from Peter Storey (via UMNS- United Methodist News Service)
Storey is the Williams Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, N.C. He is a former president of the Methodist Church of South Africa and a former bishop of Johannesburg. He was an anti-apartheid activist and served as Nelson Mandela’s prison chaplain.

In this article,  Storey sounds what I consider to be pivotal questions about the impending war with Iraq.  I agree with basically everything he says.  “Just War” has become more of “justification for war” rather than the “justice” issues.  Some highlights:

…Mr. Bush’s outrageous doctrine of “pre-emptive war,” in which the military power of the United States will be used against a nation because of something it might do, rather than what it has done. How can he claim that this illegal action would be in “the highest moral traditions of our country”? The notion of “pre-emptive war” negates all “just war” criteria and flouts international law.

One of the most sickening things about reading and listening to U.S. commentators is the disproportionate value that they seem to place on American lives, compared to those whom Americans might kill. In the Gulf war, more than 200,000 Iraqis were killed. How many will die this time? As a Third World friend said not long ago, “America goes to war; war comes to us.”