Pope Francis to begin historic Iraq visit despite virus and security risks

Pope Francis will fly to Iraq on Friday for the first ever papal visit to the country and his first international trip since the start of the pandemic.

The four-day trip is meant to reassure Iraq's dwindling Christian community and foster inter-religious dialogue.

The Pope will meet Iraq's most revered Shia Muslim cleric, say a prayer in Mosul and celebrate Mass at a stadium.

He has insisted on travelling despite a new spike in Covid-19 infections in Iraq and concerns over his security.

Hours after a rocket attack on a base hosting US troops on Wednesday, the Pope said Iraqi Christians could not be "let down for a second time".

Pope John Paul II cancelled plans for a trip at the end of 1999 after talks with then-President Saddam Hussein's government broke down.

In the two decades since then, one of the world's oldest Christian communities has seen its numbers plummet from 1.4 million to about 250,000.

Read the rest here.

US Forces Kill Two Senior Iranian Military Officials in Targeted Attack

One of those figures was the head of Iran's equivalent to military intelligence and black-ops.

...The high-profile assassinations are seen as a massive blow to Iran, which has been locked in a long conflict with the United States that escalated sharply last week with the storming of the US embassy perimeter in Iraq by pro-Iranian militiamen following an American air raid on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia. 

Soleimani, who has led the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards and has had a key role in fighting in Syria and Iraq, acquired celebrity status at home and abroad. 

He was instrumental in the spread of Iranian influence in the Middle East, which the United States and Tehran’s regional foes Saudi Arabia and Israel have struggled to keep in check. 

He survived several assassination attempts against him by Western, Israeli and Arab agencies over the past two decades. 
 
Soleimani’s Quds Force, tasked with carrying out operations beyond Iran’s borders, shored up support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad when he looked close to defeat in the civil war raging since 2011 and also helped militiamen defeat Islamic State in Iraq. 

Source.

We Broke Iraq

Colin Powell famously told President George W. Bush before the Iraq invasion, "If you break it, you own it." Well, it's safe to say we broke Iraq.

That's the story I heard last week from two people who live there. I met with the Rev. Canon Andrew White — "The Vicar of Baghdad" — who serves as the chaplain to St. George's Anglican Church in the heart of Baghdad. We were joined by Sarah Ahmed, a director at White's Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. Ahmed was born and raised in Iraq. White has lived there for 15 years.

"I was in favor of the U.S. invasion," White told me. "But we are literally 5,000 times worse than before. If you look at it, you can see it was wrong. We have gained nothing. Literally nothing. We may have had an evil dictator, but now we have total terrorism. We used to have one Saddam. Now we have thousands."

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

Srdja Trifkovic: The Ever More Complex Levantine Puzzle

“...The unrepentant interventionist cabal in Washington will reject such advice with horror and indignation. They still claim that Bashar can be removed, Iran sanctioned ad infinitum and preferably bombed, Iraq kept together, Jordan and Lebanon stabilized, and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf relied upon… if only the U.S. would accept its “regional responsibilities” and become “fully engaged” yet again. They also claim that the latest disaster in Iraq is the consequence of the December 2011 American withdrawal. All that is nonsense. The chronic crisis in Iraq, which has been going on with occasional acute eruptions for 13 years, is the consequence of the illegal, unnecessary, costly, and tragic Iraq war, tirelessly urged and waged under countless false pretenses by these same people. They belong in jail or in mental asylum, not in Washington’s “foreign policy community.”

Read the rest here.

Crisis in Iraq

The government of Iraq, by which I mean the one we installed, appears to be collapsing in the face of a well organized campaign by Islamic fundamentalists. (Details here). On which subject, I don't agree with his more hard line ethno-racialism, but AG's points 4 & 5 are spot on.

I feel very badly for the people in Iraq. And I feel even worse because I can't say with a straight face that it is none of our business. It should not be any of our business. But as our former Secretary of State once famously observed; if you break it, you own it. Iraq is our mess because we broke that country, and I am deeply conflicted about what to do about it.

The Iraqi Jewish archive: Should the U.S. send it back?

WASHINGTON (RNS) Acting on a tip, 16 U.S. troops stormed the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad intelligence headquarters in 2003 and found a stash of Torah scrolls, prayer books and Hebrew calendars.

