God Says It's A Good War

I chatted with my high school friend and part-time college roommate Marine Sgt. Rick Gonzalez today. Earlier in the day he had emailed some pictures of himself patrolling and also one of a Navy medic taking staples out of his leg. He told me he got the staples while rushing out of an area where he was "snooping" around. He said the Iraqi's spotted his unit, so they hauled ass, and in the rush of things, he ran through some barbed wire and kept running until he was safe.

The pictures were kind of neat. In one of them he carried his large weapon, I guess and assault rifle, and in the other hand he carried a handgun. The sun was setting and I imagine if somebody was taking this cool picture of him, he wasn't really in that much danger. In the other picture he's got his pant leg up and the medic is taking a look at him. He's got that big Rick smile on his face and in his right hand he is carrying a handgun, joking that if the medic hurts him, he'll shoot him. Rick told me that he didn't see the barbed wire because it was dark and his night vision glasses weren't working. I said, "what, they weren't working?" He said, "yea, only the Army gets good equipment." I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but I do know that his equipment wasn't working. Not good.

Tonight, I turned on my computer and visited the NYT. I ran across this great piece on how President Bush feels God is guiding him and God wants the war.

Here's a short excerpt for those of you too lazy to get the free NYT subscription.

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.