Thank you, Ann, for bringing this to our attention. It's significant to note, for readers who may not know, that Whalon is bishop of Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe and is a citizen of France and the US.

We should consider that when asking ourselves what it might tell us about others in The Episcopal Church think of the war. Not much, I suspect.

Also, have C of E bishops had anything to say about their country's intervention?

Finally, based on Whalon's principles for intervention why Libya and not many other countries around the world where similar conditions hold?

We ought to give Just War theory a peaceful death. The issues are far more complex than the theory accommodates as we have seen in the various tortured efforts to make it fit things like the Vietnam War.

The real tension is for me between the Rights of People and the Rights of the State/Nation. In effect we are now declaring that there is some calculus that allows a coalition of nations to invade a nation that has not attacked them at all. Quaddafi is a dictator, but one could argue that that is a problem for Libyans alone and not for the whole world. There was no coalition of nations for Rwanda, or in opposition to any of the other citizen slaughtering countries in Africa, so why for Libya?

Oil? Favor currying with moderate Muslims? The Rights of the People?

It can't be the rights of the people to rise up and change their form of government since we have little actual history of doing that. More often than not we supported entrenched despots because they were prepared to represent our self interests in the region. Batitsta, the Shah of Iran, Diem in Vietnam are just a few.

So what we need is a calculus of violating national sovereignties that articulates the rights of coalitions of nations to side with revolutionary groups against the existing national power.

And we best be careful about that as the US since we have already rejected participation in the World Court since it could decide to indite some of our living, but now retired, politicians. We cannot affirm internationalism when it is to our advantage and dispute it when it questions our actions.

In the end the revolution moving across the Islamic middle east is not likely to look like anything we have seen before. We cannot imagine who might settle into power once the suppression of monarchs and dictators is overthrown. We have to hope it is for the better, but we cannot know.

Watch it on FB and Twitter though, that is where the real reporting of significance is happening.

There was no coalition of nations for Rwanda, or in opposition to any of the other citizen slaughtering countries in Africa, so why for Libya?

At the inevitability of being hopelessly naive, does the phrase "Never Again" mean nothing?

Or is there some kind of cosmic equivalence, wherein "We stood by and did nothing while THEY were slaughtered, so now we have to stand by and do nothing while YOU get slaughtered, too"?

I feel a RAGING ambivalence about the situation (is it a war?) in Libya.

But I'm unambivalently unsatisfied w/ the "We did nothing before, therefore..." argument.

JC Fisher

We ought to give Just War theory a peaceful death. The issues are far more complex than the theory accommodates....

I think that's about right.

June Butler

@JC

We said Never Again after the Holocaust and still got Rwanda. Frankly, 10 million children die every year of totally preventable causes, and we blithely go on our way. MDGs are nice and they are moving along, but still 10 million die. This does not count all the teens and adults who die of totally preventable causes.

If the Ugandans pass the Gay Genocide Bill, will we organize a coalition to invade? Of course not.

Saying never again means nothing when we repeated are doing nothing again.

But the bigger question is "Who is morally responsible" for all these things and who has sovereignty to make a better world out of banal greedy corrupt violent and people using governments?