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George Hunsinger used his lecture at the Bonhoeffer seminar to launch into the Iraqi war. It was truly dreadful. In the name of Bonhoefferian "truth-telling," he said that 10,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed (an estimate that has been discredited); that 30,000 Iraqi soldiers died (which sounds preposterously high); that the Administration has a "five-year-plan" to invade and conquer seven other countries (a claim made in a recent book by Wesley Clark that has also been widely questioned and discredited); that there was no Iraq-al Quaeda connection (a connection that has been proved pretty definitively in a detailed article in the current issue of The Weekly Standard); that Iraq's infrastructure is worse now than it was when we came in.
He ended quoting Bonhoeffer, who said during WW2 that he was "praying for the defeat of my country." I believe that there are indeed times when we should pray exactly that. But that kind of moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and contemporary America is simply nonsensical. Perhaps Hunsinger fancies himself a latter-day Bonhoeffer, but the mere fact that Hunsinger can say such things and not be hanged is proof to the contrary.
There is a case to be made against the war in Iraq, all kinds of cases. But Hunsinger's critique was so ill-informed that it was not the least compelling.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 23, 2003 at 02:06 AM
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