I would be willing to bet that the Pentagon has plans for a blitz againt almost any country in the world and update those plans against self proclaimed enemies on a frequent.  This is just good planning. 

YBIC,
Phil Snyder

I was about to suggest that the Pentagon probably has plans for a three-day blitz against San Francisco, as well. But, that probably goes too far.

The Pentagon houses billions of salaried Dollars in military planners. I sure hope that we are getting our money’s worth! If an jumbo jetliner can be designed from scratch and successfully built without test flights, I’d guess that the military has some equally interesting computer games they regularly enjoy.

I don’t put a whole lot of stock in media reports, but if there is any accuracy at all to this one, it sounds like more than just a hypothetical contingency plan gathering dust, waiting to be deemed unclassified for the sake of historical research.  Let’s just hope…

The DoD would be criminally negligent if it did not have contingency plans for any eventuality, or operational plans for conflict with all potential foes…ALL possible foes.

My apologies: only the word “not” was supposed to be bold.

fixed

Pray that bombings will be direct to military targets and civilians spared. The Iranians are to be pitied. They never have had a decent government and their religion offers them little hope or joy.

#3 Makersmarc:

There are contingencies and contingencies.  While I’m sure that the Pentagon has plans on file for invading just about everybody, they’re going to spend more time updating the ones for countries we’re more likely to get shooty with.  Given the way the wind is blowing, the Pentagon had darned well better be thinking hard about how to tackle Iran.  Updating the plans for invading Belgium can most likely be let sit until after Thanksgiving.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think a war with Iran would be a good idea.  But given the way they’re talking, and the way our guys are talking, it would be remarkably shortsighted not to plan for it… just in case.

Sure, I don’t have a problem with contingency plans.  This topic came up elsewhere not too awful long ago and a former military person mentioned contingency plans for absolutely everything - including invading Canada!  I agree that I would rather be operating from an extant plan than coming up with one on the fly, especially for those who hate for the sake of hating and wouldn’t hesitate for one second to use a nuke on us if they found one floating around on the black market.  All I’m saying is I think it unthinkable to be heading toward putting those contingency plans (for Iran) into play with no more justification than there was for going into Iraq.  Every country has the right to defend itself, but even in a preemptive world, there must be *demonstrable* evidence for imminent threat and that’s just not the case here.

This is where I get confused as a Christian. 

When do we support our governments?  When do we support military action?  How do we separate Christianity from America?
I have a hard time deriving three day-blitz attacks from the Sermon on the Mount.

Do we support America no matter what party is in power?
If the Republicans start a war do we still support it if the Democrats take it over in an election?

Must an Orthodox believer be politically conservative?

Re: #9
William Scott,
The scope of political advice in the new Testament can be pretty much summed up with “Give unto Caesar…”
We have an obligation to obey the secular law insofar as it does not gravely contradict the Divine Law.  No where is pacifism commanded in scripture.  However it is worth remembering that in the ancient church there were some canons that imposed rather harsh penances on those who killed others even in war. Thus the Church seems to have acknowledged that war is always evil even if in some cases it may have been the lesser of evils.  Also to this day no one may be ordained an Orthodox priest who has killed another human being even by accident.  (I note your use of the capital ‘O’ and guess it was not intended to define you as being in communion with the Orthodox Church.)

The bottom line is that God is not (contrary to various reports) a registered Republican.  Nor is he a liberal Democrat.  (I have always suspected He is a monarchist.)  The Orthodox Church while proclaiming unambiguously the Truth generally eschews involvement in secular politics.  This may be in part because on those occasions when The Church has become involved little good usually came of it.

William Scott, no, of course a Christian believer doesn’t need to be a political conservative.

We are divided into two camps on this Islamist issue.  One camp views the various Middle Eastern nations as sovereign entities which must be respected at all times.  This is not the view of the Islamists themselves.  They have a long history of an imperial caliphate.  Saddam, Ahmadinejad, and in the past, even Nasser, have/had dreams of reviving the “Arabic nation” or the “Islamic nation” under, of course, his own leadership.  Bin Laden’s goal was explicitly to revive the caliphate.  The second camp in the West takes these people at their word and views an Islamic power as a threat to world stability, and certainly to ours, given their new ability to reach us where we live.  In this view, a powerful fascist state heavily supported by a hostile religion is something to be opposed, by military force if necessary.

