Just a war

JUST A WAR: Two days before the war in Iraq began, Tom Frame asked a group of students at Melbourne University: "Is the proposed war against Iraq just, or just another war?" At the time he thought it was just, and he was the only Anglican bishop in Australia to sup port his government's decision to join the U.S.-led coalition.

Now that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Frame thinks it was just another war, and he says he continues "to seek God's forgiveness for my complicity in creating a world in which this sort of action was ever considered by anyone to be necessary." Before similar action is ever taken again, he believes that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's questions must be answered: "If we are going to make preventive action, or war, part of our response to these new threats, what are the rules? Who decides? Under what circumstances? Did what happened in Iraq constitute an exception? A precedent others call exploit? What are the rules?" (The Age, June 18).

COPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Century Foundation
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