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Un-Warren-ted action

I keep thinking about President-elect Obama’s decision to invite evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the Inauguration convocation. Most of the ire that greeted this announcement focused on Warren’s ill-founded and offensive views on homosexuality, and especially his outspoken support of Proposition 8 in California. But was Obama aware of Warren’s recent foray into foreign ...

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

January 7, 2009, 4:37 PM

I keep thinking about President-elect Obama’s decision to invite evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the Inauguration convocation. Most of the ire that greeted this announcement focused on Warren’s ill-founded and offensive views on homosexuality, and especially his outspoken support of Proposition 8 in California. But was Obama aware of Warren’s recent foray into foreign policy when he invited him to play such a prominent role on Inauguration Day?

Appearing on Fox News on December 3, Warren openly endorsed host Sean Hannity’s declaration that “we need to take him [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] out.” As one might expect, Warren invoked the Bible as his justification, saying that it says that “evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped….The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers.”

I’m all for inclusiveness, but this bit of foreign policy advice is more than a little disturbing. One expects bloodthirsty bombast from Hannity, but Warren is a Christian pastor supposedly committed to certain core principles of love, humility, and forgiveness. Yet here they are casually discussing the murder of an elected foreign leader, simply because they have determined he is an “evildoer.” I agree that some of Ahmadinejad’s public statements are deeply offensive, ignorant, and stupid, but what exactly is the “evil” he has committed that warrants our “taking him out?”

There is in fact a well-established norm against the assassination of foreign leaders — including all-time “evildoers” like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and the like — and good reasons to keep that norm intact. Indeed, given recent American behavior, this is one Pandora’s Box we do not want to open. According to a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, some key Bush administration officials bore “major responsibility” for detainee abuse (read torture) and may have broken U.S. laws in doing so. And few now deny that Bush & Co. invaded Iraq on false pretenses and botched the occupation, leading directly to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, forced migration, ethnic cleansing and abundant human suffering. Whatever their aims may have been, this sounds like “evil-doing” to me. But surely Warren and Hannity don’t think that some other country would be justified in “taking them out,” even its leaders brandished the Bible as their justification.

President-elect Obama has repeatedly stated that we need to work out our differences with Iran through tough-minded diplomacy, yet the convocation prayer at his inauguration will be given by a man who apparently thinks we ought to assassinate Iran’s president.

Once inaugurated, let’s hope Obama runs U.S. foreign policy with a bit more consistency. In the meantime, Rick Warren should be more careful when he opines about foreign policy. In return, I promise that this blog will remain quietly discreet on matters of theology. In the meantime, the President-elect might ask himself why he has such questionable taste in preachers.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt