Critics call on God to take
responsibility for Iraq mess

satire
Peter Lee
April 27, 2004
God was on the defensive today as a call for Him to take responsibility for the problems in Iraq spread from the Congress to talk radio and the Sunday morning talk shows.

Publicly, God is resisting calls to issue a mea culpa. Privately, he is “obviously quite upset”, revealed an Archangel close to the Holy Throne.

“It’s not as if the plans for the Iraq invasion were hurriedly scribbled on a napkin in a dark, noisy bar…The arrangements were covered carefully and in great detail in one-on-one sessions with the President. I’m pretty sure there was no instruction given to disband the Iraqi army or blackball Ba’ath Party members” - two major errors that are called central to the current political and security crisis.

GOP Senator Rick Santorum has challenged God to produce a transcript of the key exchanges. To the embarrassment of the Realm of Heaven, records either were not kept or cannot be found.

Rush Limbaugh posited a more sinister scenario. “An omnipotent Almighty could have destroyed those records,” he told listeners of his program. He called on God to recuse himself from all war-related moral judgments until the matter had been fully investigated by a qualified independent prosecutor.

God’s tradition-bound, hierarchical imperium is being criticized for being too old and too slow — and too liberal — to keep up with the demands of Armageddon in the Information Age.

“God hasn’t fought a major war in the Middle East since the Crusades…and if you look closely at the result, it was a lot like the mess in Iraq”, stated George Will. “Quite frankly, it looks like He brought little to the party except a failed doctrine, an over-reliance on multi-nationalism, and an unwillingness to question His own ‘infallibility’”.

The Highest Power is in a difficult position. He can only defend His actions by calling into question the performance of US President George W. Bush, his chosen instrument on the planet Earth.

However, some partisans of the Father of Us All are ready to take up the cudgels in His defense.

“The man either can’t hear, can’t read, or can’t think” fumed St. Peter, of Bush. “A thundering voice, letters of flame ten miles high instructing him how to bestow God’s love and mercy on the suffering people of Iraq…What more does he want!”

A source present at the briefings described Bush as “really focused on the invasion scenarios as long as the briefings were oral and he wasn’t expected to read anything…but it was hard to get him to concentrate on the postwar planning part. The TV was tuned to a football game and you could see his eyes wandering over there all the time.”

Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan declared it was an “outrage” that “certain foreign seraphim” were seeking to evade responsibility and protect the Almighty by “undermining President Bush and fracturing the unity of our war on terror.” She called on God to “swallow his pride and fall in line.”

In an ominous sign of divisions within the Iraq war party, neo-conservative ideologues of Jewish extraction are grumbling that “Jehovah would have done a better job.”

“The handwringing, the ‘feel the love’ nonsense, that’s not what you need to impose the will of Heaven on 25 million refractory heathens”, stated neo-con ideologue Irving Kristol. “It takes Old Testament determination, clarity, and singleness of purpose to hack through the bloody valley and enter into the Promised Land.”

To date, President Bush has refrained from criticizing the highest power that guides his every thought and action.

However, he has reportedly tasked Karl Rove to explore alternatives to God in Bush’s second term.

“We’re looking at all the options”, revealed one source close to the initiative. “Buddha, Lucifer, Quetzlcoatl…they’re all on the table. The only precondition is that Whoever it is this time has the guts to make the tough calls, stand behind them, and take responsibility for His actions.”
top ^