The trove was moldy and ripped, some of it of little value, much of it priceless — 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents, all stolen from the Jews of Iraq.

Ten years later, 24 of the artifacts form a rare exhibit at the National Archives on the Mall, just steps away from rooms where tourists stand in line to see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The exhibit has raised thorny questions about the ultimate disposition of the artifacts.

Read the rest here.

The Military's Culture of Mediocrity and Non-Accountability

Generalship in combat is extraordinarily difficult, and many seasoned officers fail at it. During World War II, senior American commanders typically were given a few months to succeed, or they’d be replaced. Sixteen out of the 155 officers who commanded Army divisions in combat were relieved for cause, along with at least five corps commanders.

Since 9/11, the armed forces have played a central role in our national affairs, waging two long wars—each considerably longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Yet a major change in how our military operates has gone almost unnoticed. Relief of generals has become so rare that, as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling noted during the Iraq War, a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of a war. In the wars of the past decade, hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness. This change is arguably one of the most significant developments in our recent military history—and an important factor in the failure of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To a shocking degree, the Army’s leadership ranks have become populated by mediocre officers, placed in positions where they are likely to fail. Success goes unrewarded, and everything but the most extreme failure goes unpunished, creating a perverse incentive system that drives leaders toward a risk-averse middle where they are more likely to find stalemate than victory. A few high-profile successes, such as those of General David Petraeus in Iraq, may temporarily mask this systemic problem, but they do not solve it.

Ironically, our generals have grown worse as they have been lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the military. The Bush administration has been roundly (and fairly) criticized for its delusive approach to the war in Iraq and its neglect of the war in Afghanistan. Yet the serious failures of our military leaders in these conflicts have escaped almost all notice. No one is pushing those leaders to step back and examine the shortcomings of their institution. These are dangerous developments. Unaddressed, they could lead to further failures in future wars.

Read the rest here.
HT: MG

Iraq War is finally (mostly) over

BAGHDAD — America’s war in Iraq came to an unspectacular and deeply uncertain end Thursday at a ceremony held amid fortified concrete blast walls at Baghdad’s international airport, not far from a highway where U.S. troops first fought their way into the capital more than eight years ago.

There were speeches paying tribute to the fallen, promising that America would not abandon Iraq and warning of challenges ahead. A brass band played, and the flag that had flown over the headquarters of the U.S. mission here was lowered for the last time.

And that was it. No pronouncements of victory, no cheers or jubilation — only a profound sense that the war’s real reckoning is yet to come even as America’s part in it draws to a close.

Read the rest here.

Republicans criticize Obama over Iraq withdrawal

Mitt Romney issued a scathing rebuke Friday of President Obama's decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by year's end, joining a chorus of Republicans critical of the president's decision.

Romney sharply criticized the announcement this afternoon by Obama that all troops would leave Iraq by the end of 2011, fulfilling one of Obama's main promises from the 2008 campaign, that he would end the war in Iraq.

“President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women," Romney said in a statement. "The unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government."

Romney's sentiment is in tune with what Republicans have said Friday afternoon; most GOP voices have expressed concern that the withdrawal would imperil progress made after almost nine years' worth of war in Iraq.

Read the rest here.

The party of perpetual war speaks.

Obama declares war over, orders final pullout of US troops from Iraq

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Friday declared an end to the Iraq war, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history, announcing that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from the country by year's end.

The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.

"Today I can say that troops in Iraq will be home for the holidays," Obama said.

More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Read the rest here.

US abandons plans to keep troops in Iraq next year

BAGHDAD — The Obama administration is abandoning plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past a year-end withdrawal deadline, The Associated Press has learned.

A senior administration official in Washington confirmed Saturday that all American troops will leave except for about 160 troops attached to the U.S. Embassy. The Pentagon had considered leaving up to 5,000 troops to train security forces and hinder Iranian influence.

A senior U.S. military official said the withdrawal could allow future, limited U.S. military training missions if requested.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Iraqi political leaders have rejected giving legal immunity to U.S. troops — a deal-breaker to Washington.

Source.
(Breaking news.  Text at linked source is likely to change. )

This is very good news.