I don’t know about political ideology, but allowing weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of a fanatic of any brand does not seem like a good idea.

Years ago under Reagan the military had unit “capstones” and each major command had an area of the world they were militaryly responsible for.  If you were in a small bridging unit you might have three rivers in various parts of the world to bridge for a successful invasion.  You trained for those missions.  The military also looks at types of combat.  At the end of the cold war the US went from massive unit deployment on large fronts to “LICS”, small unit low intensity conflicts like what is happening in Iraq.

To #9, William Scott: Suggest you read C S Lewis essay/sermon “Why I Am Not A Pacifist.”  Easy to find with Google.
To #10, Ad Orientem.  You said, “The bottom line is that God is not (contrary to various reports) a registered Republican.”  Dang!  When did that happen?!

Thank you Ad Orientem.

Most of my questions were to provoke some questioning of the typical ‘for the lesser evil’ war cry that tends to follow these reports on this site.  The whole thing confuses me.  I hold orthodox faith and find that tends, as you say, towards an apolitical stance.

At bottom we are left with a best guess as to what to do, as Katharine says, “In this view, a powerful fascist state heavily supported by a hostile religion is something to be opposed, by military force if necessary.”  The problem is that war is not an accurate tool.  Though a broad goal of a war may be ‘good’ much evil is fit into its accomplishment.  We need to be conscious of these evils and not allow ourselves to slip into a cold utilitarian morality.

CharlesB I have read Why I am not a Pacifist.  For all my love for and debt to the man, I think Lewis is overly simplistic in this essay.  Even the good guys did atrocious things in WW2; killing of civilians, experimental use of new weaponry on passive targets.  To bring us up to date, do we really imagine that the US military is mostly a force of good?  I mean in the light of our faith?  I understand we are at a point in history that the US either acts or looses its position.  This is not said very clearly in the media but is the obvious motive behind the current warring.  But what has US supremacy to do with the Gospel?  How do we discern God’s will for us in all this?  We do not have the luxury of turning our consciences over to the agenda of the sate.

I, for one, am not a great fan of US supremacy per se, but I very much fear an Islamist alternative or a resurgent communist alternative.  Who else is there to stand against these?  I agree that war does great harm, and therefore, unlike some on the left, I think U.S. military force should be used only when there is a strong national interest at stake, as there is in the Middle East for reasons I gave above.  I think our military force should NOT be used where we have no national interest, because, as we see, military force can cause great harm even when our intentions are good.  I opposed, for instance, our 1990s Balkan adventures, because I felt these were European problems best solved by them and not by us and that failure to resolve them didn’t threaten US safety.

To William Scott.  Simplicity is one of the things that make me like CS Lewis.  I guess that’s the mark of a good apologist.  Where, oh where is our CS Lewis of 2007 to speak to TEC?  Anyway, concerning this topic, the matter of war plans: war will always be with us, as we live in a fallen world.  The point is whether this is a just war.  That I will concede is a valid point to debate.  I happen to think we probably did not pursue the diplomatic course far enough, but we are in it now regardless.  If one does think it is a just war, another CS Lewis quote comes to mind, from “Learning In War Time: ” . . . There is therefore this analogy between the claims of our religion and the claims of the war: neither of them for most of us, will simply cancel or remove from the slate the merely human life which we were leading before we entered them. But they will operate in this way for different reasons. The war will fail to absorb our whole attention because it is a finite object, and therefore intrinsically unfitted to support the whole attention of a human soul. In order to avoid misunderstanding I must here make a few distinctions. I believe our cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous, and I therefore believe it to be a duty to participate in this war. And every duty is a religious duty, and our obligation to perform every duty is therefore absolute.  Thus we may have a duty to rescue a drowning man, and perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn life-saving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to life-saving in the sense of giving it his total attention—so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim—he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. . . .”