Iraqi Shiite Pilgrims Flock to Karbala ("Death to America")

CNN ^ | 4/22/03

[Baseballguy]

Its amazing how people that have freedom speak out. Darn. Maybe there could be a revolution in the USA where democrats are shown for what they are (dreaming). Who cares that there are a groups that dont like the USA. We dont have enough fingers to count the groups in other countries (France, Canada, Germany, Russia....).

We need to protect ourselves. If this means letting a people choose a government that disaproves of us who cares. As long as they dont want to bomb our ships, take hostages, or attack/help attack our homeland. These are the rules of engagement.

[wideawake]

I think you've muddied the waters by introducing the question of the abuse scandal.

I don't think so at all. The Pope's authority is a moral one: the resonance of his message is not decided by military might or economic influence or academic expertise - it is dependent solely on Christian witness.

St. Paul discusses in Corinthians what a scandal immorality within the Church creates and what damage it does to Christian witness.

If there had not been such a scandal in the Church, many more Americans both Catholic and non-Catholic would have considered his opinion on the war much more seriously. You know this to be true.

"He handled the scandal badly so he should shut up about the war" is poor theology.

You haven't even done me the basic courtesy of reading my post. I never said that the pope should "shut up" about the war. What I did say is that Pope can be expected to be taken less seriously by others in direct proportion to the disarray within and tarnished witness of the Church.

The question the Pope was addressing was the licitness of pre-emptive military action and whether this conformed to the Catholic doctrine of "just war".

The Catholic doctrine of just war, as the Pope well knows, includes the possibility of a pre-emptive war and always has. There is no question at all about preemption - it is perfectly legitimate as long as the potential threat is great enough to necessitate it.

What the Pope was doing was assessing the potential threat and deeming it to not be great enough. That is his prudential assessment. His status as Supreme Pontiff doesn't give him any special insight into the true nature of the threat level - contrary to the fantasies of most anti-Catholics the Pope does not have a network of highly-placed spies in every world government.

One thing the Pope does not share is the prevailing Americo-centric view of the world which you and others subscribe to. He is the pastor of the universal church and sees things globally and this is often the source of misunderstanding and conflict.

This is a canard. While I can well appreciate the Holy Father's need to conciliate various dubious governments in order to prevent humanitarian crises directed against his flock from breaking out, there is no such thing as a "global" perspective.

One cannot refuse to take sides between a bloodthirsty dictator and a constitutionally elected man of goodwill and call it "global" - that is an unrelievedly cynical view.

There are good people and there are evil people in this world and Saddam Hussein was an evildoer with malicious designs and George Bush, despite his flaws, is a well-intentioned man who is trying to do the right thing. The moral equivalence game isn't "global" and it isn't Christian.

I consider the Pope to be a holy man. Saintly, if you will. Holy people seldom err far from the truth because of their closeness to Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Your private interpretation of the Pope's personal sanctity is one to which you are entitled. I will await the inerrant judgment of the Church on all canonizations.

Additionally, I will point out that there have been very holy men, canonized by the Church, who exhibited poor prudential judgment in some matters: a man of such irreproachable sanctity as St. Francis exhorted John of Brienne to continue sieging Damietta, hoping that Damietta would become a foothold of Christian evangelization in the Muslim world. John, knowing St. Francis to be holy man, felt certain that he knew what he was talking about. So John finished the siege, reducing the population of Damietta from 70,000 to 3,000. St. Francis' mission among the Muslims was a complete failure and he didn't win a single convert.

The "prestige" of the Church in America is altogether irrelevant.

You couldn't be more wrong. In a country where the people make the laws, the prestige of the Church has an important effect on whether more than a million children murdered by abortion each year live or die.

The abuse scandal is/was another American problem

Not really. Let's stop deceiving ourselves. The same problems have occurred in Argentina, more-Euro-than-Europe Quebec, Austria, Ireland, Poland, etc. And don't hand me this AmChurch spiel: the Pope can dismiss and laicize any wayward theologian, priest or bishop he wants, whenever he wants.

The fact is, the Pope is a bishop. As a bishop he inherits the threefold apostolic office of priest, prophet and king - taking upon himself the duties of sacrifice, teaching and leadership.

The Holy Father's teaching is excellent and deeply insightful, but the scandal of AmChurch is due to a vacuum of leadership, plain and simple. And that vacuum of leadership has been a problem with the Vatican for 30 years. Why should a President listen to fallible advice from a man whose own bishops blatantly disregard his infallible teaching?

[drjimmy]

I agree with you 100%. What I don't agree with are the Freepers whose "solution" is to just keep killing Iraqis until the only ones left are those who will worship America.

[marshmallow]

I shall reply in more detail a little later.

Do you disagree with my "private judgement" of the Pope's sanctity? Isn't essentially everything you say "private judgement"?

[soundapproach]

"we could not chance a well-financed regime under Saddam funneling chem/bio/nuke weapons to terrorists. And that, remember, is why we went in there, not to "free" the Iraqi people."


Is that why they call it Operation "Iraqi Freedom" instead of Operation "Remove WMD"

[Hank Rearden]

I understand that, in and of itself, ANWAR doesn't make much difference.

The point is to make a dramatic point that we WILL seek independence from Middle East sources; at a minimum we'll have alternatives in our back pocket if they go nuts again.

From our point of view, it's always better to suck the other guy's wells dry first, if it can be done economically.

