The American leap of faith -- and ignorance

[Warren Stupidity]

By George H. Rosen | July 21, 2007

AT 5 O'CLOCK in the morning of Nov. 4, 1824, deep in the heart of the southern Atlantic, the cook of the ship Citizen, bound for China from New York, leaped into the sea.

The man had been notable on board only for his aggressively held religious beliefs. He would read aloud from an open Bible in one hand while prodding the salt pork in the boiling pot with the other and haranguing the crew "as to their wickedness." Just before going under for the last time, he cried out, "You are all going to hell, and I'm going to Guadeloupe."

The words were carefully written down by William Hunter, then a teenage boy headed out for Canton and a long career in the China trade. Hunter found the event "unfortunate" and utterly mystifying.

...

Just as for the sea cook of the Citizen or William Walker, who would pay or where we would choose to stage Armageddon was less important than that we would go to battle. The most amazing failure of intelligence about Iraq was not in the hunting for weapons of mass destruction; that was a question of facts on the ground. What astounds is that for the 12 years between the first Gulf War and the second, during which the Republican policy elite had sworn eternal vengeance against Hussein, they had never evinced the curiosity to learn about Iraq the things for which no spies were necessary. About the complexities of Iraqi society, politics, and history -- the reasons why invasion would be easy, but occupation hard -- they knew no more than the Citizen's cook knew of Guadeloupe or Walker of Nicaragua.

What is unpardonable, though, is that theirs was a willful ignorance; they were not mad. They leaped into the sea of their own volition, and it is the rest of us, Americans and Iraqis alike, who are left floundering a thousand miles from shore.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/07/21/the_american_leap_of_faith____and_ignorance/