One day a lawyer came to Jesus and asked, “What should I do to get to heaven?”
Jesus answered, “What does the law say?”
“You should love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” the lawyer replied.
“That’s right,” Jesus said. “If you do all of that, you will be able to get to heaven.”
But the lawyer, thinking he could ask Jesus a question that could not be answered, asked, “But who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answered him by telling this story:
One day, a man who was traveling from a far away city, suddenly met up with a group of thieves. The thieves took everything he had, and then they beat him up and left him lying half dead by the side of the road.
As he lay there in pain and misery, he heard footsteps. “Ah! Someone is coming!” he thought. “I hope he will help me! . . . I hope it isn’t one of the same men who beat me up, coming back to find out if I am dead.” He waited and listened for what seemed like hours, as the footsteps faded in the distance.
It happened to be a priest who came by, but when he saw the man lying beside the road, he decided to take a different road because he was in a hurry and didn’t want to be bothered.
The poor man was certainly glad that it wasn’t one of the robbers, but he surely wished SOMEBODY would come along to help him.
After a little while, he heard footsteps again…. He wanted to call out and get the attention of the person walking by, but he was in so much pain, all he could do was moan. “Maybe this person will see me and help me,” he thought anxiously.
This time the man who passed by was a Levite, a well-known teacher in the temple. SURELY HE would want to help the poor man. But when he saw the man lying on the side of the road, he looked down . . . then turned his head . . . then walked right by, completely ignoring the poor, hurting man.
It wasn’t long until the man heard ANOTHER set of footsteps. He wanted to believe that this person would reach down to help him, but he had already been passed by twice and dared not even hope for relief. By this time, he had given up all hope and was sure he was going to die right there on the side of the road.
The man who was traveling down the road this time was a stranger from Samaria. Nobody even liked people from Samaria. It was very unlikely that he would want to help. But as he passed by, he noticed the man who was lying beaten and bloody on the side of the road. He felt sorry for him and wanted to help. He got off his donkey and bent down next to the man to get a closer look at the wounds. Gently, he wrapped bandages around the sores and helped him to his feet. THEN . . . he carefully put the man on his very own donkey, and took him to the nearest hotel. He stayed with the man overnight and took care of him.
The next morning he had to leave, but he knew he couldn’t take the man with him. When he paid the bill, he gave the innkeeper extra money, saying, “Take care of him, feed him, and make sure he has everything he needs. If he owes you any money after he gets well and leaves, write it down, and I will pay the bill the next time I come by.”
Jesus, after finishing the story, asked the lawyer, “Which of these three men was a neighbor to the stranger on the street?”
The lawyer sheepishly answered, “The one who stopped and helped him.”
And Jesus said, “That’s right. Now YOU go and do the same.”
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Tom Dispatch
posted 2007-07-17 16:01:29
Tomgram: Peter Galbraith, The War Is Lost
The week in Iraq began with a particularly brutal triple bombing in the oil-rich, disputed city of Kirkuk — a truck bomb took out part of the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and subsequent car bombs hit a nearby market and a police patrol, with over 80 dead and more than 180 wounded. These were reminders, undoubtedly from Sunni extremists (possibly driven north by President Bush’s surge offensive around Baghdad), that the only relatively peaceful, economically prospering region of “Iraq” — Iraqi Kurdistan — may not remain that way forever. Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen are already struggling over who is to inherit the oil-spoils of Kirkuk, which many Kurds would like to annex and turn into the capital of what they dream may someday be an independent country. Kirkuk’s fate is supposedly to be decided by a referendum at year’s end.
In the meantime, on Kurdistan’s western border, the Turkish army continues to mass — with rumors of a mobilization of up to 200,000 troops as well as tanks, heavy artillery, and air power. The Turkish military has been threatening not just “hot pursuit” of Kurdish rebels into Iraqi Kurdistan, but an actual invasion in response to terrorist acts committed by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish population. As the Bush administration has been claiming that Iran is arming Shiite (and even Sunni) insurgents fighting U.S. troops, so the Turks are now ominously claiming that the PKK is armed, in part, with American weapons. This represents but another potentially fatal brew of forces in already chaotic Iraq. The results of a Turkish invasion are hard to calculate, but it would surely reverberate throughout the region — and don’t expect those three “surge” brigades the Kurds sent to Baghdad to remain there long if Kurdistan explodes.
