The toughest decision any president makes is when he has to send somebody’s kid into harm’s way. There were huge pressures in the run-up to Desert Storm. People were talking about body bags; senators were arguing we should let sanctions work, saying, “Mr. President, do not do this. Do not send these young men to their deaths.” And they believed it. So it’s tough. Once, in December 1990, the presiding bishop of my church, the Episcopal Church, Ed Browning, was picketing outside the White House. The bishop, a lovely Christian pacifist, asked to see me. So I called Jim Baker and I said, “Hey, our Big Man is coming over, get on over here.” Kind of like the pope coming up Fifth Avenue.
We prayed. But he said, “The use of force is immoral.” And I said, “Well, you know, I think it’s this aggression that is immoral.” I gave him a report from Amnesty International that detailed Iraqi human-rights violations in Kuwait. He said he would read it, but also told me that he thought all use of force was immoral. And I said, “Let me ask you a hypothetical question. What if the world had responded sooner to Hitler’s invasion of the Lowlands? Would that have been an immoral use of force?” It’s a difficult question. He wrote me back later and said he had wept over the Amnesty report but did not answer the hypothetical question. Well, here’s the presiding bishop of your church with a dramatically different view than I had on it. It was just one more pressure coming from the outside.
