John 8:7 – “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” (ESV)

To quote Richard Nixon, “Let me be perfectly clear!” I believe Russia is wrong in its invasion of Ukraine. They were wrong – very wrong. Having said that, when it comes to national sentiment and reportage by the media, it all depends on whose ox is being gored.

What do I mean by that? Somewhere around 1 million Iraqis and Afghans have died due to America’s war making there in the past 30 years. That’s a whole lot of dead men, women, and children, and not counting the widows, orphans, and little boys and girls sold into sexual slavery because of the deep poverty into which they were thrust.

But here’s the thing: I cheered when American forces destroyed hundreds of Iraqi tanks and other combat vehicles on the Highway of Death in the 1st gulf war – along with the thousands of Iraqi conscripts who perished in their vehicles. And I cheered just as loudly when the air campaign began during the 2nd and we leveled sections of Baghdad. and when we leveled Mosul in order to save it later on in the war.

In Afghanistan we overthrew the legitimate government of the nation and installed a puppet regime more to our liking and less to the liking of the Afghan people – and over the years killed over 200,000 Afghans in the process.

All this to say I’m more than just a little uneasy watching this current war play out on our screens. It’s not that I want the Russians to succeed – I don’t. I want them to return to their borders and cease this wanton destruction of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, and the senseless devastation of the civilian populace. (And I don’t like seeing soldiers die either!) No, it’s that war is a horror. It’s never clean. Killing is never surgical. Cities are chokepoints and you destroy them and everyone in them. And our hands are not clean and we shouldn’t pretend that they are.

Putin’s “reason” for this war is almost the same as ours in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Vietnam too for that matter, but most of you are too young to remember that one.) – the “enemy” was threatening our national interests and intervention was necessary to prevent further damage.

War should always be the option of last resort. It is not always an atrocity, but it is always a horror. Looking at our history over the past 150 years, there are only 2 wars that stand out as necessary from our perspective: World War 2 and Korea. The others, from the Spanish-American to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we got into either through hubris or political expediency – or just bumbled into them. And wars, even those waged from the purest of motives leave death and destruction in their wake requiring a generation or more to recover. America has a generation of soldiers who will carry the physical and mental wounds of war to their graves – and this is not counting the millions in those nations in which we warred who will do the same.

So, Mr. Putin – stop! Withdraw and pay Ukraine for the death and destruction you have caused. And America and her allies – stop pretending your hands are clean and your motives pure; they are not.