Former ambassador Peter Galbraith, author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, has long defended the interests of the Kurds (a people repeatedly deserted by great and regional powers) and a possible three-state solution to the Iraqi catastrophe. I’ve had my own doubts about Kurdistan as a fallback position for this administration. (Imagine, based on the record so far in the rest of Iraq, the harm they could do.) But in the following piece, posted at Tomdispatch thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books, Galbraith vividly lays out the dismal state of Iraq and the various catastrophes likely to flow from most of the major “benchmarks” established by the Bush administration and Congress, if they were ever to become reality. He also briefly makes the case for an American responsibility for “preserving Kurdistan’s democracy,” one that must be taken with great seriousness. Tom
The Way to Go in Iraq
By Peter Galbraith
[This essay appears in the August 16th, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books and is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
1.
On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq’s three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. General Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the “benchmark” now achieved: with the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq’s eighteen provinces.
In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan’s territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.
Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgement that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag — an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in Ripley’s Believe it or Not.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan’s prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While General Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, Mowaffak al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan’s distinct nature and the right of the Kurds — approximately six million people, or some 20% of Iraq’s population — to chart their own course.
On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration’s desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its “surge” by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaeda.
Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies — usually the victims of Shiite death squads — has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.
The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weapons to fight al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq’s Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the U.S. appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.
Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush’s surge strategy, remains one of Iraq’s most powerful political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with the public.
Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush’s new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take over security.
The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns of Iraq’s Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. These steps include an oil revenue–sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq’s constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public sector employment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era public service), and a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked US strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.
Iraq’s government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department’s foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq’s leaders.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq’s leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam’s rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim’s main rival, comes from Iraq’s other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam’s Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada’s father-in-law and the father-in-law’s sister — the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah’s beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq’s two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.
Iraq’s Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq’s Shiite-led government has gone “out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces” and that the “strident intervention” of the U.S. embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.
Iraq’s mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim’s Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq’s population. Iraq’s decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the U.S. and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq’s constitution, approved by 79% of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: the Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.
Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq’s three groups.
Constitutionally, Iraq’s central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. embassy stopped the UN from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.
When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the U.S. insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.
With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament’s mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.
Thanks to Khalilzad’s expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan’s voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan’s powers), and this could push tense Sunni–Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish NGOs, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a “NO” campaign on constitutional revision a “No to Iraq” vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC’s work as “satisfactory,” an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.
For the most part, Iraq’s leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don’t agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq’s future, including the new constitution. The Kurds’ envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.
But even if Iraq’s politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn’t end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their longstanding oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.
2.
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war’s intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.
The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning — a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes — but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, “The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”
Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “Those who believe the war is already lost — call it the Clinton-Lugar axis — are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home.” Lugar provoked Donnelly’s anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush’s Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This “blame the American people” approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.)
Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaeda would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still unfinished largest embassy in the world. President Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.
But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq’s Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaeda, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq’s Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq’s Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq’s military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today — a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America’s failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq’s Kurdish leaders and Iraq’s dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Senator Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the U.S. to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: it secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish–Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaeda in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran’s gains.
In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, President Bush never discusses Iran’s domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaeda victory. Bush’s reticence is understandable since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq’s central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy — notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary — that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq’s Shiites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)
3.
On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, spoke in the Senate about “connecting our Iraq strategy to our vital interests.” On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment at home “make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame.” Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis…. In this context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved, but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government is still just a hopeful plan for the future.
Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we “refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East.” After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.
Lugar’s focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable — disrupting al-Qaeda, preserving Kurdistan’s democracy, and limiting Iran’s increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won’t get it.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in post-conflict societies, including Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End is now out in paperback
This article appears in the August 16th issue of the New York Review of Books.
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Is the GOP political platform contrary to Catholic teaching?
The president’s most influential evangelical advisor makes some surprising claims about many of the party’s defining positions.
