CONDEMNED TO REPETITION

Re: Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=8109

Peace without power is unsustainable in a world where there are those with power who do not want peace. Just as the existence of criminal individuals willing to do violence to their fellow man makes necessary the existence of armed police, so too the existence of national leaders willing to do violence against other nations makes necessary some kind of power to stop them. And just as one would hope that the police have more power than the criminals they are charged to stop, so too it is important that the nations that take on the role of protecting other nations have the power to do their job. I think a case can be made that America has become a bit arrogant in its power, and perhaps a bit too willing to use it. The relative value we place on American lives compared with lives of people in other nations sometimes appalls me. But erring too far in the opposite direction can be far more dangerous, as the peoples of Europe need to remember from an earlier case where a defeated nation was allowed to ignore the terms of a peace treaty it had signed. Imagine the suffering that could have been averted if a Coalition of the Willing had stood up and said "No" when Germany first started building weapons prohibited to it under treaty in the 1930s. (And before someone tells me that I'm mired in a "past" where things were decided less by law and more by force, can you honestly say that Saddam Hussein was any less mired in such a past?) (Nathan Barclay)