Anglican Communion News Service

From an article by Jim Wallis and John Bryson Chane

It is the eleventh hour, and the world is poised on the edge of war. Church leaders have warned of the unpredictable and potentially disastrous consequences of war against Iraq - massive civilian casualties, a precedent for preemptive war, further destabilisation of the Middle East, and the fuelling of more terrorism.

Yet, the failure to effectively disarm Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime could also have potentially catastrophic consequences. The potential nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is the leading security issue in the world today. This is the moral dilemma: a decision between the terrible nature of that threat and the terrible nature of war as a solution.

The world is desperate for a "third way" between war and ineffectual responses - an alternative instead of war to defeat Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration and the antiwar movement are agreed on one thing - Saddam Hussein is a brutal and dangerous dictator. Virtually nobody has any sympathy for him, either in the West or in the Arab world, but everybody has great sympathy for the Iraqi people who have already suffered greatly from war, a decade of sanctions, and the corrupt and violent regime of Saddam Hussein. So let's separate Saddam from the Iraqi people. Target him, but protect them.

As argued by the Human Rights Watch and others, the Security Council should have established an international tribunal to indict Hussein and his top officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indicting Saddam would have sent a clear signal to the world that he has no future. It would have set into motion both internal and external forces that might have removed him from power. It would have made it clear that no solution to this conflict would have included Saddam and his supporters staying in power.

It is five minutes before midnight, as Dr Martin Luther King Jr might have said. Unless an alternative to war is found [at this late stage], a military conflagration will soon be unleashed. A morally rooted and pragmatically minded initiative, broadly supported by people of faith and people of goodwill, might help to achieve an historic breakthrough and set a precedent for decisive and effective international action in the many crises we face in the post September 11 world.