There is something disturbing about the cold rationality of this article, which ran in the March issue of Esquire and is reproduced on the Naval War College site. Thomas Barnett boils the world down to the Core and the Disconnected, those wired into the world economy and those left out, and posits that a country's potential threat to world security is inversely proportional to how connected to the global economy it is. Poor countries with no stake in the global capitalist marketplace will always be a threat, he says; the only way to connect them is to create a secure environment for commerce to thrive and foreign capital to flow.

Which seems like a novel new take on things to some. But it's really the North vs. South divide restated. a problem that has been discussed widely since the end of World War II. What's novel about Barnett's view is that he sees military force as the way to affect change in economic connectedness, rather than economic aid.

Here's where our disconnect is when we discuss whether we should go to war with Iraq. Is the proposed war, as the diplomats suggested and President Bush has since denied, about weapons of mass destruction and a failure by Saddam Hussein to follow UN Security Council demands? Or is it about the triumph of global corporate capitalism, and making the world safe for open markets? It's sounding more like the latter every day, since Barnett's position seems to be the only rational policy-based reason for war. Disarming Iraq? Bush has already said that he wants Saddam gone no matter what. Clear and present danger to the US? The evidence presented has been sketchy at best.

But this “disconnected” thing provides intellectual cover for what amounts to neo-imperialism, where multinational corporations rule and the US military is their willing servant. In rational-sounding words, it neatly cuts the world into us and them, defines them as a threat, and proposes that force is the ultimate answer to all the world's problems. QED.

The words may sound rational, but are they reasonable? Murder can be calculated and rational, but it isn't the course taken by reasonable people–it's the route taken by psychopaths. War is not a controllable physical phenomena; things go wrong, and sometimes horribly so, in ways that could never have been predicted. Just ask Napoleon, Hitler, and company; a superior military position does not necessarily ensure eventual victory.

prayers for peace

Then there's the moral perspective. Whether or not it may be rational, a war fought without provocation or even a clear future danger is anything but moral. Punching someone because they look like they might someday, at an undisclosed time, punch you isn't the Golden Rule; knowingly killing innocents to get to one evil person defies every moral code.

The Washington Post has published a list of Religious groups opposing war online (thanks to Sainteros for posting the link).

The Catholic church has already laid out its case against unilateral war by the US against Iraq in no certain terms. Bishop “We respectfully urge you to step back from the brink of war and help lead the world to act together to fashion an effective global response to Iraq's threats that conforms with traditional moral limits on the use of military force,” Bishop Wilton Gregory, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in a letter to President Bush, in a letter he hand-delivered to Condaleeza Rice.

So if we're looking for a religious case for war, it isn't there.