Casualties of Faith

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Thu, 21 Oct 2004 06:10:57 -0700

Subject:Dowd: Casualties of Faith

 

 

 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/opinion/21dowd.html?oref=login & hp>

 

OP-ED COLUMNIST

 

 

Casualties of Faith

By MAUREEN DOWD

 

Published: October 21, 2004

 

WASHINGTON

 

When I was little, I was very good at leaps of faith.

 

A nun would tape up a picture of a snow-covered mountain peak on the

blackboard and say that the first child to discern the face of Christ

in the melting snow was the holiest. I was soon smugly showing the

rest of the class the " miraculous " outline of that soulful, bearded face.

 

But I never thought I'd see the day when leaps of faith would be

national policy, when the fortunes of America hung on the possibility

of a miracle.

 

What does it tell you about a president that his grounds for war are

so weak that the only way he can justify it is by believing God wants it?

Or that his only Iraq policy now - as our troops fight a vicious

insurgency and the dream of a stable democracy falls apart - is a

belief in miracles?

 

Miracles make the incurious even more incurious. People who live by

religious certainties don't have to waste time with recalcitrant facts

or moral doubts. They do not need to torture themselves, for example,

about dispatching American kids into a sand trap with ghostly enemies

and without the proper backup, armor, expectations or cultural training.

 

Any president relying more on facts than faith could have seen that

his troops would be sitting ducks: Donald Rumsfeld's experiment -

sending in a light, agile force (more a Vin Diesel vehicle than a

smart plan for Iraq) - was in direct conflict with the overwhelming

force needed to attempt the neocons' grandiose scheme to turn Iraq

into a model democracy.

 

J.F.K. had to fight the anti-papist expectation that his Oval Office

would take orders from heaven. For W., it's a selling point. Some

right-wing Catholics want John Kerry excommunicated, while

evangelicals call the president a messenger of God. " God's blessing is

on him, " the TV evangelist Pat Robertson says, adding, " It's the

blessing of heaven on the emperor. "

 

Mr. Bush has shown all the evangelical voters who didn't like his

daddy that he gets, as Mr. Robertson puts it, " his direction from the

Lord. "

 

When Paula Zahn asked the televangelist Tuesday whether Mr. Bush, as a

Christian, should admit his mistakes, Mr. Robertson said he'd warned a

self-satisfied Bush about Iraq: " The Lord told me it was going to be

(a) a disaster, and (b) messy. "

 

Mr. Robertson said, " He was the most self-assured man I ever met. "

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, he said Mr. Bush was " like a contented

Christian with four aces. He was just sitting there, like, I'm on top

of the world, and I warned him about this war. ... And I was trying to

say, Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for

casualties. 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' "

 

W., it seems, really believes he's the one. President Neo. (And his

advisers are disciples. That's why Condi Rice so willingly puts aside

her national security duties to spread the Bush gospel in swing

states, and why Karen Hughes raced to impugn Mr. Robertson's veracity

after he described his chilling encounter with W.)

 

W.'s willful blindness comes from mistakenly assuming that his desires

are God's, as if he knows where God stands on everything from

democracy in Iraq to capital-gains tax cuts.

 

As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address about the Civil War,

one can't speak for God: " The Almighty has His own purposes. "

 

Mr. Bush didn't just ignore Mr. Robertson's warning - he ignored his

own intelligence experts, who warned before the war that an invasion

of Iraq would spur more support for political Islam and trigger

violent conflict, including an insurgency that would drive Baathists

and terrorists together in a toxic combination.

 

As Michael Gordon wrote in his Times series this week on blind spots

in the strategy to secure Iraq, the Bush crew engaged in an

astonishing series of delusions: assuming they could begin a

withdrawal of troops 60 days after taking Baghdad; enabling the

insurgency to flourish; abolishing the Iraqi military and putting

American lives at risk; misreading the obvious reaction to an American

occupation of a Muslim country.

 

C.I.A. officials were so clueless they wanted to sneak hundreds of

small American flags into Iraq before the war started so grateful

Iraqis could wave them at their liberators. The agency planned to film

that and triumphantly beam it to the Arab world.

 

The president has this strange notion that his belief in God means

detailed and perfect knowledge of everything that God wants. He may

wish to keep his head stuck in the Iraqi sand, but he may discover

that the Almighty has His own purposes.

 

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