Is Condi Crazy?

Today marks the 25th day of the most recent chapter of the Middle East conflict directly involving Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon. Other states and actors--many others--have a direct bearing on the conflict even if they are not fighting on the ground.

For most of the twenty-five days, I have watched CNN and Anderson Cooper report on the carnage. For sure, I have little sympathy with the actions of the State of Israel, even though I think that it should exist. Further, I have no sympathy with Hezbollah and its use of violence. I do have a good deal of sympathy with the civilians of both Israel and Lebanon as they live in fear.

I should add to my list of sympathies and antipathy, the disgust I feel at the response of the government of my own country. Since much of this response is articulated by Secretary of State Rice, I find my respect for her significantly decreased. In the early moments of this conflict, she noted on one television appearance that what we are witnessing are "the birth pangs" of a new democratic Middle East. She declined in the early moments to call for a cease fire--surely a moral act that would have saved many hundreds of lives--by stating that we didn't want just words but to get to the root of the problems. Her pompous, if diplomatese use of the term "status quo ante" hardly fit with the grimy, bloody suffering actually being experienced, mainly by Lebanese civilians, at this time.

Is Condi crazy?

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the past years of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq, that indicates that the current administration has any understanding of how to go about implanting democracy--if such a thing can be done by a foreign occupier. There is nothing that indicates that the United States understands the true roots of violence in the Middle East.

My own assumption at this time is that the Israeli Defense Forces are acting on behalf of their own government' misconceived interests. But the government of Israel also is acting, I think, as a proxy of the United States. We would like to see Hezbollah eliminated or incapacitated, at any price. Since we are so overdrawn in civil war Iraq, we are letting Israel carry on our fight for us.

True, the mess in the Middle East predated GWB and Condi by many years. Successive American presidents and governments tried all sorts of things to broker peace. None of them were as arrogant as the current United States administration, which can't even deal seriously with the situation in Iraq.

Normally I think that the United States should not distance itself from realities in other countries. However, our use of our power in the past few years has made the Middle East a worse place for all and a very dangerous place for the future of humanity. The best thing we could do would be to pack up our arrogant spins and illusions and get out of the game. We are the least qualified country to do anything helpful for Middle Eastern populations, Israel included.

Even if now Secretary of State Rice indicates serious interest in a diplomatic solution, her previous advocacy for the administrations positions in Iraq and elsewhere should disqualify her as an honest broker. One wonders how we will broker anything as long as we insist on not talking directly to groups we see as evil or adversarial: Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas . . . . . .

And, who knows, maybe the many influential Republicans who are into end of the world theologies as embodied in the theologically bankrupt Left Behind Series are seeing this in some weird theological context. If this is true, then I have a theological response of my own: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.