They Made a Desert

Well, once again, the President had the opportunity to pull support from nations he had previously dissed. And once again, he made us all look like the playground bully: just pushing the smaller kids around because he could. Headline after headline repeats the theme of missed opportunity. Only Mr. Bush could make Iraq look so good and make Saddam actually look like a victim. (We must remember, after all, that Saddam was practically placed in power, hand-picked, by the US.)

A few select words from UN General Secretary Kofi Annan:

Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it.

In Iraq, we see civilians massacred in cold blood while relief workers, journalists and other non-combatants are taken hostage and put to death in the most barbarous fashion.

At the same time, we have seen Iraqi prisoners disgracefully abused.

And still fully half of the nation's voters would want this man (the subject of these comments) to continue running our nation? This delusionist cum illusionist who continues to think that everything is going well and that it's the rest of the world that's screwed up for refusing to help us?

Christians who support this man willingly support his war. They must live with the consequences and will answer to God for their refusal to seek biblical reconciliatory measures.

I will close this post with a somber quote from a speech by Bobby Kennedy delivered 2 days after announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President, 2 weeks before Martin Luther King's assassination, and just 3 months before his own.

The front pages of our newspapers show photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners. Every night we watch horror on the evening news. Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives. And whatever the costs to us, let us think of the young men we have sent there: not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but also those who must look upon the results of what they do.

It is becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of destruction for the nation we once hoped to help. Even before this winter, Vietnam and its people were disintegrating under the blows of war. Now hardly a city in Vietnam has been spared from the new ravages of the past two months.

We are entitled to ask -- we are required to ask -- how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner...?

I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert, and called it peace."

We turn off our brains and check our morals at the door. We surf the web and watch Flash-based cartoons. We go to work and come home to watch the war on Fox News. The clock ticks. Meanwhile, on the other side of our precious interstellar island, the blood of thousands drips from our fingertips.

As RFK also quoted from Antigone, "All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride."