Thankless Pacifists

This morning I woke to the following headline: U.S., British Troops Rescue Iraq Hostages

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and British troops Thursday freed three Christian peace activists in a rural area of Iraq without firing a shot, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said the hostages were being held by a "kidnapping cell" in a house, and the operation to free the captives was based on information from a man captured by U.S. forces only three hours earlier.
(Proof that when we torture poor sheep farmers with underpants and barking dogs they can yield useful information.)

As the article states, these were the comrades of the recently murdered American Tom Fox, all members of the Christian Peacemakers Team based in Chicago. From the heading on their website, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" I gather that they are pacifists in practice and at heart.
Doug Pritchard, the group's co-director speaking from Toronto, had this to say about the rescue operation:

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers," Pritchard said.

He also called for coalition forces to leave the country.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq," Pritchard said.

Commentary

Pacifism is a fine strategy when the stakes are low. It's easy to make enlightened claims about the virtues of non-violence when the wolves are not knocking at the door. Probably the most famous pacifist of the 20th century was Mahatma Gandhi. He and his followers famously stood down the mighty British Empire, paving the way for an independent India. I can't help but wonder how India would have fared using such a strategy against Chairman Mao, Stalin, or Hitler rather than the largely benevolent British?
Gandhi had this to say regarding the Jews and the Holocaust: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs." He believed that the Jews should commit mass suicide in order to make the Third Reich introspectively realize that maybe the Aryan race was not really the master race afterall, and should instead live peacefully with their neighbors as equals. Regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation as Gandhi did, recommending mass suicide hardly seems like the recipe for living peacefully on this earth in this moment.

The lack of gratitude that Doug Pritchard and CPT have shown for the brave troops that rescued the hostages is inexcusable. Instead of for a moment setting aside his dogmatic belief "... that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers" and thanking the actual people that rescued his helpless pacifists, he instead took the opportunity to call for the coalition forces to leave the country. Surely he would argue that they would have never been harmed had we never invaded Iraq etc... A chicken or the egg argument if there ever was one. It seems the power and the love of God was a little slow to the rescue. Fortunately for the CPT, our brave Armed Forces were up to the thankless task.
Pacifism is not only immoral, it's suicidal.

UPDATE:
In my recent post, "Weapons of Mass Destruction Revisited" I mentioned the boxes of documents and hours of audio tapes that we've found in Iraq leftover from Saddam's reign. Some enterprising members of Pajamas Media have taken to translating some of the documents themselves and then cross-checking the translations for accuracy. The following link provides evidence that members of Saddam's regime were in contact with Osama Bin Laden via Sudan as early as 1995.
Also, Mark Steyn has written an excellent article that explores the costs of maintaining the U.N. mandated sanctions against Iraq had we continued with the status quo.