Glenn Greenwald
Jul. 18, 2007 | Michael Gerson, the devout, born-again evangelical Christian who was one President Bush’s closest advisors until he left the White House in 2006, uses his Washington Post column today to warn his fellow social conservatives about the dangers of electing Rudy Giuliani. In particular, Gerson stresses that Giuliani’s political views, virtually across the board, are squarely at odds with Catholicism, and what is interesting is the list of un-Catholic positions Gerson cites:
Another consequence of a Giuliani victory would be to place the Republican nominee in direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. For someone who aspires to be the fourth Roman Catholic to lead a major-party ticket, this is not a minor thing.
Giuliani is not only pro-choice. He has supported embryonic stem cell research and public funding for abortion. He supports the death penalty. He supports “waterboarding” of terror suspects and seems convinced that the conduct of the war on terrorism has been too constrained. Individually, these issues are debatable. Taken together, they are the exact opposite of Catholic teaching, which calls for a “consistent ethic of life” rather than its consistent devaluation.
No one inspired by the social priorities of Pope John Paul II can be encouraged by the political views of Rudy Giuliani. Church officials who criticized John Kerry on abortion are anxious for the opportunity to demonstrate their bipartisanship by going after a Republican. Those attacks on Giuliani have already begun.
In listing Giuliani’s political views which are squarely at odds with core Catholic teachings, Gerson forgot to mention one little issue. From Fox News, two weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq:
Pope John Paul II and top Vatican officials are unleashing a barrage of condemnations of a possible U.S. military strike on Iraq, calling it immoral, risky and a “crime against peace.”
The unwavering stance has made the pope one of the most visible opponents of war in current circumstances, and a rallying point for peace groups and politicians who seize on his words counseling against war.
Indeed, contrast Giuliani’s specific support for the Iraq invasion and his more general mantra about the need to “stay on offense against The Terrorists” with the views on such matters of the Vatican:
[Then-Cardinal-now-Pope] Ratzinger has said, “A preventive war is not in the Catechism.”
Civilta Cattolica points out that an American attack on Iraq would be motivated in large part by political and economic reasons rather than military necessity and rejects the Bush argument that a preventive war should be considered a defensive action. Archbishop Martino said that “a preventive war is a war of aggression.”
Of course, Giuliani isn’t the only politician who supports the death penalty, waterboarding, a “war on terrorism” fought with few if any moral restraints, and “preventive wars”. As it happens, Gerson’s ex-boss enthusiastically shares that same agenda, which Gerson describes, accurately, as being “the exact opposite of Catholic teaching . . . for a ‘consistent ethic of life.’” In fact, virtually the entire bulk of the Republican Party shares this “anti-life” agenda.
Add on to that list of decisively un-Catholic views the GOP’s fervent opposition to anti-poverty programs and borderline-religious support for tax cuts for the wealthiest, policies condemned with equal fervor by the Catholic Church, and what you have is a political movement that on virtually every significant issue other than abortion is one that is at war with the core, defining teachings of Catholicism.
But that did not stop the media from depicting the Republicans in 2004, and generally, as the party of “people of faith.” Nor did it stop self-professed “Party of Death” opponents from lending their full-throated support to the Republican Party despite its litany of anti-life and un-Catholic positions.
Most significantly, none of this stopped the GOP in 2004 from making John Kerry’s alleged hostility to his own church a centerpiece of its campaign, including the disgustingly exploitive argument in the middle of an election that he should be denied communion. As Reason Magazine documented in 2005:
The contemporary Catholic vote is now the most important swing vote in American politics. . . . Hence, the Republican Party’s “Catholic Strategy.” Bush strategist Karl Rove identified the Catholic vote as central to his long-term plan to convert swathes of traditional Democratic voters, thereby transforming the Republicans into the majority party. Throughout the 2004 campaign, Rove maintained that, if Bush won the Catholic vote, he would be reelected. Rove was right.
It is striking to see one of the nation’s most influential evangelical Christians explicitly acknowledge that the defining Republican policies — the death penalty, unrestrained “terrorism” approaches, waterboarding, and (though Gerson doesn’t mention it) “preventive” wars — are not only un-Catholic, but also hostile to the “ethic of life.” Gerson is right that such policies are decisively anti-life and contrary to Catholic teaching. Beyond that, they are squarely at odds with more general Christian moral teaching as well. Indisputably, there is a “life” and “morality” aspect to the Republican Party’s conduct of the “war on terrorism” and that conduct could not be more at odds with the values they claim to embrace.
