Note: This essay was updated in January of 2006 to reflect the re-election of "W."

Except for a short time after the fall of the Soviet Union, I’ve never known a time when my country was not at war. Even during that brief interlude, war noises bounced around in my head like a gun shot in an echo chamber. My first clear recollection as a child was hearing that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. My older cousins, or their spouses, marched straight from the Depression onto the beaches of Normandy and Guadalcanal, or were shot out of the skies over Germany.

The Korean non-war was fought during my junior high and high school years, and my first summer in the Naval Academy earned me the National Defense ribbon for service during that "national emergency." During the Cold War, I snooped on the Communists in a WWII-vintage diesel submarine in the South China Sea. Later, packing a brace of Polaris missiles in a nuclear submarine, I was stalked by Russian fishing trawlers above the Arctic Circle and in the Mediterranean. The commissioning crew of that Polaris boat and our wives walked on the backs of nuclear protestors when we launched it. 

I did not like the idea of surviving a nuclear holocaust from the "safety" of a submarine, and volunteered for the swift boats in Viet Nam, but because my billet on the Polaris boat had a higher priority than service in Viet Nam, my request was denied. I really did not want to part with the Navy, but I began to realize that the Navy did really want any part of me, so I resigned my commission just as it was becoming clear that the war in Viet Nam was going no place but down hill. I numbed myself to the disaster as it grew and looked for some way to justify my existence while my classmates were suffering or stonewalling in Asia, and my best friend was dying in Viet Nam. The priesthood gave me a place to serve, and it protected me from having to publically criticize a government I trusted and the country I loved, even as fissures and hair-line cracks began to appear in the Constitution I had once sworn to defend. Now regretably we are deep in the same sort of hopeless war and attacks on the Constitution in the name of national security are looking very serious indeed.

I was opposed to the first war in Iraq because harnessing Saddam Hussein and driving him from Kuwait was the responsibility of his Arab neighbors, not Americans and Western Europeans. Our addiction to oil from the region won the argument, however, and the cunning Arabs saw no point in doing something for themselves we would do for them. The great irony is that our supply of Middle Eastern oil was and is in no way endangered by Arabs hating us.  They have to sell the oil to support their own materialistic addictions and we're the only customers they have that can pay for it.

Going to war with Iraq the first time was a mistake for lots of reasons, but the most serious was the mentality of the people of the area, as anyone will tell you who has traveled there and talked to the people. I was on the first U.S. warship to sail up the Shat el Arab after the Iraqi coup in 1958. Over the years I have met and talked to enough Iraqis, Iranians, Lebanese, and Egyptians (I know no Syrians.) to know the deep underlying hatred and distrust those people have for westerners–and especially Christians. Most Americans have never heard of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, nor do they think of the Crusades as anything but  ancient sagas, like Hannibal and Alexander the Great. But the people of the Middle East do remember the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire and their memories are bitter indeed. Anyone making decisions about diplomacy in the middle east should have known how deeply offensive calling a righteous cause a "Crusade" is to them, and how repugnant they find Western (read "Christian") meddling in the region.

For that reason alone, stopping the first Bush War in Iraq short of a "final victory" was a wise thing to do, for as we know now, the mission was certainly not accomplished when we finally did unseat Saddam in the second Bush Iraqi war. In the first Bush war, we left a tyrant in power, but we stopped short of the greater disaster: defeating and occupying an Arab country by a Western, (Christian) power and calling it a "Crusade." Our recent "victory" also was another outrage because of our close alliance to Israel, which is exremely obnoxious to Arab, Muslim sensibilities.

The real reason for the second Bush war in Iraq will probably never be known, shrouded as it is in duplicity and ideological bravado masquerading as patriotism, but perhaps part of the truth lies in a folly similar to another son whose advisors told him he was a better man than his father.

King David’s son Absalom got it into his head that he would be a better king than his father. Because of Absalom's vanity, dim wit, and some very bad advice, he brought disaster on himself and his country. I am afraid at this point we are deep in the middle of another Absalom war, and the sooner we get rid of Absalom, the better. Absalom got pulled off his mule when his hair hung in a tree branch and he was slain by his enemies. Luckily all we have to do to unseat our Absalom from his mule is defeat him and his henchmen and henchwoman in the election in November.

After that unseating, we must get out of Iraq as soon as we posssibly can. However the people of the Middle East resolve their governmental, cultural and economic problems, they must do it for themselves. Our best hope is that when they no longer have the decadence of the United States and Western Europe to blame for their sick economies and failed social structure, they will be forced to find their own solutions and live with them. In the meantime, our best bet is to admit our mistake as a nation, pick up our marbles, and come back home.

P.S. Unfortunately our latter-day Absolom was elected to a second term and it has not taken long for most of those who voted for him to come down with a bad case of "buyers' remorse." As this is written at the beginning of 2006, it is becoming more and more evident that he is in a race to the bottom in the competentcy list for presidents. Revelations about our entry into theSecond Iraqi War have made it clear that the intelligence that supported the president's pre-emptive war was dreadfully wrong and indications are that it was intentionally construed to support going to war. The so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction that were supposed to present the United States with a threat were non-existent. The Insurgency following President Bush's "Victory" celebrations i.e. "Mission Accomplished" grand-standing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln--has turned into an unsolvable mess from which even such hawkish members of Congress as John Murtha (Pennsylvania's 12th District) no longer support remaining in Iraq . On the home front, the Republicans are being rocked by a series of scandals, mostly having to do with the Lobbyist Abramoff  that brought down Tom Delay the speaker of the House and appears to threaten at least 6 or seven more Republican members of the House and Senate (and at least one Democrat--an additional catastrophy the people of New Orleans did NOT need.)

The President now seems for the most part to have lost interest in the job and prefers to spend his time clearing brush on his Crawford, Texas ranch rather than governing the country. He was so detached that his aids, in order to get his attention, had to show him a special DVD of the disasterous hurricane that flooded New Orleans and devastaged much of the Mississippi/Alabama Gulf-coast before he reacted to it. I doubt that he will finish out his second term as several grounds for  impeachment seem to be gathering on the horizon like approaching storms.

He would be gone already if the Democrats were not so completely inept.