Mid-East Unraveling

02/23/2006

Paul Munnis

Iraq is coming unraveled. To all appearances they are falling into wide-spread sectarian civil war. This is awful after all they have been through. They are within a short grasp at freedom, autonomy, and a decent future for themselves and their children. Yet it eludes them.

What is left is to form a non-sectarian government based upon separation of church and state, establish minority rights, and ask the various sectarian militias to act as local police and oust foreign insurgents and help assure the civil peace. Then they must ask the USA to leave.

The Iraqi’s know what must be done but they do not seem to be able to bring themselves to the task. There is just too much mischief and evil.

What can we say about Palestine and Israel that hasn’t already been said? Best we say nothing just lament the lost attempts at peace between both nations. Peace has been so elusive for these people and it is so badly needed.

Both situations in the mid-east seem now to be in the hands of God more than in the hands of man. Men have flubbed every opportunity and since God often works through the hands and minds of men even He must be frustrated.

One never knows for sure though. Sometimes the results of evil produce a reaction against the forces of evil that serve as an antidote and shocks people into doing what is in their enlightened self-interest.

We pray that is the case for Iraq and Palestine and Israel. May God have mercy on these people.

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Lament of the Frontier Guard
Ezra Pound

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.

I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.

There is no wall left to this village.

Bones white with a thousand frosts,

High heaps, covered with trees and grass;

Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?

Barbarous kings.

A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,

A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,

Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,

No longer the men for offence and defence.

Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,

With Rihoku’s name forgotten,

And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

- By Rihaku.