Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 06:10:57 -0700
Subject:Dowd: Casualties of Faith


OP-ED COLUMNIST


Casualties of Faith
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 21, 2004

WASHINGTON

When I was little, I was very good at leaps of faith.

A nun would tape up a picture of a snow-covered mountain peak on the
blackboard and say that the first child to discern the face of Christ
in the melting snow was the holiest. I was soon smugly showing the
rest of the class the "miraculous" outline of that soulful, bearded face.

But I never thought I'd see the day when leaps of faith would be
national policy, when the fortunes of America hung on the possibility
of a miracle.

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.

J.F.K. had to fight the anti-papist expectation that his Oval Office
would take orders from heaven. For W., it's a selling point. Some
right-wing Catholics want John Kerry excommunicated, while
evangelicals call the president a messenger of God. "God's blessing is
on him," the TV evangelist Pat Robertson says, adding, "It's the
blessing of heaven on the emperor."

Mr. Bush has shown all the evangelical voters who didn't like his
daddy that he gets, as Mr. Robertson puts it, "his direction from the
Lord."

When Paula Zahn asked the televangelist Tuesday whether Mr. Bush, as a
Christian, should admit his mistakes, Mr. Robertson said he'd warned a
self-satisfied Bush about Iraq: "The Lord told me it was going to be
(a) a disaster, and (b) messy."

Mr. Robertson said, "He was the most self-assured man I ever met."
Paraphrasing Mark Twain, he said Mr. Bush was "like a contented
Christian with four aces. He was just sitting there, like, I'm on top
of the world, and I warned him about this war. ... And I was trying to
say, Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for
casualties. 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' "

W., it seems, really believes he's the one. President Neo. (And his
advisers are disciples. That's why Condi Rice so willingly puts aside
her national security duties to spread the Bush gospel in swing
states, and why Karen Hughes raced to impugn Mr. Robertson's veracity
after he described his chilling encounter with W.)

W.'s willful blindness comes from mistakenly assuming that his desires
are God's, as if he knows where God stands on everything from
democracy in Iraq to capital-gains tax cuts.

As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address about the Civil War,
one can't speak for God: "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Mr. Bush didn't just ignore Mr. Robertson's warning - he ignored his
own intelligence experts, who warned before the war that an invasion
of Iraq would spur more support for political Islam and trigger
violent conflict, including an insurgency that would drive Baathists
and terrorists together in a toxic combination.

As Michael Gordon wrote in his Times series this week on blind spots
in the strategy to secure Iraq, the Bush crew engaged in an
astonishing series of delusions: assuming they could begin a
withdrawal of troops 60 days after taking Baghdad; enabling the
insurgency to flourish; abolishing the Iraqi military and putting
American lives at risk; misreading the obvious reaction to an American
occupation of a Muslim country.

C.I.A. officials were so clueless they wanted to sneak hundreds of
small American flags into Iraq before the war started so grateful
Iraqis could wave them at their liberators. The agency planned to film
that and triumphantly beam it to the Arab world.

The president has this strange notion that his belief in God means
detailed and perfect knowledge of everything that God wants. He may
wish to keep his head stuck in the Iraqi sand, but he may discover
that the Almighty has His own purposes.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com