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Collateral Damage
by John J. Dwyer
- The world watched the latest
scene of Yugoslavian horror unfold on the nightly news. Scores of
Albanaian Kosovar Muslims had fled from the brutal Serbs of Slobodan
Milosevic. Then their protectors, American jet bombers, had come to
the Kosovars’ rescue.
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Now the world saw the charred bodies
of the “rescue” women, children, and seniors, victims of
the latest NATO bombs gone astray.
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Perhaps the obliteration of a nation
with a population half that of the state of Texas by the mightiest
military machine in the history of the world will be completed by
the time this column is read. Bu the shame of America before the
God of history will not.
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It shall not be remedied until an
old, barbarous, anti-Christian way of thinking is purged forever
from an America who seems not to understand that our judgment does
not loom around the corner. It is a work already in progress.
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Indeed, there is a sort of terrible
reciprocity in the eternal councils of Almighty God. Is it
happenstance that as U.S. bombers laid waste to tiny Serbia, the
most ferocious tornadoes ever recorded in history left entire
American communities in rubble, including one next to the country’s
largest military air base?
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Is it coincidence that a nation
which bombs civilian trains, buses, vehicle caravans, apartment
buildings, embassies, and five countries on three continents in
seven months sees its own children gunned down in cold blood in one
school after another?
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But we “deeply regret the loss
of innocent human life.” Still, rather than relent or rethink
our strategy, we “intensify the bombings.” Soon, we
regret the loss of more innocent human life.
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But “collateral damage”—the
killing and maiming of women and children, among others, and the
destruction of their property—“is an unavoidable part of
war.”
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General Robert E. Lee of Virginia
thought not. Even as rampaging Federal armies laid waste to the
homes, treasure, and lives of Southern civilians during the War
Between the States, Lee issued the following order as he twice
invaded the North:
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“It must be remembered that we
make war only upon armed men, and we can not take vengeance for the
wrongs our people have suffered without . . . offending against Him
to whom vengeance belongeth . . . ”
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Some of Lee’s critics in the
South blamed his refusal to war on the Northern populace for the
Confederacy’s defeat.
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Brutality, as it will do, came more
easily for the U.S. government the next time, against the American
Indians, as the legacy of “Manifest Destiny” was
blackened forever on fields of horror like the “Battle”
of the Washita, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee.
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A later generation of American
leaders unleashed the greatest single slaughters of the modern age
at Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—against the aged and
infirmed, the women and the children, of Germany and Japan.
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- NATO SCORECARD
“COLLATERAL DAMAGE”
| Date | Location | Dead | Wounded |
| Apr. 6 | Serbian neighborhood | 5+ | Dozens |
| Apr. 12 | Passenger train in Kosovo | 30+ | ? |
| Apr. 14 | Kosovar civilian convoy | 60+ | ? |
| April 27 | Serbian barracks basement | 20 | ? |
| May 1 | Kosvar bus | 40+ | ? |
| May 3 | Kosovar bus | 20 | ? |
| May 7 | Serbian hospital/market | 22 | 43 |
| May 14 | Kosovar village of Korisa | 84 | 53 |
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- (Partial listing of incidents as
of May 18, 1999.)
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- It is the truest patriot who
loves his country enough to call her to task when she is in the
wrong. Let the brave soldier who wears the uniform descended from
Washington and those who froze at Valley Forge, from those who
charged—and stood—at Cemetery Ridge, from those who
scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and those who drove their torpedo
planes into the teeth of the Japanese carrier force at Midway—let
that soldier refuse the order which calls him to war on the
innocents.
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For such an order is an immoral
order and should not be obeyed by any American soldier.
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And let the Christian clothed in the
white robes of righteousness and descended from the Lord of eternity
declare that attacks on innocent women and children are a blot on
history an on the nation who commits such atrocities.
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Ultimately it is our humanity that
is the collateral damage, we Americans, especially we American
Christians—if we remain silent. As laws are broken under the
regime of one of the most evil leaders this country has ever known
and biblical morality made a mockery of, we are in danger of
becoming pathetic, but very affluent, footnotes to history, people
who profess righteous beliefs and Christian concern for the
downtrodden, but whose consciences have become seared to the reality
of the murdered American unborn and the Yugoslav citizen alike.
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A people of whom future generations
may rightfully lament, “Such a dark period that was in the
history of America and its Church.”
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