Iraq is devolving into a civil war. Shiites and Sunnis, rather than cooperating in bringing effective and unified governance to their nation, are lunging at each other’s throats. “Some 2,000 bodies reportedly ended up in the Baghdad morgue last month—90 percent met with violent deaths, most with gunshot wounds to the head” (Stratfor, August 9).

The notion of Iraq becoming a peaceful, self-sustaining, stable state within the Middle East is dimming. This is disheartening news, to say the least—and not only to Iraqis.

For the United States, this can only be interpreted as failure in its single biggest global project (in terms of military commitment, manpower and funding)—its primary theater of operations in the “war on terror.” Casualties to U.S. forces have spiked in the last two weeks; coordinated ambushes by insurgents using improvised explosive devices, rocket attacks and small-arms fire have gotten so deadly that the coalition has all but stopped conducting daytime patrols.

Note the tone of hopelessness in this August 8 report from Stratfor (emphasis ours throughout):

[T]he decision by Iran’s allies in Iraq to pursue civil war rather than a coalition government has put the United States into a militarily untenable position. It does not have sufficient forces to prevent a civil war. … The United States now must make an enormously difficult decision. If it simply withdraws forces from Iraq, it leaves the Arabian Peninsula open to Iran and loses all psychological advantage it gained with the invasion of Iraq. If American forces stay in Iraq, it will be as a purely symbolic gesture, without any hope for imposing a solution. … The United States now has no good choices ….

What is truly remarkable about this situation is the fact that Iraq doesn’t even represent the biggest news in the world right now. As critical as this moment is for the future of that country, it has been relegated to page-two-or-three news by the carnage within Israel and Lebanon. The U.S. is one of several global powers frantically trying to bring some kind of standstill to a situation that appears stubbornly resistant to any kind of diplomatically engineered solution.

And then there is Afghanistan—yet another troubled area whose problems are only getting worse. President Hamid Karzai is known locally as “the mayor of Kabul” because the encroaching presence throughout the country of the “ousted” Taliban is whittling his authority down to a parcel of real estate that doesn’t extend much beyond the capital city.

Did we mention North Korea? Remember, it was only a month ago that Kim Jong Il test-fired a range of missiles that included one with the potential to strike America’s West Coast.

Then there is Fidel Castro—that perennial gadfly of the U.S.—who just last week suffered from severe intestinal bleeding that put him in the hospital; he appointed his brother Raul to take his place in the meantime.

The news about Castro, which came on the same day as another notable event—the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea being breached by a shooting incident—prompted Stratfor to make the following observation:

Obviously, these events are not connected except in this sense: The United States, which is obviously concerned with all three incidents [including the Lebanon war], is on complete overload. This isn’t a Bush thing. It’s an institutional thing. Managing three unrelated crises at the highest level of any government stretches things beyond capacity. If these events happened sequentially, they would absorb almost all analytic and decision-making capacity. When they happen together, two would-be crises are subconsciously declared “non-crises” and handled at the lower pay grades—or actually, not handled at all.

What is happening to the world? It is dizzying enough simply staying informed about these events—let alone having to make binding policy decisions on each one of them.

Columnist Peggy Noonan recently made a similar comment, saying that it is all becoming far too much for politicians to keep up with. In her July 13 column she wrote,

We are asking our politicians, our senators and congressmen, to make judgments, decisions and policy on: stem cell research, sdi, nato composition, G-8 agreements, the history and state of play of judicial and legislative actions regarding press freedoms, the history of Sunni-Shiites tensions, Kurds, tax rates, federal spending, hurricane prediction and response, the building of a library annex in Missoula, the most recent thinking on when human life begins, including the thinking of the theologians of antiquity on when the soul enters the body, chemical weaponry, the Supreme Court, U.S.-North Korean relations, bioethics, cloning, public college curriculums, India-Pakistan relations, the enduring Muslim-Hindu conflict, the constitutional implications of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, Homeland security, Securities and Exchange Commission authority, energy policy, environmental policy, nuclear proliferation, global warming, the stability of Venezuela’s Chavez regime and its implications for U.S. oil prices, the future of Cuba after Castro, progress in gender bias as suggested by comparisons of the number of girls who pursued college-track studies in American public high schools circa 1950 to those on a college-track today, outsourcing, immigration, the comparative efficacy of charter and magnet schools, land use, Kelo, health care, hmo’s, what to do with victims of child abuse, the history of marriage, the nature and origin of homosexuality, V-chips, foreign competition in the making of computer chips, fat levels in potato chips, national policy on the humanities, UN reform, and privacy law.And that was just this week.

There is no question that the pace of earth-shaking events is quickening, that the hatreds between enemies is growing hotter, that the vitriol of public debate is turning more acidic—that, in short, the complexities and perils of our world are spinning beyond our ability to manage them.

Some would argue that it has ever been thus—this complaint is common to man throughout history. What slays that argument, though, are uniquely modern realities: technology that shrinks continents and dries oceans, linking individuals, groups, populations; news that encircles the planet in an instant; pockets and rivulets of radicalism that are meeting and finding each other as they surge forward into streams, rivers, torrents of anger that manifest as terrorism; chemical, biological and nuclear armaments—weapons of mass destruction—that have proliferated beyond the possession of sovereign states with rational, predictable patterns of behavior.

This is different.

More and more in the news one sees it. Commentators allowing that hopelessness to creep into their reporting and analysis—alluding to unprecedented times, plagues, curses, biblical-scale occurrences, apocalyptic events.

To those who are truly watching what is going on, one cannot escape the sense that we are lurching into a world ominously unlike the one we have inhabited for the last couple of generations.

Is this how it is to be now? Is this—dare we ask—the end of the world as we know it?

During Jesus Christ’s ministry, His disciples asked, “[W]hat will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?” (Matthew 24:3, Revised Standard Version). Jesus didn’t dismiss the idea that the world as we know it would come to an end. No—He responded by warning His disciples of specific events to beware of (found in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21). He concluded with the words, “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man” (Luke 21:36).

One third of the world’s population considers itself Christian. So it should hardly seem unusual or unorthodox to take Jesus at His word. Do you?

Watch theTrumpet.com for news regarding the specific signs of the end-time Christ warned about.