Short memory, must have a

“In the tents new rifles,” the singer barks, bitterly summarizing the endless cycle of war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and bemoaning the “short memory” that ignores all that has gone before. The singer rails against those insisting that this time it will be different and this next military intervention will somehow produce a different result.

And that song is more than 30 years old.

I hear that song in my head whenever I read articles like this one: “Frank Wolf Calls for Safe Haven for Mideast Christians.”

That’s a report from Christianity Today on the proposal from a former Republican congressman and his new parachurch political group headquartered at Baylor University.

All of it — Wolf’s proposal, the article itself, the statements from nearly everyone quoted — reads as though all of this began yesterday. As if the situation and context it describes just suddenly rose from the sea last week, or abruptly appeared ex nihilo.

None of which is to say that Wolf’s proposal has no merit. He wants to do something for some of the refugees within Iraq, and that’s a positive thing. And I commend the former congressman for getting into a different kind of lobbying, for not cashing in on K Street like most of his former colleagues.

But it’s disorienting and confounding to read a story calling for military intervention in Iraq that almost completely disregards the reality of the very recent history of military intervention in Iraq. Here is one of the few places in which the article makes a slight, glancing acknowledgment of that recent history:

“A decade ago, Iraq’s Christian population numbered 1.5 million,” said Randel Everett, Wilberforce Initiative president and former Texas pastor. “Today, roughly 300,000 remain, and most have no jobs, no schools, and no places of worship.”

Apparently something dramatic must have happened “a decade ago” in Iraq. The article doesn’t say what that might have been.

It doesn’t say that what happened there happened with the full, enthusiastic support and advocacy of then-Rep. Frank Wolf, and of Christianity Today, and of Texas pastors like Randel Everett. It doesn’t say what they all told us at the time would be the outcome of what happened more than a decade ago in Iraq, or how radically, disastrously wrong all those predictions and reassurances proved to be.

CT’s article is starkly illustrated with a horrifying screen shot from a war crime. It’s a still from an ISIS/Daesh propaganda video in which the terrorists force 21 Syrian Christian hostages to kneel before being executed. But there’s no discussion of how the ongoing horrors in Syria relate to the ongoing horrors in neighboring regions in Iraq.

Everett’s short-memory invocation of the calamity that has befallen Iraqi Christians over the past dozen years is weirdly disconnected from the context of Syrian Christians today, who are largely supportive of their country’s Ba’athist leader in part because they fear the kind of decimation they’ve seen occur in Iraq. There’s no sense of how the insurgents who horrify us today were, less than a decade ago, the “surge”-ents awakened and armed due to the same sort of short-memory appeals for intervention that are now resurgent. No sense that many of the same voices now calling for increased military action against ISIS were, very recently, also calling for increased military action against that group’s main foe in Syria.

“They’re only there to lend a hand,” the singer sang. But that warning was from 1983. We can’t possibly be expected to remember that far back when we’re not even able to remember 2003, or 2007, or 2013.

Short memory, must have a …