A 'Pacifist' on the Iraq War

Someone who claims to place a great premium on peace and justice posted the following in a discussion of just war (whether there is such a thing) in the comments at Vox Nova.

I read The Guardian, Le Monde (in French) Haaretz and Al Jazeera in English, as well as The Economist, the London Times and The Times of India. In addition, I read several blogs of servicemen in Iraq. I found them through AndrewSullivan.com, which links to them regularly. I have not trusted the Main Stream American media in over a decade.

The consensus of most writers at ALL these organs of media is that the war is lost, the people of Iraq want us gone so that they can pursue the sectarian civil war that they've been hankering after for centuries.

It is not our "white man's burden" to tell them they may not have that civil war, what form of government or what church-state relations they want. THAT is colonialist, racist patronizing posing as benevolent nation-building. All we are doing by staying is making our own relationships with these countries poisonous for generations to come.

We must leave, and leave sooner rather than later, so that the Iraqis, Kurds and Sunni Arabs can get on with the bloody business of "nation building."

During the American Civil War, Johnnie Rebs who had no material interest in preserving the South's "peculiar institution"--who were themselves dirt-poor and who had never thought to own a slave--were asked by their Union jailors why they kept fighting for the Confederacy with such relentless zeal. The Confederate prisoners of war answered, "Because you're here, where you have no business being." Why can't we understand that this is a natural human response, which the Iraqi people have EVERY RIGHT to feel.

The only way that act of international terrorism called Bush's war in Iraq would EVER have had any chance of "success" would have been if we had invaded Iraq, deposed and imprisoned Saddam, sent him to the Hague to be tried, and LEFT.

There is a certain honesty about this, though I can't say it's refreshing. And people say that "warmongers" are heartless...

Compare that set of opinions motivated by "peace" with Michael Yon's dispatch about traveling with the first convoy of food from Baghdad to Baqubah in a number of months. I think in this case, there's more hope and care for humanity on the war side than the peace side.

The point of the original post on Vox Nova (which I think is rather more sentimental than thoughtful, and thus wanders astray a bit, but more on that later) is that if Christians are forced into war, they must still love their enemies even as they seek to defeat them. What strikes me in some of the more frank anti-Iraq-war rhetoric is that those in favor of an immediate and absolute pull-out seem to care much less about those who live in Iraq than those who advocate seeing things through to a point of relative stability.