This is part of Ron Reagan and John Podhoretz on Peter’s show, Uncommon Knowledge from earlier this year (full transcript here):
Ron Reagan: I’m not a Christian so I don’t have a right to talk about Christianity but I understand Christianity to be a religion of compassion and I assume that’s the way George Bush understands it too. I think we might want to consider at least when we’re thinking about George Bush and his religiosity, that for instance, in the war in Iraq, that some ten thousand or so–there’s no actual hard number but the estimates seem to be around ten thousand or so–innocent Iraqi men, women, children, old people, babies, have died as a result of this war. … If he’s really a religious man, he ought to be crawling over those people’s graves, begging their forgiveness and explaining to them why they had to give up their lives…
John Podhoretz: How about the fact…
Peter Robinson: Humanitarian agencies
Ron Reagan: Wait a minute.
Peter Robinson: …has estimated that four thousand kids a month were dying in Iraq…
Ron Reagan: Because of the embargo that we put on them.
John Podhoretz: Yes. We didn’t put the embargo on it. The U.N. put the embargo on it…
Ron Reagan: So kids are dying anyway, what’s a few more thousand? We can kill…
John Podhoretz: No, no, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands less…
Ron Reagan: But we didn’t kill them. George W. Bush’s war killed these ten thousand people. And if I’m a religious person, now I’ve just done something that results in the deaths of ten thousand innocent people, I’m going to be real apologetic about that.
John Podhoretz: Lincoln was a religious man and I’m unaware–I am unaware of, unless you are equating Christianity with…
Ron Reagan: We’re not talking about Abraham Lincoln.
John Podhoretz: No, unless you are equating Christianity with pacifism, which you obviously are, then… …no Christian leader is permitted ever to go to war.