The Beating Drums

When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

-Mark 13: 7-8

For fairly obvious reasons, this Scripture has been running through my head for the past few days.  Trump finally did something that wasn't just bluster, he actually took out an Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani with a drone strike.  This has generated all sorts of pearl clutching and honestly more diverse reactions from all over the political spectrum than most of what the Donald has done in this three year farcical collage of a presidency. Ross Douthat has an interesting analysis in the NY Times today about the differing paradigms of foreign policy if you want some political science in your day.

My interest is more along the lines of the moral and spiritual impact of things.  While I lean towards a pacifist interpretation of the Gospel, as a child of the 20th Century, I grew up with far too much evidence of the damage that unrestrained evil can cause.  While mutually assured destruction did seem like utter madness, I suppose you have to say that the idea prevented us from turning the earth into a charcoal briquette (we are just taking the slow cooker approach). I still find it hard to "not be alarmed" at wars and rumors of wars, and in a very real sense I do wish we could all lay down our swords before we die by them.  However, it is a fact that men like Soleimani and Donald Trump are pretty much destined to be the ones pulling the levers of power.  Even when we do get a thoughtful diplomat like Barack Obama, things like Libya and Syria still go down, and the measured, grown up reactions that I admired in Obama, do actually turn out to have been mistakes.

I guess that has always been an appeal of Trump, he is a bully, but if he's on your side, it would seem, he can help you fight those other bullies.  Iran is definitely a bad actor, on many levels.  Hopeful analysis from inside tells us that the Iranian people are yearning to breath free and rid themselves of the Mullahs that control the rather brutal and restrictive Islamic, Shiite theocracy.   But so far, there has been no Persian Spring, and even if there were, the Arab Spring has not left us much reason to hope that things would really change that much.

Our own track record with Iran is pretty dismal, we toppled a primarily democratic state that had many signs of actually becoming a modern society on par with say France or Spain, and set up the Shah, who proved to be a despot whose inept rule provoked a revolution that brought Khomeini to power. For those of you who don't remember Khomeini, that's this guy: 

That's right, Mr. Death to America himself.  Ronald Ray-gun brought down the USSR, but he couldn't do jack spit about the Ayatollah Khomeini.  We hated and feared this old man so much that we supported a certain Iraqi named Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.  Hindsight is 20/20, and we really should have stayed the hell out of a 1000 year old war between the two major sects of a religion that really only agree on one thing: we (the USA) are the devil.  That's right boys and girls, the one thing that unites two disparate groups of Muslims that split right after the Prophet Mohammed died in 632 CE (no I didn't forget the first digit), is their dislike of our decadent western behinds.

The thing that really scares me the most is that President Donald J. Trump seems to lack even the basic 7th grade social studies understanding that I just laid down right there. At my most cynical I believe that he is actually trying to "wag the dog" by starting up a hot conflict to distract from his impending impeachment (that's a good punk band name right there). But even if I give the Donald his due, which is hard on a spiritual level, and say that he actually did get a bad guy who totally deserved to get himself bombed into the next life, I just can't imagine how this is going to end well.

That's why I need me some Jesus.  He saves me from myself. I am still worried about the members of our armed forces who might bear the casualties of what would invariably be a really awful conflict.  I am still worried about the millions of Iranians, who don't necessarily think we are the Great Satan, but who happen to live in a country that is governed according to the standards of an essentially medieval religion.  I have this hope that, somehow, a new and better world might be born out of this mess, but I'm not really looking forward to going through labor.