Evangelical Christians around the country, probably around the world, are on the alert. They believe the rapture must be near because of the trouble in the Middle East. According to their interpretation the battle for the control of Israel is the "Battle of Armageddon" and will bring in the seven-year tribulation, preceeded by the rapture when all Christians mysteriously disappear from earth.
The rest of the world is worried, because too many large nations have too much invested in the Middle East to let things there just happen on their own. China's growing demand for oil, Russia's interest in protecting its allies in the region, and the United States' inexplicable desire to protect Israel could well pull all these nations and more into World War III. Then King George the second will really be a war president and we'll see if he's as good at it as he has always claimed.
If you're new to this site you'll want to read the articles on Israel in my "Theology" section. There you'll see why I believe the existence of Israel is not demanded by the Bible. Even if it was, the God I worship is fully capable of establishing and defending the country, without my assistance. So my response to the present escalation of tensions is to let the thing boil over and figure out what to do with the pieces afterward.
There is the argument that Israel is friendly to the United States and is worthy of our protection. But that notion calls into question what it means to be "friendly" and what it means to be worthy. Clearly Hezbollah, and its sponsors in Iran and Syria, wanted to provoke a war with Israel. Israel complacently gave them what they wanted.
And if you want to complain about Israel's blatant disregard of civilian life and infrastructure, you must recall that as a voting citizen (or at least eligible to vote) of the United States you bear responsiblity for massive civilian damage that Israel hasn't the capacity to inflict. It's just that we know how to cause our death and destruction where it isn't so visible, in places like Afghanistan and Iraq which are largely closed to western media. The result is that nobody has an accurate estimate of the number of civilian deaths in the two countries, but we know that it far outstrips the loss of life on 9/11 and the military casualty count together.
"War is hell," someone says tritely. So why do we keep on doing it? The war in Iraq was NOT forced on us by any stretch of the imagination. The wars in Europe and the Pacific probably weren't forced on us either, but at least you have some facts on your side if you choose to argue it.
Which brings us to the "reason" for the existence of Israel. We felt compelled to stop Herr Hitler, and when we learned of his death camps and the hatred he unleashed against the Jewish race, we felt justified in all we had done. Some Jews began to push for a Jewish state. England, one of the victors, had control of the ancient Jewish homeland and might be persuaded to carve out a nation of "Israel" as a strange sort of repayment for the treatment the Jews received from Germany.
Not all Jews liked the idea, however. The most devout, religious Jews in the United States, among them the Hasidic Jews, felt it would be sacrilege to establish a secular nation in the Jews' ancestral and "holy" homeland. But in 1948 Great Britain, with the support of the United States, carved out territory just east of the Mediterranian Sea, ordered the residents to move to territories carved out of neighboring nations, and began importing Jews en masse.
What were we thinking? It had to be obvious to our leaders that the Jews were moving into the middle of their most vitriolic enemies. And while I might be tempted to believe that nobody brought that up at the time, experience from our own day tells me otherwise. There were people saying we shouldn't have imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II, but the people who needed to heed their advice either didn't, or more likely wouldn't, hear it.
So there were probably people in the years between VJ day and the establishment of Israel, who warned us against doing it. But like today they were probably branded unpatriotic or enemies of the United States and its freedoms.
That's strange today, because George Bush told us the terrorists "hate our freedom" and proceeded to hack away at those very freedoms in the name of his "War on Terror." [It should be called a war on behalf of terror, since nothing has done so much to increase the ranks of terrorists as Bush's misguided attempts to stop them.]
Most of you can probably argue, "But I wasn't even ALIVE in 1948, much less likely to have voted for the men in power then. You do have that back door escape route regarding the establishment of Israel, but it won't relieve you of responsibility for today's problems because they have been created largely by our own shoot first and criticize those who ask questions later foreign policy.
You see we propped up the Shah of Iran against popular dislike through most of the '70s. We were so single-minded about that we didn't take careful thought about what we wanted to have replace him when he was eventually ousted (and we should have known he would be). So what developed was the one kind of government least likely to serve the United States' interests: an Islamic Republic.
We sat back powerless and embarrased when Americans in Iran were taken hostage. Just to prove how powerless we were, the Islamic Jihadists waited to release the hostages until the one time in our political cycle when a given administration would find it hard to take credit for it. Things got so bad there that when the leader of Iraq started a war against Iran we supported him.
We probably should have continued to support him, but when the relatively wealthy nation of Kuwait fell to Mr. Hussein's forces we suddenly changed sides and attacked. (Just goes to show who gets the attention of our government. Poor people in Sudan are attacked by Islamists and we look the other way.)
