DAMASCUS ROAD

Life can be full of ironic twists because life has a way of "coming back around".  God never changes; we do.

Now the Vietnam warrior/dove Kerry has become a hawk.  Now the winner of the 2009 Nobel peace prize is deciding to lob a few Cruise missiles into a country who has not attacked us.  Now Dems who are characteristically critical of war are lining up to support the President.

Those poor Syrians.  Their own government counts them expendable and now in order to help them, our plan is to bomb them.

But we need to send a message, right?  Shouldn't we make good on the president's words (which yesterday in Sweden were parsed very carefully).  Sorry, Mr. President, but in fact you DID draw a line.  That old international line drawn in the 1920's evidently dissipated because  NO ONE is stepping up to help us carry the fight.  So you may not like to have your name on anything...but you can't vote "present" this time.

BHO's learning curve is particularly steep these days.  It must have looked easier when Candidate Obama looked on and criticized the earlier resident of the White House.  That president built a coalition of 46 countries, plus got authorization from Congress AND the UN.  It takes a pile of chutzpah to excoriate Bush when you can't match his action with even ONE ally.  Such is the state of Obama foreign policy.

Of course there's the charge that Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction.  That charge flies over a mass of evidence and testimony that the WHOLE WORLD believed at the time.  When the buck stopped and Bush acted, it was later "proven" to be a false assumption by the lack of evidence. If BHO acts in Syria and later we find out this "evidence" was staged, then he will be up the same salt creek.

Besides, who leaks information about your own attack plan and duration?  (Dennis Miller:  "We have GOT to be the only country that sends out "Save the Date" attack cards.")  Doesn't that allow Assad time to distribute his weapons cache into populated areas?  That's exactly what Assad did.  Now how do we inflict enough damage to do damage...without hitting civilians or some Russian instructors who man Syrian armaments?

By not acting, some might criticize America for lack of concern.  We care about the Syrians, but we remember rescuing Bosnian Muslims in the 90's and that wasn't received well.  We cared a year ago when Assad first gassed his people...and have cared in the interim as nothing was done while he killed thousands.

Now we wince at the pictures of dead children, but there's no clear path to the guys in the white hats.  Would we rather have Shittes backing the murderer Assad or Sunni radical Islamists?  We are afraid to trust our politicians who say there are good rebels.  At least the dictators of old (Assad in Syria, Mubarek in Egypt, and Ghadafi in Libya) kept a modicum of order and didn't torch the Christians.

Perhaps you've noted that this region of the world is scarce on white hats.  LINK

We have dithered while Syria is now full of foreign fighters who poured in after the first gas attack, funded by Iran.  We know that when we (seen as "infidels") wade in, these cousins will become brothers and turn on us.  And Israel.

Let's pray together that the President is bathing his plan in prayer.

It's been a long time since Paul saw the light on the road to Damascus.  Now the Damascus road is lit with volatility.

Believers know all of God's prophecies will come to pass.  We take God at His word as we read Isaiah 17:1.  We know Damascus to be the oldest continually inhabited city in the world...and there is no ancient history of it ever being fully destroyed.  That gives pause.  No one can predict God's timeline, but we also cannot ignore His warnings.  You might want to read the whole 17th chapter of Isaiah, but here is just the first verse:

"Here is a message about Damascus:

'Look, Damascus is no longer a city,

it is a heap of ruins!'..."

Isaiah 17:1