James Baker’s Statement on Jobs and Iraq

In response to “Bishops Raise Moral Barriers to Force in Gulf” (front page, Nov. 9):

The Catholic Church has always laid a particularly strong claim to a corner on morals but has managed, in my generation with a few outstanding individual exceptions, to stand with its hands behind its back at perhaps the most extreme, prolonged moral outrage in modern and perhaps in all history.

The arguments of U.S. bishops now against the use of force regarding Iraq’s blatant and brutal seizure of Kuwait are the same arguments given against opposing Hitler’s initially “peaceful” cruel conquest of Europe. Of course war is immoral per se, but one cannot, unfortunately, extract the act of violence from its context any more than one can condemn every act of violence in an individual context.

The bishops, divorcing themselves from the larger context requiring much more thorough analysis than the simplistic one they have addressed, should be asked where might the morality lie in a likely even more devastating war to come when an ideologue who’s made his intent clear is equipped with the nuclear weapon with which to defy a highly moral-minded international community?

It is their argument of the pacifist that all wars are created equal, but not one that addresses the prospective cost of inaction in each and every circumstance.

MITCHELL GORDON, San Pedro