Perhaps War is the Answer

Below is an excerpt from America Alone that I have been reading for a class. I could not help but think about the irony, and that the replacement of "Free Tibet" with "Save Darfur" makes it incredibly relevant.

...It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the "FREE TIBET" stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. Are you in favor of a Free Tibet? It's hard to find anyone who isn't. Every college in America is. ...

Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first "FREE TIBET" sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inertia: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new "FREE TIBET" sticker. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet shtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he'd been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: "But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?" she insisted. "You're not doing anything, are you?"

"Give the guy a break," I said when we got back home. He's advertising moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfelf were to say, 'Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,' the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They'd bend down and peel off the 'FREE TIBET' stickers and replace them with 'WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.'"

I say this not to belittle the pacifist/social movement crowd, but to draw a larger point. That sometimes, out of compassion and love, war might be a necessity. What is more loving, allowing a people group to get slaughtered, and protest or actually fighting for them? Kosovo was a military incursion to stop genocide. Stopping genocide and murder is important, but let us remember that perhaps defense is necessary (following Paul's argument in Romans 13). Sometimes war is the answer.