Communio Viatorum 2003/II. [antikvár]

A BIG "IF" Although this issue of Communio Viatorum is not intended to be thematic, there is nevertheless one theme common to the articles, namely the imaging or imagining of reality. Key for Christians is, undoubtedly, the language we use to imagine the reality of God, and our talk starts with the Old Testament, the theme of our first article. But a reflection on this question became even more important for us, as we were recently confronted with very different images of reality presented to us by Bush's war campaign against Iraq, which raised serious morál and epistemological questions. More than any other war in history, this was a war about creating rather than uncovering truth. Many of us will have seen the images filling our television screens from the outset of the invasion, with the myriad "embedded" reporters, purporting to offer a close-up view of war. To these were added images from Baghdad, not to mention the pictures supplied by the Arab-speaking news stations, such as Al-Jazeera, which brought a less sanitary view of the destruction and death caused by the Americans' clean bombs. Yet even before the war started it is clear that the creation of con-ditions for going to war was being undertaken. No doubt Saddam was a very unpleasant dictator, and responsible for the deaths of huge numbers of Iraqis. He may at somé time have had access to weapons which could have caused mass destruction, and there is absolutely no doubt that he had and used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and against Shiites in the south of the country. Ali of which makes him extremely unpleasant, not to say evil. But, perhaps unfortunately, that would not necessarily have justified war when it happened. This meant that, to justify their desire to go to war, Britain and America had to produce evidence of material breaches of various UN resolutions, especially that which ordered Saddam to destroy his weapons of mass destruction. This is where the epistemological prob-lems kicked in. Because, how can you know that something is not? Perhaps in somé sense this is the kind of question which the Re-formed Epistemologists, considered in this issue, are addressing. Of course, it suited Bush and Blair to believe that there were still weap- 9i