It was carried out by an Anglo-American force basically alone, because the rest of the world saw the self-serving agenda that was operative better than our elected leaders were willing to see. It has not, more than three years later, given us a situation that is substantially better than the situation there was prior to this American-led invasion. Indeed, Iraqi deaths are much higher today than they were before the war.

The debate in early Christian history about what constituted a just war was predicated on self defense and the hostilities were limited to military combatants who engaged each other directly. Today with impersonal bombs, missiles and artillery falling on civilian centers bringing death to innocent victims, the idea of a just war has become little more than a religious delusion, utilized by politicians who gain power and by business leaders who gain wealth from human conflict and its resulting human misery.

War is a barbaric and primitive way to settle human differences. No Christians should try to perfume this horror with either pious phrases or absurd religious claims. Religious voices, for example, that support this war on the basis of some obscure prediction from the first century in the book of Revelation are frankly in need of psychiatric intervention and should be treated at once. No one, however, should build national policy on this expression of mental illness.