December 5, 2007
Whether
A newspaper columnist wrote recently that Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of people who won’t admit that they are ever wrong.
I guess we could give these inadmissibles some slack, for it’s not all that easy just looking into a glass darkly and finding out you are wrong, let alone admitting it. Trouble here is the same folk who are so very wrong now started out then doing what they said God told them to do and which they of course thought surely must be right because God said so even if everything else seemed to suggest otherwise. Further, to admit that you are wrong about something God told you to do suggests that something must be awry about God’s judgment. ‘Tis a pity, for they seemed so sure about that then and also convinced a lot of people who wanted to believe them. And spent a lot of money, a fact we don’t want to forget because the Asians who floated us aren’t. But that’s the trouble dealing with God. It takes faith, and you can never be all that sure about faith, or God, for that matter. That’s why we talk about faith as risk, about whether the light at the end of the tunnel is just plain daylight or whether it’s the head lamp on the Rocky Mountain Limited. Even Jesus had his moments out there in the garden that night asking God to let him off the hook of what he had been so sure about earlier. It’s bad enough if it’s just me who’s wrong and who has a hard time admitting it. It’s when those with the big wrenches stick them into the gears at the wrong times and places. It’s getting to where in these past few years that “late breaking news” is already broke by the time we get it. Just now, Iran has become Also Ran, and you’d think we could relax, that everything we’ve been told about it is down the chute, that the smoking gun wasn’t smoking after all, but that somebody else probably was. I imagine that the spin must have been lying in wait for just such a late break, because now we’re being told it really doesn’t make any difference at all whether our leaders were right or wrong. At any rate, maybe it’ll be made to look good in some Presidential Library where it can be chiseled into stone in big, bold Century Gothic.
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