The War Prayer

[Ultra]

The folowing was written by Mark Twain but unpublished in his lifetime.  Mr Twain said he didn't think he could get it published while he was alive as it was too radical.  His quote on the issue, ""I don't think the prayer will be published in my time, none but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."



It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!

Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

    God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
    Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- excpet he pause and think. "God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it --

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, strain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

...

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

[MG]

I have never read this story before, but, like all Twain writings, it is powerful beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.

Who can deny that the very results prophesied by the "lunatic" lie before us this very morning in the country that we have most recently smitten with our machines of war. Call us appeasers if you will. Call us cheese eating surrender monkies if you must. But those of us who see the merit of Twain's words are those who hold the promise of The Saviour in our hearts.

Peace on earth, good will towards men.

If only humanity as large would listen......

"Forgive them. Father, for they know not what they do."     Or DO they?   

[Tifosi]

I'm reminded of another of Twain's writings...

    "It's been said that Adam was the inventor of sin.  That doesn't seem like too big a job...I believe I could have done that myself."


Dan

[Ultra]

One of my favorite columnists seems to have pity on the men who live and die in Mr Twain's prayer....



by Fred Reed

It's all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he's half the man his father was?

The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.

The talk among pols now is about finding an "exit strategy." This means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress. Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five words: "OK. On the plane. Now." Bring your toothbrush. Everything else stays. We're outa here.

It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to all. But we won't use it. We will continue killing our men, calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.

Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This isn't new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to "save face"—at two hundred dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren't among the dead, or among the GIs.

I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon's plan to save face. "His face, our ass," was the reply. Just so, then, and just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in Kansas anyway.

Soldiers are succinct and do not mince words. This makes them dangerous. We must keep them off-camera to the extent possible. A GI telling the truth could set recruiting back by years.

The truth is that the government doesn't care about its soldiers, and never has. If you think I am being unduly harsh, read the Washington Post. You will find story after story saying that the Democrats don't want to do anything drastic about the war. They fear seeming "soft on national security." In other words, they care more about their electoral prospects in 2008 than they do about the lives of GIs. It's no secret. For them it is a matter of tuning the spin, of covering tracks, of calculating the vector sum of the ardent-patriot vote which may be cooling, deciding which way the liberal wind blows, and staying poised to seem to have supported whoever wins. Screw the troops. Their fathers probably work in factories anyway.

Soldiers do not realize, until too late, the contempt in which they are held by their betters. Here is the psychological foundation of the hobbyist wars of bus-station presidents. If you are, say, a Lance Corporal in some miserable region of Iraq, I have a question for you: Would your commanding general let you date his daughter? I spent my high-school years on a naval base, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as it was then called. Dahlgren was heavy with officers, scientists, and engineers. Their daughters, my classmates, were not allowed to associate with sailors. Oh yes, we honor our fighting men. We hold them in endless respect. Yes we do.

For that matter, Lance Corporal, ask how many members of Congress have even served, much less been in combat. Ask how many have children in the armed services. Look around you. Do you see many (any) guys from Harvard? Yale? MIT? Cornell? Exactly. The smart, the well-off, the powerful are not about to risk their irreplaceable sit-parts in combat. Nor are they going to mix with mere high-school graduates, with kids from small towns in Tennessee, with blue-collar riffraff who bowl and drink Bud at places with names like Lenny's Rib Room. One simply doesn't. One has standards.

You are being suckered, gang, just as we were.

It is a science. The government hires slick PR firms and ad agencies in New York. These study what things make a young stud want to be A Soldier: a desire to prove himself, to get laid in foreign places, a craving for adventure, a desire to feel part of something big and powerful and respected, what have you. They know exactly what they are doing. They craft phrases, "Be a Man Among Men," or "A Few Good Men," or, since girls don't like those two, "The Few, The Proud." Join up and be Superman.

Then comes the calculated psychological conditioning. There is for example the sense of power and unity that comes of running to cadence with a platoon of other guys, thump, thump, thump, all shouting to the heady rhythm of boots, "If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian c__t, Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef..." That was Parris Island, August of '66, and doubtless they say something else now, but the principle is the same.

And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country. This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on Pennsylvania Avenue. You will figure this out years later.

Once you are in the war, you can't get out. We couldn't either. While your commander in chief eats steak in the White House and talks tough, just like a real president, you kill people you have no reason to kill, about whom you know next to nothing—which one day may weigh on your conscience. It does with a lot of guys, but that comes later.

You are being suckered, and so are the social classes that supply the military. Note that the Pentagon cracks down hard on troops who say the wrong things online, that the White House won't allow coffins to be photographed, that the networks never give soldiers a chance to talk unedited about what is happening. Oh no. It is crucial to keep morale up among the rubes. You are the rubes. So, once, were we.

December 18, 2006

[MG]

I thought for a while that political and possibly inflammatory postings over here were verboten, unofficially if not officially. But since Ultra has had the temerity to kick off this most interesting thread, let me jump in with both feet. ( I almost NEVER jump in with just one foot or a few toes.)