Yet our political discourse is sufficiently broken that this is rarely pointed out. The media has decreed that these same Republicans embody the “faith” agenda. Thus the political party that, on one issue after the next, advocates anti-”ethic-of-life” and un-Catholic positions is endlessly presented as the “pro-life” party for “people of faith.” Perhaps now that even Michael Gerson, who bears large responsibility for many of these policies, has acknowledged (in an attempt to hurt Giuliani’s candidacy) that such policies are anti-life and un-Catholic, we can have a a more open and substantive examination of these “faith” and religious influences on our political process.
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In Iraq bills, a Vietnam echo
Legislating an end is a thorny quest
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | July 16, 2007
WASHINGTON — In December 1970, Congress passed historic legislation revoking the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution, which had authorized military force in Vietnam, and banning the deployment of ground troops in Cambodia. War opponents hoped Congress was on the verge of forcing a quick end to the bloody quagmire in Indochina.
“The president, in our judgment, now lacks legitimate authority to keep on prosecuting the war,” said Senator Frank Church , Democrat of Idaho, in a 1971 speech. “Under these circumstances, a great opportunity is presented to Congress — the chance to fill this constitutional vacuum with a disengagement policy that could help unite the country again.”
War opponents’ hopes were dashed. Despite signing the bills, President Nixon said he had independent authority as commander in chief to keep combat in Vietnam going. For the next two years, Congress failed to agree on further restrictions, and nearly 3,000 more American soldiers died. Nixon finally ended the war on his own terms with a cease – fire agreement in January 1973.
In the coming months, some 34 years after the Vietnam War shuddered to a halt, Congress will again attempt to do something unprecedented: stopping a war before a president is ready. Scholars agree that Congress has the power to force a shift in the conduct of the Iraq war, but the path will be difficult in the face of uncompromising opposition from President Bush.
Julian Zelizer , a Princeton history professor, said that there has always been a gap between what Congress can theoretically do to end a war and what is politically achievable. The ugly consequences of withdrawals, coupled with procedural rules that allow a group of 40 senators to block votes, have proved to be steep obstacles to winning enough votes to stop combat.
“Once you are in a war, it’s hard to get out of it,” said Zelizer. “When the messiness of war is combined with the messiness of Congress, the result is that it is very hard to get congressional opposition under way.”
Congress is considering such proposals as repealing the Iraq war authorization, moving troops out of cities, narrowing their mission from policing the sectarian strife to hunting terrorists, and limiting troop rotations. Last week, the House passed a measure that would require a withdrawal to begin within 120 days and be completed by April .
But such measures face additional hurdles in the Senate, where Republicans can use the procedural tactic known as a filibuster to block a vote on anything that does not have the support of 60 senators. On Wednesday, for example, 41 senators blocked a vote on a proposal to require troops to receive additional time at home before being redeployed.
There is ample historical precedent for Congress imposing limits on what presidents can do with US troops in the midst of a war, specialists say. But in all previous such cases, Congress was working with a president who was willing to sign its bills into law, usually as a negotiated compromise.
In Vietnam, for example, Congress banned ground combat troops from Laos and Thailand in 1969, and from Cambodia in 1970. And in July 1973, when the combat in Vietnam was over anyway, lawmakers cut off funds for further military action in Indochina — a gesture that prevented the United States from restarting the war after the North Vietnamese broke the cease-fire agreement in 1975.
Congress has also repeatedly imposed limits on what presidents can do with forces on peacekeeping missions. In 1983 and in 1993, it imposed deadlines for pulling out of Lebanon and Somalia, respectively. Congress also banned further covert paramilitary aid to anti-Marxist fighters in Angola in 1976, and in Nicaragua in 1984.
But Bush has promised to veto any legislation that limits his flexibility in how to conduct the Iraq war — as he did in May when he vetoed a funding bill that included a timetable for withdrawal. And, analysts note, Bush is in a far different political situation than were Nixon in 1971, Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1983 and 1984, or Bill Clinton in 1993.
