Methodist group calls Iraq war "unjust, immoral"

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/01/25/churches.iraq.reut/

I would add to this "financially catastrophic" for future generations of Americans and so far "spectacularly unsuccessful" in its unstated goal of seizing and ramping up Iraqi oil production.

The difference between going to a United Methodist church, though, and a Southern Baptis one is that the pastor at one of the latter churches will tend to inject, on a tiresomely frequent basis, into his sermons his belief that voting Republican (this is done not overtly but through identification with the "wedge" social issues the GOP pushes) is the only "Godly" choice one can make. I have never heard a Methodist pastor sermonize in a partisan political vein in this way.

Methodists just think, as do all sane individuals, that people who say they are Christians should try to live by the Golden Rule, and the U.S. government has never done that in Iraq. What our government did (and you can either say they did it negligently or deliberately, depending on how stupid you actually believe Bush to be) was "do unto another nation" before "it could do unto us" in spite of the fact that rational observers of the WMD issue before the war crime ensued were telling the administration what turned out to be true.

My belief is that it was never about WMDs. Cheney had his eye on taking over the Iraqi oil fields from the day he took office. His secret energy task forces meetings in early 2001 had maps thereof on display for participants. That much we do know. Also, Iraq had switched its payments to euros over dollars under the UN-administered "oil for food" program as of November 2000. The only reason the U.S. is not already a Third World economy is that we force, at the point of our huge arsenal, the nation-states with oil to denominate their export sales in U.S. dollars, the so-called "petrodollar" phenomenon.