Here is a piece from yesterday's Sunday NYT Week In Review section that I found enlightening, troubling and possibly infuriating. It seems our so-called leaders are fiddling while American soldiers get their asses shot off, just as Ultra's article would seem to suggest.  And it raises a question in my pint sized brain? Since when did war planning become an ex post facto process?   

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

December 17, 2006
Brainstorming on Iraq
The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON

SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney's office has gotten everybody on this city's holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they're likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.

As President Bush and his deputies chew over whether there's a Hail Mary pass to salvage Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that the president will probably throw the ball toward his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Make no mistake, the Rice way is a long shot as well. It's a catchall of a plan that has something for everyone. Its goal — if peace and victory can't be had — is at least to give a moderate Shiite government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

In this plan, America's Sunni Arab allies would press centrist Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns. Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The Rice plan seems diplomatic and reasoned. But it breaks no molds. Which is why examining the Darwin Principle better helps explain the mood of the capital right now.

"Deciding to side with the Shia is probably the most inflammatory thing we could do right now," says Wayne White, a member of the Iraq Study Group who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research center here. "It would be a multi-headed catastrophe."

At first glance, the idea of siding with the Shiites doesn't seem that crazy. America has, after all, had more spectacular trouble of late from Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban than from Shiites, whose best-remembered attacks on Americans were two decades ago, by hostage-takers in Iran and truck bombers in Lebanon.

But Middle East experts can provide a long list of reasons why a survival-of-the-fittest theory might not necessarily be the best way to conduct American foreign policy in Iraq. First, they say, it's always dangerous to take sides in a civil war. Second, siding with the Shiites in a Shiite-Sunni war is particularly dangerous since most of the Arab world is Sunni and America's major Arab allies are Sunni. Besides Iraq, Shiites form a large majority only in Iran, and, well, enough said there.

If America has problems now with Muslim extremists around the world, those would likely worsen if the United States was believed to have aided the uprooting or extermination of Iraq's Sunni population.

On Monday, a group of prominent Saudi clerics called on Sunni Muslims everywhere to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq, complaining that Sunnis were being murdered and marginalized by Shiites.

So, where is the Darwin Principle coming from?

Well, there's no proof Mr. Cheney really even backs it. Unnamed government officials with knowledge in the matter say the proposal comes from his office, but they stop short of saying it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.

Other top officials say it is highly unlikely that the administration would pursue such a radical course. (Of course, the radical nature of the Darwin Principle is all the more reason to assume it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.) But it is difficult to imagine the administration actually publicly announcing such a course even if it decided on it.

Can you just hear President Bush's speech to the nation? "My Fellow Americans, the United States has decided that there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq, so we are therefore going to side with the people most likely to win a fight to the death. We'll figure out how to deal with the rest of the Arab world, where there are more Sunnis than Shiites, later."

Still, somewhere deep inside the Beltway, someone has laid out the intellectual basis for the Shiite option. So some people with knowledge of the thinking behind the proposal were asked to explain it. None agreed to be identified, citing an administration edict against talking about President Bush's change-of-strategy in Iraq before the president articulates exactly what that change will be. But here's what they said:

America abandoned the Shiites in 1991 and look where that got us. Mr. Cheney has argued that America can't repeat what it did after the Persian Gulf war, when it called on the Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then left them to be slaughtered when they did. The result was 12 more years of the Iraqi dictator's iron-fisted rule, which ended up leading to war anyway.

Reconciliation hasn't worked. The logic of the past couple of years has been that Iraq's Constitution and election process would bring together the Sunnis and the Shiites. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was eventually able to formulate a so-called National Unity Government in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all hold key positions.

That government has proved itself to be "disappointing," one senior administration official acknowledged delicately. And violence has continued to surge.

Maybe America can scare the Sunnis into behaving. That's the "stare into the abyss" strategy, another senior administration official said. He said that for the past three years, Sunni insurgent groups, and many Sunni politicians, have refused to recognize that the demographics of Iraq are not in their favor. Sunni insurgents can share the responsibility with Shiite death squads for the violence in Iraq, but the Sunnis have the most to lose in an all-out civil war, since they are outnumbered three to one. So perhaps Darwin Principle proponents — whoever they are — just want to scare Sunnis, including those in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other American allies, into trying harder for reconciliation.

Ms. Rice "does not believe we should plainly take one side over another," said a State Department official, who said he doesn't support the Shiite option but sees the convoluted logic of it. "But the demography of Iraq is a fact."

The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they're the ones with the oil. A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas.

Darwin? Try Machiavelli. An even more far-fetched offshoot of the Darwin Principle is floating around, which some hawks have tossed out in meetings, although not seriously, one administration official said. It holds that America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq's Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war. And in that, the Shiites — and Iran — lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else.

Wow.

[Ultra]

I thought for a while that political and possibly inflammatory postings over here were verboten, unofficially if not officially.

Verboten is the ONE topic we do not discuss here. 

Everything else is okay. 

