Let's Beat on Pacifists

I like this:

There’s no getting around the fact that being a pacifist has a nicer ring to it than being, say, a warmonger. But when I hear people such as Alan Colmes say, as he did recently, that we rushed to war in Iraq and didn’t give negotiations a chance to work, I wonder what planet he and Mrs. Colmes call home. After all, for a dozen years, Saddam Hussein had violated his 1991 ceasefire agreement, and he cynically used the profits from his oil-for-food program to bribe Russia, Germany and France, into complicity. During that period, the U.N., the last great hope of the feeble-minded, passed 17 resolutions against Iraq. I guess the member nations figured they’d shame Hussein into compliance. They couldn’t even get him to allow the inspectors to search his palaces, leading one and all to believe he had WMD stashed in his wine cellars.

But in spite of British and American intelligence, and the leading lights in both political parties, agreeing that the Butcher of Baghdad had to be taken out, the pacifists disagreed. To them, anything beyond the equivalent of giving Hussein a good talking-to and a time-out, as if he were a three-year-old who’d been acting up, was unthinkable.

It’s hard to get a grip on the way their minds work. Do pacifists simply choose to believe that evil doesn’t exist? Do they actually believe that Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden, Idi Amin and Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung, are or were good guys who were simply misunderstood? The question is whether pacifists are hopelessly naïve or simply cowards.

I'll take neither.

True pacifists tend to have a strong religious faith which precludes violence against their brethren. These are not cowards; it often costs them dearly to hold fast to their beliefs.

Of course, pacifists having earned some measure of respect in America for the strength of their faith, cowards find it convenient to adopt their mantle to avoid the consequences of their cowardice. You can distinguish true pacifists from the faux-pacifist cowards by their willingness to serve their country in wartime in roles such as chaplain or medic---no one has ever accused either of these folks as being less than extremely brave, given they're in combat without weapons or intent to use the same.

So let's be careful that we don't lump true pacifists in with the cowards who claim higher conviction when they really only care about preserving their own skins.