Catholic and Enjoying It!
A reader writes:
I think we should be happy with the potential Syrian resolution, pray gratefully, and note this is what regular miracles are like to thosemof us hoping for peace and justice.
Completely agree. I love that God appears to have used a thug and an effete bonehead like Kerry to jigger the situation into a resolution. I love even better that He exposed our transparent eagerness to create terms that we believed were impossible to meet in order to force a war, only to have it cover us in shame and create an escape hatch.
Russia’s done something we haven’t done yet: lose. They, like Germany, seem to have learned from it. It’s still an open question whether we are able to learn from failure. Our country is remarkably adolescent in its ability to admit failure and folly. On the other hand, I’ve seen an awful lot of Iraq War supporters take this occasion to say, “I was wrong” and to refuse to be fooled again. So that’s a huge plus.
Anyway, thanks be to God for answered prayer. Pope Francis done good.
He replies:
This is the Pope’s first miracle.
We lose the peace. We have lost.
In Iraq and Afghanistan. We lost the peace. And its because we built nothing for them, because we spent no money on civic infrastructure. Because we were cheap- both with planning and physical development.
We didn’t have enough soldiers at the conquest of Iraq to guard our own bases. We had fewer civil engineers.
The Brits are remembered more fondly by the Indians 60-ish years after the Raj than we will be at a similar time point by Iraqis.
Plus, the Brits did not leave behind a legacy of skyrocketing birth defects as we have done, due to our generous gift of depleted uranium in the Iraqi environment. Then again I think generations yet unborn far from Iraq will curse this generation for lots of reasons. We have been particularly reckless in the “What could it possibly hurt?” department. But mothers in Iraq will have particular reasons to wish us death for decades and perhaps centuries to come.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” – Thomas Jefferson
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