Religious leaders address, debate ‘War, Iraq and God’ at Samford

In the 13th chapter of Romans, God ordained the civil magistrate. The governmental resort to legal violence is the price one pays for living in a moral universe,” explained Richard Land, who spoke before a standing-room-only capacity crowd at Samford University (SU).
   
Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, was one of five distinguished speakers who participated in a panel discussion Nov. 13 on “War, Iraq and God.”
   
Samford’s Beeson Divinity School and Cumberland School of Law organized the event in response to the latest developments dealing with the possibility of war between the United States and Iraq.
   
The intent of the two-hour discussion was to examine the various Christian perspectives concerning war in general and the potential conflict with Iraq in particular.
   
Land made the biblical reference to substantiate his support of President Bush’s stance of pursuing a potential war with Iraq.
   
Former governor and Cumberland Law School faculty member Albert Brewer moderated the discussion and told the audience, “this panel discussion is meant to stimulate our thinking as we relate our Christian faith commitment to an issue of compelling national and international significance. Moral, ethical and religious issues are involved in the threat of the use of force against Iraq,” he said.
   
The other panelists who participated in the discussion were Jim Douglass, a Roman Catholic lay theologian and peace activist who lives in Birmingham; Cumberland Law School professors “Jack” Nelson III and David Smolin; and Wilton Bunch, a retired orthopedic surgeon and current professor of ethics at Beeson.
   
Land told the audience that the United Nation’s Dec. 8 deadline given to Saddam Hussein to provide a complete inventory of weapons of mass destruction would be the determining factor in going to war with Iraq. “He says he doesn’t have them but we know that he has them and we know where some of them are,” he said.
   
“I can’t tell you all the reasons how I know but I have security clearance, and I believe our government when they tell me he does have them,” Land said.
   
If Hussein reveals the details of the weapons he can avoid war but if he does not, “we will disarm him,” Land added.
   
Comparing the Iraq dictator to Adolf Hitler, Land said, “Hussein sees himself as the Adolf Hitler of an Arab Third Reicht, from Morocco to Pakistan.”
   
Land asked the audience to think about how different and how much safer the 20th century would have been had the allies confronted Hitler when he illegally occupied the Rhineland in 1936 in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
   
“It is entirely possible that tens of thousands of lives would not have been lost if the Allies had enforced the treaty,” he said.
   
A completely opposite position was taken by Douglass who, along with his wife, has made a name for himself as a peace activist. His dialogue centered around the need for peaceful means of resolving the problem. Having traveled to Iraq on numerous occasions with his wife to deliver medicine to Iraqi children in the hospitals, Douglass said the children are the ones who are paying the price for the UN sanctions forced on the Iraqi people since the Persian Gulf War. 
   
Douglass said the question as to whether there should be war on Iraq has 22 million faces — “the faces of the Iraqi people.” Douglass told the audience, “Jesus meant what He said: Love your enemies.”
   
Land disputed Douglass’s assumption that the Iraqi people were suffering because of the sanctions. It is because of their leader, he said, noting that Hussein built six palaces and bought weapons of mass destruction while the Iraqi people went without basic necessities. “Deterrents don’t work against people who don’t care whether their country is destroyed — or they are destroyed — if they can destroy you,” Land said. “Hussein is more than willing to take his whole world down with him. Preemption is the only way.”