In those prior cases, presidents had years of governing ahead of them — or at least believed that they did. But Bush’s presidency will soon be over and Vice President Dick Cheney is not running to replace him. Thus, the White House has less reason to compromise with Congress — or to worry about public opinion polls.
“No one in that White House is destined for an accountability moment,” said Harvard law professor David Barron . “Under normal circumstances a president would have incentives to bring [a war] to a close — consistent with the wishes of the legislature, but somehow still on his own terms. But there doesn’t seem to be any interest in doing that.”
Bush’s lame-duck status, Barron said, also may make GOP lawmakers more willing to break with the White House because their political futures are no longer entwined with the president’s.
Such a dynamic raises the possibility that Congress could pass some kind of war restriction over Bush’s veto — only to see Bush defy the law anyway.
Prompted in part by Cheney, the Bush administration has championed an aggressive view of executive power under which Congress cannot restrict the commander in chief’s options, short of cutting off funds for the troops. This constitutional interpretation, which is disputed by many legal scholars, has surfaced repeatedly in recent months.
On May 1, when Bush vetoed the Iraq timetable bill, he told Congress that it was unconstitutional “because it purports to direct the conduct of the operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the presidency by the Constitution, including as commander in chief of the armed forces.”
Last Tuesday, Bush sent Congress a letter threatening to veto any defense bill that restricted his options not only for dealing with Iraq, but also with Iran. His letter asserted that the Constitution “exclusively” commits to him alone the power to decide how to use military or covert force in such national security situations.
And in a news conference Thursday, Bush repeated again his view that Congress can only decide whether to fund the war — but that all other decisions were for the commander in chief.
In that news conference, Bush also said he would not want to establish a precedent by agreeing to let Congress share in setting troop levels. If Bush refuses to obey laws restricting his conduct of the war, scholars said, it could take months for Congress and the courts to strike back — a process that might take too long to complete before he leaves office.
“If the executive branch is determined to push its powers to the brink of what they can get away with, the problem for the other branches is that any response they can make within a system of checks and balances takes time,” said Peter Shane , an Ohio State law professor.
Added Barron: “It’s a perfect storm for a constitutional crisis.”
History has shown that it can be politically difficult to force presidents to obey restrictions on their use of the military. In May 1975, for example, the Cambodian Navy seized an American freighter called the Mayaguez and kidnapped its crew. Without consulting Congress, Ford ordered US Marines to attack an island where the crew was believed to be held.
Ford’s move drew fire because of the ban on using ground troops in Cambodia, as well as a 1973 law requiring presidents to consult with Congress before sending troops into combat. In an Oval Office meeting, Speaker of the House Carl Albert , Democrat of Oklahoma, told Ford: “There are charges on the floor that you have violated the law.”
But, a transcript shows, Ford cited his power as commander in chief to say that he had acted within his legal rights: “It is my constitutional responsibility to command the forces and to protect Americans.”
The Mayaguez crew was rescued. The operation was portrayed by the media as a feel-good victory in the wake of the humiliating fall of Saigon. Congress lacked the political will to challenge Ford.
Months later, after the controversy faded, it emerged that the rescue operation was not such a success. Instead of one Marine dead and 13 missing, as early reports said, 41 died assaulting the island. Worse, the crew had already been released and was floating out to be picked up by the Navy when the assault began.
In his memoirs, Ford said he “felt terrible” about the “high toll,” but believed he had done the right thing. He wrote: “We had recovered the ship, we had rescued the crew, and the psychological boost the incident had given us as a people was significant.”
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Ask no more about separation
Somehow I lived through its night
The heart learned to console itself
life returned to its routines
In the festival of memory
you again were loveliness
lit up by beauty
The grief of the moon was extinguished
we were again together in the night
When I remember you
the morning is essence it is perfume it’s musk
And the night
when I kindle our sorrow
is longing caught in itself
The heart as such
had settled every doubt
when I went to tell her we must part
But on seeing her
the lips spoke love’s unrehearsed words
and everything changed everything changed
It was the final night Faiz
What happened to those who’d started out with you?
When did the morning breeze abandon you
and where on those last miles
the dawn?
