Christian leader lambasts Wikileaks inspired project
A Christian leader lambasted recently a project that was started by a group of Christian leaders in response to the Iraq War Log that was released through Wikileaks.
Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, decried Duke Divinity School of North Carolina for its Proper 29 Project, which is supported by clergy, theologians and seminarians, FrontPage said.
The Project 29 Project wants U.S. Christians to be culpable for the torture and deaths of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. It said in a statement, “We acknowledge and lament our corporate responsibility for these acts,” FrontPage reported.
Tooley, wrote in FrontPage that the group’s proponents are misguided in saying the U.S. is accountable for some 66,000 citizen deaths after eight years in Iraq, “without considering that U.S. and allied forces weren’t the only side that was shooting.”
In his blog Tooley scores a Mennonite minister who says, “Our preoccupied silence and political support has sustained so brutal a war since 2003. We are complicit in these crimes.” He also refers to Claremont School of Theology’s David Ray Griffin who said the U.S. murdered tens of millions.
Perspective
In his FrontPage blog Tooley cited al Qaeda and sectarian militias asking, “Do the sectarian militias and al Qaeda carry any guilt for the civil war they have attempted to foment since Saddam Hussein’s relatively quick overthrow by Allied forces in 2002?”
Tooley wrote in FrontPage, “These militias and terror groups deliberately killed civilians to stoke religious and political resentments they hoped would convulse Iraq into a blood bath.”
He also said in his FrontPage blog that Proper 29 Project proponents seem to imply that Iraq would have lived in peace if the U.S. did not invade the country, ignoring the hundreds of thousands who were murdered under Saddam’s reign.
Tooley wrote in his FrontPage blog, “In the brutal calculus of the real world, the choice for American policymakers is often not between tranquility and carnage but between massive horrors versus more limited horrors.”
Credibility
According to Tooley, anti-war critics and religious pacifists might gain more credibility “if they freely acknowledged that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a charnel house of mass murder, torture, mutilation, orchestrated rape, imprisonment and police state oppression,” he wrote in FrontPage.
Tooley also suggested that Proper 29 Project supporters admit that warring factions and terrorists arose after Saddam, who seek to establish an Islamist theocracy to equal Saddam’s brutality, but with the cloak of religious zeal.
Tooley wrote in FrontPage, “Within that horrifying context, religious pacifists could then present their hard and ostensibly holy truth that no matter the vast carnage of such a regime, or its likely alternatives, no military action by the United States or its allies under any circumstances could be morally justified.”