If anything characterizes this newspaper, it is the
Editor’s willingness to buck the tide of public opinion,
even Catholic opinion, even traditionalist
Catholic opinion.
Six months before the Iraq war began, The Remnant was
warning that there were no “weapons of mass
destruction,” that the pretext for war was a patent
fraud, and that the invasion of Iraq would be a debacle
of massive proportions. Right on every count. And yet
The Remnant suffered the loss of hundreds of
subscribers—“super patriots” as the Editor rightly
called them—who were enraged that this newspaper would
not “support our troops.” In fact, the best way to
support our troops was to demand that they not be sent
to suffer and die in that jingoistic folly.
Five thousand American soldiers lost their lives in
Iraq, and many thousands more suffered crippling
physical or psychological wounds, or both, from which
they will never recover. The irreparable damage to them
and their families will reverberate down through the
generations.
And for what? Today, Iraq is in the hands of a radical
Shiite Muslim government friendly to Iran. As
Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
recently declared,
Iraq and Iran enjoy “a ‘friendly’ and ‘brotherly’
relationship that he and the Iranian leadership hope to
continue. Iran is one of four countries listed as a
‘state
sponsor of terrorism’ by the
U.S. State Department….
‘The Republic of Iraq and the
Islamic Republic of Iran, as two Muslim countries and
with rich cultural and historical background, have
friendly and brotherly relationships,’” said al-Maliki.
Since “Operation Iraqi Freedom” ended, Iraqi Christians
have been murdered or driven from the country by Muslim
fanatics.
In 2010, “reports emerged
in Mosul of people being stopped in the streets, asked
for their identity cards, and shot if they had a first
or last name indicating Assyrian or Christian origin.”
Since 2003 upwards of 70% of Iraq’s Christian population
has fled the country, reducing the Christian population
“from
850,000 pre-war to 250,000 today.”
Of the approximately 300 church buildings that existed
before the Iraq invasion,
only 57 remain.
And, as the whole world
knows, in October of 2010 an Al-Qaeda affiliate group
bombed Our Lady of Salvation Cathedral in Baghdad,
killing 58 Catholics. In fact, precisely as the result
of America’s insane invasion of Iraq, Al-Qaeda
has established an Iraqi beachhead that never existed
before “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
And now the Republicrat Uniparty is clamoring for a new
war with Syria. The aim of this pointless exercise is
to “punish” Syria because President al-Assad—with whom
the war-mongering Uniparty leader, John Kerry, our
laughable “Secretary of State,” once enjoyed dinners and
drinks—allegedly authorized deployment of chemical
weapons, causing some 1,300 civilian deaths. Only
America, you see, can cause civilian deaths in Arab
nations by bombing them back into the Stone Age with
proper bombs, not improper chemical weapons. Thus a mere
100,000 civilians were killed—properly killed—during the
American invasion. The right way to kill people is to
bomb them or rip them to pieces with 30 mm canons fired
from Apache helicopters, as America did to some Reuters
journalists who appeared to be carrying something that
could be a weapon. Bradley Manning’s leak of that video
to Wikileaks will cost him most of the rest of his life
in jail.
The idea for this latest war is to drop a few bombs,
launch a few cruise missiles, destroy a few buildings,
kill a few people, and then declare that we have
sufficiently punished Syria and al-Assad for using the
wrong type of weapon in a civil war that had already
claimed 100,000 lives while America did nothing. This
will prove America’s “resolve” never to allow killing by
improper weapons to go unpunished. Al-Assad must learn
to kill with proper weapons if this civil war is to
continue.
Now, the Syrian “rebels” seeking to overthrow the Assad
government are clamoring for this war in the hope that
it will aid their attempt to gain power. But at the core
of the rebel uprising are—wouldn’t you know it?—Al-Qaeda
fighters. As CNN
reports:
Al Qaeda’s affiliate in
Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, is generally acknowledged to be
the most effective force fighting al-Assad. Its fighters
are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, are
widely viewed as uncorrupt and are not involved in
looting as other opposition forces are. A number of them
are battle-hardened from other conflicts such as the
Iraq War. Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate is also
well supplied as it benefits from the support of
Sunni ultra-fundamentalists in the wealthy Gulf
states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Follow this carefully: the Uniparty now proposes to
attack Syria, to the benefit of
Al Qaeda rebels linked to
Sunni fundamentalists, after we invaded Iraq to
overthrow a Sunni government and ostensibly to
oppose Al Qaeda, which was not even there.
