Sometimes there are no good answers

by Lowell Grisham
printed in the Northwest Arkansas Times, Fayetteville, AR
Monday, October 1, 2007

The late Rabbi Edwin Friedman posed a question in the form of fable to a group of about sixty Episcopalian priests.

It's a beautiful night. You are walking across a bridge enjoying the starlight, when a man approaches holding a length of rope. He politely asks you to hold one end of it, smiling in a gentlemanly manner. Before you can react, he ties the other end around his waist and hurls himself off the bridge toward the swift-running river below. "Hold on!" he cries. And you do. Barely. You nearly lose your grip as he catches at the end of the line, dangling between bridge and river. There you are, holding on to the rope with a man hanging perilously below. What do you do?

We began offering answers. "Pull him up." No. Too heavy. You are not strong enough. "Look for help." None available. "Tie off my end to the bridge." Nothing to connect to. "Ask him to pull himself up." He won't do it. "Tell him to roll the rope around him a few times until the counterweight is less." He won't do that either.

After about five or six minutes we were beginning to feel stuck. There didn't seem to be a good way to get out of the dilemma. But we were a group of priests; ...pastors. Nice people. We were used to helping others with their problems. So we kept asking questions and posing far-fetched scenarios in nervous wish fulfillment. It was a brutal twenty minutes before someone finally said out loud what we all knew must be done. You've got to let go of the rope.

Here's how Rabbi Friedman offered closure. "I would tell the man dangling from the rope, 'You decide which way this ends. I will become the counterweight. You do the pulling and bring yourself up. I will even tug a little from here.' I would wait for a few minutes to see if there is a response. If there is no change in the tension of the rope, I would tell him, 'I accept your choice,' and free my hands.

On March 20, 2003, George Bush grabbed hold of Iraq and jumped off the bridge. "Hold on!" he cried to the military and the nation. He provoked the civil war that was inevitable in a divided nation ruled by the Sunni dictator of a minority Ba'athist party who forcibly suppressed all dissent -- rival Sunnis including Al Qaeda, Kurds and various factions of the majority Shiites. On March 20, 3003, George Bush grabbed them all and opened their Pandora's box.

It was a stupid bridge-jumping. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no Al Qaeda. The only winner is the not-so-nice regime in Iran, gaining influence as a majority Shiite rule replaces their former enemies.

Now at the end of the rope, various clans compete fiercely for control -- Sunni vs. Sunni; Sunni vs. Shiite; Shiite vs. Shiite; Kurds vs. all of the above. Americans are triangled into every conflict. They all want us out of their country. Whenever it suits a particular faction's aims, that group will cooperate with the Americans for a while. We'll gladly arm them and train them, until they've managed their ethnic cleansing.

But we cannot impose peace. We cannot dictate a political settlement. There's no way to pull them up. There's nothing to tie the rope to. There is no good answer.

All our president says we can do is to hold on; stay the course. At least until 01.20.09. Then it's somebody else's problem. So he holds on to the rope, shouting for us to keep on arming more and more Iraqi combatants and putting more and more of our brave soldiers in harm's way, even though the longer we stay, the more weapons the tribes have to kill each other with when we leave. It's like Vietnam. Surge here. Campaign there. Reports of progress. Quagmire continues.

I think I know what Rabbi Friedman might say. Let go of the rope.

Give the various Iraqi factions an offer: Create the political environment for shared leadership. Come to terms for tolerance, geography, and oil revenues. We will stay here to offer any stabilization or help we can toward those ends. It should take you about three months.

At the end of three months, accept their choices. Let go of the rope.