Excellent. Gary Kamiya: "War, Chaos & Bush's Faith - Beware Of Those Who Play Dice With God"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/07/31/faith_war/index.html

War, chaos and Bush's faith
The first lesson of Iraq: Beware of those who play dice with God.

By Gary Kamiya

- snip -

Ironically, this is the very argument that Bush and his supporters are now using to justify keeping U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely -- or at least onto the next president's watch. They insist that disaster looms, and that only the blood of American troops, infused into a slow-drip I.V., can keep Iraq and the entire region from dying. Bush understands that there only two things that can save his legacy: either victory, or a worst-case scenario in which all of his threats about the all-powerful Islamo-fascist menace come true. The frightening thing is that for Bush, there's no difference between the two outcomes.

- snip -

Most Americans now believe that Bush's decision to invade Iraq was a terrible mistake. They see that it has turned out badly, and think that it has made us less safe. But there is another, less discussed reason why the war was an act of madness: War always has unforeseen consequences. Making war is like playing dice with God -- using His dice. This is why war should always be a last resort. What's stunning about the Iraq war is that its architects not only ignored this obvious truth, but also ignored the consequences that could have been, and were, foreseeable. To start an unprovoked war on false pretenses and pie-in-the-sky promises of a vast regional transformation, besides being unethical, is an act of almost cosmic folly. To put it in Christian terms, it is the cardinal sin -- the sin of pride.

- snip -

Even if the war had gone exactly according to plan, the neocons' grand vision of regional transformation had about as much chance of success as throwing a hand grenade into a printing press and it spitting out a copy of "Hamlet." But they compounded their folly by convincing themselves that they could control the war. Push a few buttons here, insert a few battalions there, and the enemy would vanish like a pixelated villain in a video game.

The neocons fell prey to the same delusion that has always hypnotized warmongers: They thought they could control war. But wars are like experiments with unknown, volatile substances: Their outcomes cannot be predicted. War means killing people on a mass scale. It is a human earthquake, a tidal wave, a forest fire, unleashing chthonic forces far too large for us to comprehend, let along control.

In Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger," Twain describes how the most minute alterations in a person's destiny -- alterations made by a handsome young man who happens to be the devil -- completely change the subsequent course of history. War is comparable to such a supernatural intervention. It is as close to being a rip in the fabric of space and time as you can get in the Newtonian universe. It puts too many variables in play, and we cannot control enough of them. And even those we do control end up creating new problems that may be worse than the original ones.

A classic example of the law of unforeseen consequences was America's support for the mujahedin's guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s...

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[DrDan]

1. an excellent read

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. This is what is scary

that Bush might MIHOP as far as a terrorist threat just so his legacy will be secured. I would hope that others would stop him before this could happen.

[ixion]

4. people continue to believe "it couldn't happen here", but

that is flawed logic and severe denial, IMO. The extremists in the WH wouldn't think twice about another MIHOP type of event.

[southern_belle]

3. k & r

[Hissyspit]

5. .