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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Mature content warning
Probably one of the most savvy, experienced and mature voices in journalism today, Bill Moyers (a personal hero) interviewed a conservative expert on constitutional law, Bruce Fein, and author and political journalist, John Nichols, about the “I” word – Impeachment.
“Nancy Pelosi is wrong”, cited Nichols. She errors in taking impeachment off the table. It seems that our politicians have forgotten or repudiated statemanship and replaced it with politics above country. Fortunately, glimmers of hope are springing up since the country, as they discuss, is much further along on the impeachment road than Congress (by estimates of 45% of the country to impeach Bush, and 54% Cheney).
Moyer’s Journal
The trick is motivating Congress to live up to their clear constitutional duty, spurring them to restore for us the nature and balance of presidential power that’s been so seriously mangled while the king’s subjects blithely wile away the long winter night believing he’ll bring them warm porridge in the morning and weave them another terrible tale about why they’re not allowed outside in the sunshine. Be certain that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill-Oraly and all the stenographers of the mainstream media will surely rev up their own engines to meet the brewing discontent of the masses and persuading many to hate the Clintons, Algore, all things scientific, environmental, social and economic justice and, worst still, those LIBERAL Dirty Fucking Hippies.
TRex has this to say in his usual loosely-disguised eloquence:
Of all the sad spectacles brought to us by Bush Presidency’s ongoing collapse, I think that perhaps the strangest and saddest of all must the spectral form of Peggy Noonan huddled in the bleak chill of this strange new dawn, shivering like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl as her thousand points of light go out one by one.
I found myself Thursday watching President Bush’s news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth.
Alas, Lady Peggy, mark me well! Pray, ask yourself how it would feel to grit your teeth for six years. Six very, very long (terribly long!) years. Where it’s always winter, and never Christmas.
I’m not referring to what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. That phrase suggested that to passionately dislike the president was to be somewhat unhinged. No one thinks that anymore.
I’m going to assume that is as close as you will ever come to apologizing, Madam, therefore I accept. Cos it sure isn’t the President who’s changed. He is the same twitchy, smirking asshole he was on his first day at Yale.
In fact, do me a favor. Knowing what you know now, go back and watch a press conference from, say, 2004. Watch the smugness, the fatuous nonchalance, the dismissive half-shrugs. (”I’ve already stopped listening to your question, peasant!”)
Then factor in the mangled syntax, the misfired talking points, and the overall tone of pained condescension, “I’ll answer your question, but if you weren’t so stupid, you’d already know the answer.” Once the scales fall from your eyes, Peggy, every word he says makes you loathe him more.
Are you sure you want to go down this path, Ms. Noonan? Because once you attain this dark knowledge, gentle Lady, there is no turning back.
As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president’s seemingly effortless high spirits. He’s in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude.
In the Queen’s English, Peggy, we call that “being a dick”.
He doesn’t seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn’t Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president’s since polling began. He’s in a good mood. Discuss.
Mamaaaaa, he’s crazyyyy [/judds]
Seriously, Peg, the guy is a couple quarts low. He’s thrown a rod. Call him Ishmael. He has chained himself to the masts and commanded the oarsmen to ply ever onward, even as the ship of state begins to list to one side and ride lower and lower in the water.
Americans can’t fire the president right now, so they’re waiting it out.
Peggy, my darling, that is where you are wrong. There are clauses in the Constitution that were placed there for just such an occasion. Something about when a Chief Executive uses his powers of pardon to cover up his own crimes, wasn’t it?
George Mason (1725-1792), the father of the Bill of Rights (1791-2002), argued at the Constitutional Convention in favor of providing the House of Representatives the power of impeachment by pointing out that the President might use his pardoning power to “pardon crimes which were advised by himself” or, before indictment or conviction, “to stop inquiry and prevent detection.”
James Madison (1751-1836), the father of the U.S. Constitution (1788-2007), added that “if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”
Seems pretty clear to me.
But chin up, dear lady. It may not work out for you guys in 2008, but I feel fairly certain that by 2012, you will have found yourselves a new empty suit with a heart made of tar. Some well-connected snake-oil salesman who can mouth the proper platitudes and maybe not get caught with a dead girl or a live boy in his bed.
Shouldn’t Damien be old enough to run for office by then?
Ohhhhh, wait a minute…
TRex – FDL
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