It all began with 9/11

"'Soon, God willing, their happiness will turn to sadness,' it said, 'their blood will be mingled with their tears.'"

Thus Al Qaeda following Osama's death.

It is hard not to think of the current Middle East strife as part of the broad panorama that opens up when we begin with 9/11.

Inevitably, we chose the exact wrong course. Had we merely taken out Al Qaeda we would have done the proportional thing, the fair thing, the right thing. 

Instead we set off a chain which has exacted more lives than were ever lost on 9/11. And now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran are  set against us, Iraq spins close to a meltdown and Syria is involved in a grisly program of serial genocide with the support of Russia and China.

We are walking at the edge of an abyss that can be traced back to the warped mind of the President we allowed our Supreme Court to put into office twelve years ago.

The history of life since 9/11 has been one of monstrous error and limited efforts to counter it with sanity.

To praise the President would be a wonderful option were it not for two things. He has helped compound. the karmic burden by refusing to see the value in truth as given to the world by one Bradley Manning and he had stored up grapes of wrath with the move to the drone. Both these "policies" are fraught with future danger to our nation. To the point that we cannot and should not say we are safer now than we were four or eight or ten years ago.

It is easy to be against Al Qaeda and to fault radical Islam. But it is more accurate to lay blame equally and even to lay it more heavily on ourselves. This is precisely what the GOP thinks is so terrible. That we should be apologetic. Well we should be. And we should understand that the way of Abba is in the direction of this understanding, not in the Santorum, McCain, Gingrich direction. 

We are in a tragic vortex and we will get out of it only by a grace which we do not deserve.