What Did God Say?

I drove to London yesterday to see an old friend who had flew in from Washington. We spent some time chatting and catching up with each other, then sure enough it got round to politics. Now I haven’t blogged on here about politics yet, and it’s not because I’m not interested, it’s actually one of my favourite subjects. I haven’t blogged simply because I have so much to say I wouldn’t finish. Plus there are lots of other blogs doing politics.

[Joe], my friend, is very worried about where his country is headed, the patriot act, invasions of privacy, all that stuff. I have to say I share the same sentiments. We shared a few jokes over Bush. I saw a cartoon recently, George Bush on the the telephone and the voice on the other end “George, it’s GOD, from now on try to play down our relationship.”

I can’t believe the hypocrisy of the UK and US governments at the moment. It seems odd that God would tell a bunch of guys to fly planes into the twin towers, and now it was God who told the President to attack Iraq. Anyone would think the God we have is some sort of Greek god of war, waging bets over the nations against the other gods like some sort of gargantuan cock-fight.

I can’t believe that opposition parties in both countries have failed abysmally to see the irony and the hypocrisies in the whole affair, so I’m going to point them out.

• We invaded Iraq because Saddam had WMD, but he didn’t have any WMD.
• Then they said it was to bring and end to a torturous regime, So we remove Saddam and inflict our own torture, but call it ‘abuse’.
• Notice how if someone was stepped and forced into lurid sex acts in the UK, it would be called sexual abuse. They would probably be jailed then put on a sex-offenders list. When it’s carried out by our troops, it’s called sexual ‘humiliation’, not ‘abuse’. Because to abuse someone that’s just perverted, but to humiliate someone, well that’s just not nice.
• We invaded to bring freedom to the Iraqis, but at home, we remove civil liberties and freedom bringing in draconian laws to detain people and use evidence extracted by torture.
• We brought ‘democracy’ to Iraq and removed a regime that tortured dissidents, but Iraq’s own ‘US Trained’ security forces have been inflicting torture.
• We got rid of a despot who used chemical weapons on his own people, and now we are using chemical weapons on those same people of Iraq.
• hypocrisy doesn’t just end with the government. Back when the invasion was beginning, like churches all over the US and the UK I’m sure, at my church one of our pastors led a prayer for the troops. The only thing I could think was ‘who’s praying for the Iraqis, the ones our troops are killing?”. Now I don’t think we shouldn’t pray for our troops, but we have to not buy into Bush’s whole world view of Good and Evil. Too many conservative Christians are doing this.

I don’t care how much Bliar or ‘Burning’ Bush attempt to justify this war/insurgency or whatever, the more it goes on, the more ironies turn up… more and more it seems there was no reason invade in the first place.

I don’t even want to start on the home front and the erosion of our own freedoms, all I will say is the Brave New World of 1984, here we come.