[otto]

The part about not dating sailors hits very clear. In San Diego Home owners posted sign on lawns saying--no dogs or sailors on grass--despicable. And if you all will remember years ago some of us stated flat out this was just another loosing war. So what is new now except that viewpoint has been proven correct. Around here the kids sign up for a way out of here and some college. Yes a deal has been made and must be honored. As the brother in law says they took the kings gold now they must earn it. The problem now becomes how does the VA take care of the maimed? The last time, after a certain point, all aid stopped. The wounded were set out on their own to fend for themselves. Do you get the idea our govt would prefer the casualties would die rather then continue to cost them money? I cant remember nor do i want to remember the number of human wreaks drunks and total druggies that died young after coming home.  A few still sit in local bars until they fall. It is too sad. Let us, all of us , do better this time with and for them.

Rant over.
edit; If this offended you i apologise. Sometimes i get carried away.
otto

[Ultra]

Rings of War

Think of a war as a violent center of a circle with concentric rings of people surrounding it. At the center are the soldiers who have to fight the war. In the next ring are the people whose loved ones are doing the fighting. In the third ring, at a safe distance, are the politicians who started the war.

The fourth ring includes journalists, to whom the war is just another story. They get paid to write and talk about something, and a war is a long-lasting topic.

The fifth ring includes the self-anointed experts, who love to do sound bites on television and participate in panel discussions.

The sixth ring includes the arms industry, which, wisely, keeps a low profile. Arms merchants, after all, view the war as a permanent holiday sale. The longer it lasts, the more profits they make. There is a distinct advantage in products that self-destruct with one-time use, such as bullets, missiles, bombs and artillery rounds. Even the big-ticket items like vehicles don't last too long.

The seventh and final ring of people includes the majority of Americans, who have no direct interest in the war. They are not in the military, they have no loved ones in the military, and they don't work in the arms industry.

To these people, a war in a distant place is like a television show that they can watch in the comfort of their living room. If they get bored, they can make it go away with a flick of their remote control. The war has no effect on their lives, which go on as if there were no war – as indeed there isn't, so far as they are concerned.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with undeclared foreign wars. The great majority of Americans are excluded from participation. Politicians start wars, and politicians are the only ones who can end them. The fewer people involved in the war, the less pressure there will be on the politicians to end it. That leaves them free to posture on either side of the issue without actually doing anything.

President Bush has no interest in ending the war. Before the terrorist attack in 2001, he was at odds and ends and didn't seem to know what he wanted to do. But now he enjoys being a war president. It's given him a role to play. He's not going to give that up.

Congress, of course, could stop the war by cutting off the funds. That is one of the great checks and balances the founders wrote into the Constitution. Congress has 100 percent of the responsibility for and control of all federal expenditures. There is nothing the executive branch can do about it.

The soldiers can't declare peace. The people of Iraq can't declare peace. Only the American politicians can end this war, and they can't end it by sending more Americans to the killing fields. That ploy didn't work in Vietnam, and it won't work in Iraq.

So, if you want to spare lives, bombard your representatives with letters urging them to end the war now. In the future, we should insist on a declaration of war with a 10 percent surtax on income and a 10 percent war tax on goods and services, both to expire with the cessation of hostilities.

That would force everyone, even those in the seventh ring, to participate in the war and give everyone an incentive to end it. A pay-as-you-fight war would be whole lot less tolerable to most Americans. As long as we force soldiers to bleed, we should bleed financially.

[MG]

Your initial post in this thread motivated me to visit the Mark Twain House while in Connecticut over the holidays. Truly more than just a gifted writer, he was a smart, witty and insightful man whose wisdom remains relevant today (eerily so, as it turns out.)

I have just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, a book by Frank Rich entitled "The Greatest Story Ever Sold."  It is fair to say that Rich (Frank Rich, not that other Rich) is no fan of W and his minions. His reportage is clear eyed and unapologetic. The book includes a 150 page appendix which sets up two separate timelines juxstaposed side by side detailing what the administration admitted to themselves internally and what they said publicly.  The resultant calculated effort to weave a web of lies and deceit is startling when viewed in this format.  As Shakespeare observed, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

I won't comment on your taxation suggestions except to say that we as a nation OUGHT to give due consideration to how we are going to PAY for our hegemony, if we intend to continue being hegemoniacs.

The virtually total absence of stories from the troops in Iraq, from those who have returned, from the families whose sons and daughters have died, from the thousands who have been disfigured and maimed by this misadventure is quite startling when you think about it.  Our media have been totally cowed by the administration, to the point where the only truth about what is transpiring has to come from Al Jazeera (which has an excellent English language website, btw) or other foreign news sources.  If anyone needed more proof of the perils to democracy that come from the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands, the events of the past 5 years should be sufficient to overcome any doubts.

What is astonishing to me is the rapidity with which the plans to invade moved forward without any meaningful opportunity for those with alternate views to be heard contrasted to the glacial pace of the deliberations that are presently upon us as The Great Decider dithers and weaves, seeking advice from everyone from Ahnold to Sweet Mother McCree.

Interesting times we live in. The most foolhardy and lethal period in American history is upon us, but, in the words of Don Henley, "all we want to do is dance."