A prayer roll for Iraq

I just got done watching the documentary No End in Sight, about the inept U.S. officials who orchestrated (if you can really call it that) the Iraq war and then blundered their bloody way into the chaos and civil war that followed. I really should stop watching these kinds of films—they make me boiling mad, along the lines of "I wish there was a hell so these people would burn in it the way they deserve."

In my adrenaline rush, I feel a need to vent, and my temperament is to vent religiously. So here goes.

During the federal campaign to destroy polygamy, which turned into a campaign to out-and-out destroy Mormonism, church leaders gathered in their temple robes and performed a kind of inverted prayer roll—inverted in the sense that instead of praying for the well-being of a list of sick and afflicted people, they instead prayed for judgment against a list of government officials they saw as their persecutors. The list included the U.S. president, the Supreme Court, members of Congress, various state or territorial governors, and judges. (My source for this is Thomas Alexander's biography of Wilford Woodruff, Things in Heaven and Earth.)

In that spirit, I present below a prayer roll of some of the government officials and other political movers who are responsible for the Iraq war. I pray that these men (they all happen to be men on this list, since I'm not feeling particulary incensed at Condoleezza Rice at the moment) will be brought before the bar of God's judgment. The list could be longer, much longer. And it could include folks from "the other side," people like Muqtada al-Sadr. But these are the people whose offenses against their fellow beings have kindled my anger tonight. They preoccupy my attention because they acted in the name of my country.

George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
Donald Rumsfeld
Paul Wolfowitz
Bill Kristol
George Tenet
Paul Bremer
Walter Slocombe

In more positive terms—but necessarily vaguer terms—I pray for Iraqis and for the foreign nationals who are working with them to stablize and rebuild the country and provide humanitarian assistance. Somehow let there be peace. Somehow let the waste places be restored.