After that war we imposed sanctions on Saddam and began a years-long aerial monitoring of the region to prevent his air force from exerting power beyond rather arbitrarily imposed boundaries. (These are the areas where terrorists got a foothold in Iraq if, as Mr. Bush says, they were there at all.)
Throughout that time Saddam quibbled and played games with the inspectors. He even ordered them out of the country at one point. Bill Clinton, distracted by enemies determined to destroy him, and embarrased by the missteps of the military in the very country where Osama bin Laden most likely was at the time, found it convenient not to stop him. And the rest of us chafed at Saddam's unanswered arrogance and wondered why more wasn't done to stop him.
Meanwhile Mr. bin Laden had moved and was organizing successful attacks on American interests. When the Republicans finally got in power by defeating the vice-president associated with the mortally wounded Clinton (well, maybe...) they brushed aside all the warnings of the transition team that something had to be done about terrorism.
Today we know why. George W. had designs on greatly increasing the power of the presidency, and he needed a shocking event to provide cover for his blatant attacks on the liberties of United States citizens. Osama provided it on the now infamous eleventh of September during Bush's first year in office, 2001.
If you have time look through the "Response to 9-11" articles. You will see that I was dismayed by our country's response, and I called for calm, rational thinking rather than knee-jerk, patriotic, slogan-quoting and thinly disguised thirst for vengeance. There I opposed going to war against Iraq.
Once it started, however, I said we needed to stay there and return the country to normalcy, to rebuild what we had destroyed and see a stable government installed. I even called for the reelection of George Bush in 2004 because I felt he was the only one who would keep our troops there. That changed when the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. In that one moment we lost any semblance of moral authority and became nothing more than an occupying force.
Since that time well over a thousand American soldiers have died in that country, and terrorists by the thousands flock there for the chance to take potshots at American troops. And we continue to find out that our troops aren't very well behaved either. Earlier articles I've written suggest a possible cause for that phenomenon.
All the while life elsewhere in the Middle East continued apace. Distracted with Iraq and Afghanistan, doing everything but find Osama bin Laden, we failed to notice the activity in Iran until that country announced a return to uranium enrichment. Emboldened by its ability to distract Western attention, Iran began a game of talks when we're ready and we're not ready yet, further distracting us from the real threat, its ability to arm and encourage Israel's enemies.
There's one other major gaffe that helped all this along. We keep talking about wanting "democracy" in the Middle East. So in free and fair elections the Palestinians chose who they wanted to lead them. But we didn't like their choice and like selfish little kids we decided to act spitefully and refuse to give the new and disliked Palestinian government any money.
This created great hardship among many working class Palestinians. That strife boiled over into Israel with the now infamous abduction of an Israeli soldier. Lebanon has taken our eyes off that issue, so we don't know if that soldier has been returned, but I bet we'd know it if they did. Since what the Palestinians did resulted in such a swift military assault by Israel, Iran knew it could stir up a much bigger fracas by doing the same on the north border of Israel. So Israel is fighting a two-front war largely generated by all the hatred we've been studiously stirring up in the region.
This is not something we can fix. As noted before, we have no moral authority in the region, and precious little elsewhere. I have no doubt we'll go in if things get worse. I believe Bible prophecy predicts exactly that. But our presence will just complicate matters and increase the levels of hostility being acted out on all sides.
"OK, Mr. Big Critic," someone accosts. "It's easy to criticize, come up with an idea of your own." You won't like it, I promise. I say we stay out of this one. We move out of Iraq and let what happens happen. And we stay out of Lebanon and Israel and Syria and Iran, even if the latter country deploys nuclear weapons. We support another nuclear-armed nation in the region, so its entirely hypocritical of us to demand that other nations give up their nuclear ambitions.
A final word about our blind favoritism. On a talk show today I heard someone suggest that the solution to the current crisis is to cut off the arms supply to Hezbollah. Shouldn't we also cut off the arms supply to Israel? How can we be so blatantly unfair and still fend off the claims of racism? We can't. What we do in the Middle East is as racist as it gets. You Jew? You good. You Islamic? You bad. Why aren't we calling the Israelis terrorists for their attacks on civilians in Lebanon? (Because we're equally guilty and we know it.)
Will this be the world's end? I seriously doubt it. It could, however, be the beginning of the end. Suppose a supernatural being came down and put an end to all the animosity in the Middle East. What kind of power would that being have? Who wouldn't believe in that being and even worship it? When you answer that question you'll know how to tell the saved from the lost.