[wideawake]

Do you disagree with my "private judgement" of the Pope's sanctity?

Not really. But I disagree with your implication that personal sanctity = prudential omniscience.

Isn't essentially everything you say "private judgement"?

Not if I'm just relating information from magisterial sources.

[LS]

No. It's called propaganda. Ever hear of it? But whatever get's the job done.

Note that the war in Afghanistan was called "Enduring Freedom," not "Kill the M@$TERF@#$X!"

[wtc911]

MM is right. We watch a French news show every day for two reasons, to get a different view and to sharpen language skills. Last week they ran a story I have yet to see on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, any US based outlet. The religious leader of these potentially fanatic people actually told them to thank allah for the victory he gave them. That spin is working with these fundamentalists. The victory is their's; we were nothing but a convenient tool for allah. They are the majority in Iraq. We will never understand their dark ages minds. There is big trouble down the road.

[wtc911]

Allow me to clarify.....I do not agree that we will regret this war. I do agree that the mullahs are going to throw us some pretty ugly curves.

[madison10]

...The march is just a part of the newfound strength Shiites have gained since the fall of Saddam. Shiites are setting up local administrations to re-establish order, and religious leaders have emerged as key sources of political power, especially in southern Iraq.

At least one leading Shiite has called for the Karbala gathering to be used as a protest against U.S. domination of Iraq.

Some pilgrims chanted anti-American slogans, echoing a second day of anti-American protests by Shiites in Baghdad, reported Reuters.

"Yes, yes to Islam, no to America, no to Israel, no to colonialism and no to occupation," chanted men marching in Karbala behind a portrait of Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, an Iraqi Shiite cleric killed with his two sons in 1999.

Coalition forces want to form an interim, multi-faith and multi-ethnic government and help the Iraqis choose their leaders. But many Shiites are angered by what they see as U.S. intervention.

"It is a message to the Americans: If you interfere, we shall fight you. These people are ready to be killed for freedom, because we want a Shiite leadership," a pilgrim said.

You may have a point, maybe there was too much generalizing on my part. However, CNN is definitely not the only news source reporting the anti-American sentiments:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,84785,00.html

[valkyrieanne]

The Shi'ites are fundamentalist Islamic fanatics. No surprise here at all. Left to their own devices, they will install a theocratic dictatorship like Iran's. There will still be no freedom there - because even if you *gave* them the vote on a platter, they would vote for slavery.

[valkyrieanne]

On the other hand, I kept saying before the war to my friends that the last thing we want in Iraq is a democracy. What we really want is a nicer Saddam. A burtal but western-oriented dictator who will keep the shia's in check, not threaten Isreal, guarantee access to oil. Kind of like the Shah of Iraq.

Exactly - like Kemal Ataturk's role in the founding of Turkey as a modern nation out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Yes, they could vote - but radical Islamist parties were banned until very recently, and if the government got too jihadi, the military would overthrow them and set up another government more secular. Democracy on a leash, as it were.

Left to their own devices, the radical Muslims will vote in a theological dictatorship; will oppress their own people with enthusiasm equal to Saddam's, and will continue to spread terrorism.

It's the medieval interpretation of Islam that is the fundamental problem here. People who have been raised in virtual slavery cannot become free overnight.

[xJones]

We have a new and well-spoken Freeper from our ally, Poland. See #71.

[valkyrieanne]

Hi, Matthew Paul: Tell these Americans not to take the Muslims for granted. : ) Your country had experience dealing with their previous invasions of Europe, and know it's nothing to be complacent about...

[leftiesareloonie]

Of course, you are right the Shah turned out to be a problem in the end.

What we need is a dictator who is EVENTUALLY replaced by a democratically elected leader, in a state that is GRADUALLY westernized and secularized.

It's a long term project.

I don't know why the adminstration keeps talking about leaving in months.

This is a decade long thing, at least. And it will take lots of delicacy sometimes and lots of brutality and realism at other times.

In the end, though I doubted the wisdom of this war, I agree with the ultimate stated goal. The Middle East is an anti-modern basket case, that threatens the modern world order. It has GOT to be remade.

My only worry is about means.

I also suspect that before real progress is made, Arabs are going to end up shedding lots of each others blood.

Kind of like we couldn't have gotten to contemporary America -- a multi-ethnic pluralistic state if ever there was one -- without the Civil War.

[GraniteStateConservative]

Not even all Shias want a theocracy. Calm down.

[leftiesareloonie]

I agree in most ways. I don't know about "enslavement" but I get your point.

See my post #77. Eventually, after lots (more) blood has been shed, maybe the Middle East will achieve a few stable mutli-ethnic, secular democratic states. Maybe in a decade or two. It's going to be quite an adventure along the way.

The problem with dictators is that they overstay their welcome.

Saddam, for all his evil, had some of the right ideas. HIs problem was he turned Iraq into a strange brew of a cult of personality and a repressive stalinist state that did nothing really to build a multi-ethnic Iraqi nation.

So now we are left with his mess to clean up -- a seething cauldron of ethnic hostilties, no real political culture, nothing.

It's a big job. Like I said above, my main problem with this war was not the ends for which it was ostensibly fought -- the remaking of the middle east -- but the means we chose. Really not the means, but, as it were, the means to the means.

I wish we weren't so alone in this. I wish there was an Arab-European-American-Asian-Jewish consensus about the urgency of remaking the middle east. For a moment there, I thought we might pull it off.

Ah well. It's still going to be a great adventure.