Month: March 2006

They’ve issued their own statement of belief and faith. In one way, I’m glad that someone has stood up to the far right Catholics who now dominate political discourse and misrepresent the views of most lay Catholics. In another way, I’m sorry it has come to this. It is not a good sign when politicians feel the need to stress their religious and sectarian loyalties. But this kind of polarization is what the religious right has accomplished; and I’m glad that finally some of us are fighting back and exposing them. (Hat tip: Chuck Currie).

This is a challenging piece by Stephen Biddle, at the Council on Foreign Relations. The basic argument is that we do not face a nationalist insurgency in Iraq, but a sectarian civil war. Trying to integrate the armed forces with different sects before sectarian tensions have been defused only undermines the incipient national army, by riddling it with insurgents keen on sabotage. There’s another way:

"The United States must threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate. Washington should use the prospect of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table. At the same time, in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten either to withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis."

I don’t buy all of the argument, but it’s well worth reading.

"If you seek power before service, you’ll neither get power, nor serve. If you seek to serve people more than to gain power, you will not only serve people, you will gain influence. That’s very much the way Jesus did it," Dr Timothy J. Keller, in last Sunday’s New York Times. It’s hard to get a better critique of the religious right than that.

"Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face."

– "Ash Wednesday, 1930," T.S. Eliot.

"Iraq is changing quickly, hour by hour. But what is coming after the end of Iraq? I don’t know what it will be," – Baghdad resident, Ms. Abayachi, in the New York Times today.

A reader remonstrates:

"I let the ‘Jewish Sharia’ comment pass. I didn’t like it, but what the hell. A little rhetorical excess… whatevs. But two in a row deserves a reaction. To say that the academics in American universities want to police thought "just like" the mullahs in the Middle East is obviously a gross exaggeration. If you could show me a list of the victims of violence directly spurred by the rhetoric of p.c. academics, I’ll join in the outrage with you. I’ll even give you partial credit on the Kaczynski killings. But it pales in comparison, and you know it. It isn’t "exactly the same way" the mullahs do business, and you know it.
I remember a time when you got very upset at the Left for making frivolous comparisons about Saddam. You know the story of the boy who cried wolf. Watcher, watch thyself."

Consider myself watched.