The result, of course, will
be the same result that seems always to follow US
military intervention in the Middle East: the
persecution, killing, and dislocation of Christians. As
one retired Army colonel,
Lt. Col.
Robert L. Maginnis,
now a national security advisor,
observed:
“Former dictator Saddam
Hussein protected Christians but once Saddam was
replaced the American-installed Shiite government sat
back while Christians were run out of the country… Today
Iraqi Christians are living in Jordan and Turkey,
meanwhile, the few Christians left in Iraq live in fear
of Islamist attacks…”
Maginnis also told CP that he
expected “a similar outcome in Syria” given the
direction of the current civil war. “That country under
Assad has been diverse but since the civil war sectarian
tension has increased and many Christians fled to Jordan
and Turkey,” said Maginnis, who is a senior analyst with
the U.S. Army. “Should Islamists take over Syria, with
or without American help, Christians will face increased
persecution and thus will flee in greater numbers."
Quite understandably,
American military personnel have gone public (under
disguise) to oppose this madness and even to suggest
that it constitutes a treasonable undermining of what
America was supposed to have accomplished in Iraq. One
picture will replace a thousand words:
Remnant readers know that I have had some very serious
public disagreements with Tom Woods on issues related to
Catholic social teaching the Popes have insisted is
binding on the Catholic conscience. But no one can
improve on
Woods’s description of the insanity at work in this
latest eruption of American war-mongering. It is worth
quoting in full:
Awesomest Country Ever
About to Embark on More Awesomeness
The neocon headline on Drudge is
“US Ready to Follow on Syria.” The idea being that the
Awesomest Country Ever should be ready to “lead” on
Syria, which means launching another idiotic war with
murky consequences, while exploiting people’s love of
country to lure them into supporting another fiasco.
The real problem is not “leading” (neoconspeak for
irrational bellicosity) or “following,” but the policy
of intervention itself, which has been destructive for
everyone concerned (American citizens included) except
the profiteers.
Ah yes, the profiteers. That is, the capitalists who
have, from the very inception of capitalist social
order, profited not only from endless wars but also
state favors, privileges and protections at every stage
of the building of the “free market” we know and love.
(Lunchables®, anyone? How about some porn? Or maybe a
“safe and legal” abortion?) But this is not the place to
re-ignite that debate with the libertarians. What Woods
has written here is exquisitely incisive, and it
suggests why Catholics ought to be ready to ally
themselves with libertarians in opposition to the sacred
modern-nation state, while never forgetting that the
only effective remedy to its evils lies in the law of
the Gospel, not the text of the Constitution. On this
score I never tire of quoting
the words of Alasdair MacIntyre:
The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a
dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting
itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of
goods and services, which is always about to, but never
actually does, give its clients value for money, and on
the other as a repository of sacred values, which from
time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its
behalf... [I]t is like being asked to die for the
telephone company.
So here we stand some ten years after the Uniparty’s
Iraq debacle began, on the verge of another senseless
war in the long history of senseless wars that coincides
with the emergence of what the moderns have the audacity
to call Liberty, the idol whose origin and “progress” I
trace in
Liberty, the God that Failed. What do we do? We
pray and fast, as Pope Francis has asked of us, and we
implore Our Lady of Fatima to intercede for us by
bringing about, at long last, the Consecration of Russia
to Her Immaculate Heart in order effect in a miraculous
manner the conversion of that poor nation and peace in
the world.
It is no happenstance that a resurgent military power in
a yet-to-be-converted Russia figures prominently in the
precarious balance of powers now centered on the little
nation of Syria. Events in little nations provoked the
two Great Wars of the 20th century. Pray
that we do not witness the next Great War on account of
our government’s uncontainable hubris and delusions of
grandeur, which are driving its politicians toward yet
another epochal blunder—perhaps the biggest of all.
Today the super patriots who abandoned The Remnant are
conspicuously silent. They have been for quite some
time. And well they should be. |