It may happen that politics has caused damage, which omens even worse damage, such that Mercy has to come to a compromise with evil so as to get man out of his mire (Rev of Ares XLIII/12).
The reason, among other reasons, why the Father asks us not to appeal to his Mercy at every turn (16/15) is that the kind of mercy that men hope for rarely turns out to be that which the Father picks. So, today, Mercy might well come to the Middle East thanks to a man, James Baker, all the more unexpected because he was not especially beneficial or providential when he was a member of Reagan and George Bush Sr's administration. "Jim" Baker may be the wise man that George W. Bush Jr will pay attention to in order to resolve the catastrophic impediment in Iraq.
The total number of civilian casualties of the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 has just been worked out: 600,000—actually a death toll range of 400,000 to 760,000—by humanitarian and medical organisations seemingly of great integrity. So enormous that it's incredible! George W. Bush has declared that 600,000 was an "untruthful and outrageous" number; he has asserted that the number of civilian casualties in Iraq had been 30,000, if that! Who is right? Who is wrong?
We don't know. We are just aware that Iraq has been put to fire and the sword so much so that some "authorized voices" have made themselves heard muttering that Saddam Hussein should be called back , because he alone may be able to re-establish order and save a million to a million five hundred thousand Iraqi lives very likely to die.
What's more, the toll in American and British military life (not to mention undisclosed losses) is getting alarmingly heavier day after day, so that General Richard Dannat, chief of staff of the British Army, declared on October 13 that the British troops should withdraw as soon as possible, because they had come to do nothing but stir up the hatred of the Iraqi people.
Now and then President Bush still happens to deliver triumphalist speeches probably sincere. On October 22: "We will win a victory in Iraq. We only have to change strategy." A victory over what? Over terrorism? But Iraq has never gone into terrorist action and never granted Al Quaeda and Bin Laden asylum.
We can see enough obscurity and misfortune in the situation to hope that the influence that reasonable Americans have started to bring or try to bring to bear on on George W. Bush will grow more and more imperious.
Jim Baker, the one whose advice the White House may well end up following, fits in the realistic body as far as foreign policy is concerned. He represents all that George W. Bush feels strong aversion for and wants to fight throughout the world, and that you can sum up in two words, "constructive ambiguity." This doctrine by James Baker means something the Father in person knows, that is, times now and then happen when man has to negotiate with evil in order to dispel some ten times worse evil, tragic times when the huge weakness that nastiness constitutes with some kinds of humans should not be disregarded (Rev of Ares 36/5). A long way we have to go until the day when our mission has changed the heart of men enough to save them from coming to compromises with evil, but we at the same time realize that our mission is momentous.