Last Christians Ponder Leaving a Hometown in Iraq

HABBANIYA CECE, Iraq — The last Christian man in town goes to church each morning to clean the building and to remember the past. Romel Hawal, 48, was born in this town in Anbar Province back when most of the population was Christian. Now, he said, his 11-year-old son knows no other Christians and has no memory of attending a church service.

“When my son swears, it is on the Koran, not the Bible,” Mr. Hawal lamented.

His wife wants to leave town or leave the country, joining what is becoming an exodus of Christians from Iraq and throughout the Middle East. But Mr. Hawal said he felt an obligation to stay. And he found support from an unlikely source.

“What gives me courage,” he said, “is that my Muslim brothers say, ‘Don’t leave.’ ”

Here in Habbaniya Cece, residents talk about their town as an oasis of ethnic and religious harmony, where Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites all lived together for decades without friction. On one short stretch of rutted road near Mr. Hawal’s church, Mary Queen of Peace, are an Assyrian church, a Sunni mosque, a Shiite mosque and another, older, Sunni mosque.

“This is the best place you will find in Iraq, because we have Christians and Muslims together,” said the mayor, Sabah Fawzi, a Muslim, who stopped by the church to look in on Mr. Hawal. “When my wife and daughters want something, sometimes they come to the church to ask God for it.”

Read the rest here.

When do we start calling this ethnic (or religious) cleansing?

Iraqi PM: US forces must leave in 2011

BAGHDAD — The last U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says.

In a two-hour interview published by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Maliki said his country's security forces can handle any remaining security threats beyond the mutually agreed year-end pullout date established with the Bush administration in 2008.

"The last American soldier will leave Iraq," he said, according to the Journal. "This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration. It is sealed."

The Journal said it spoke to Maliki in his Baghdad office inside the protected Green Zone.

It was Maliki's first interview since Iraq ended a nine-month election stalemate and seated a new government, allowing the prime minister to begin his second term.

Read the rest here.

Al-Qaida threat on Iraq Christians linked to Egypt

CAIRO (AP) — The wives of two Egyptian Coptic priests, forbidden by the Church from divorcing their abusive husbands, desperately sought another way out by converting to Islam. When their intentions were discovered, police handed them over to the Church and their whereabouts since have been unknown.

The cases caused a furor at home that spilled over the borders and turned deadly when al-Qaida in Iraq cited the women as the reason behind the bloodiest attack ever on Christians in Iraq — a five-hour siege of a church in October that left 68 people dead.

It was a stark example of the schism between Christians and Muslims that runs through the Middle East and periodically erupts into violence.

Read the rest here.

With New Violence, More Christians Are Fleeing Iraq

QOSH, Iraq — A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.

The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.

It threatens to reduce further what Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East called “a community whose roots were in Iraq even before Christ.”

Those who fled the latest violence — many of them in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars — warned that the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq’s Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

“It’s exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.”

Red the rest here.

Last US combat forces are leaving Iraq

But a very large body of "military advisers" is remaining.

NEAR THE IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER — The last U.S. combat troops were crossing the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.

The final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., was about to enter Kuwait shortly after 1:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), carrying the last of the 14,000 U.S. combat forces in Iraq, said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has been traveling with the brigade as it moved out this week.

Read he rest here.

None dare call it tyranny

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Read the rest here.
H/T The Young Fogey

The first half or so of the linked post is pretty good and I generally agree with its complaints. The second part seems divorced from reality to me. Reasonable people can disagree with the war in Iraq. I have come around 180 degrees on that subject myself. It was a war of choice against a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Afghanistan is a different matter altogether. Sometimes I think people need to be reminded that THEY CAME HERE AND ATTACKED US ON OUR SOIL. Sorry but no one gets a free pass on that.

Afghanistan in 2001 had become the Walt Disney World of terrorism. It was being used, with the full and active support of the de-facto government, as the main base for the world's most lethal terrorist organization. An organization dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the establishment of Sharia worldwide. If you allow your country to be used as the launch pad for an attack on another country and provide material support for those carrying out the attack, that is customarily regarded as a casus belli.

Yes civilians have been killed during the war. And that is deeply regrettable. But there is an important distinction between us and those we are fighting there. We make every effort, often at the expense of our own military interests and even to the point of endangering our people, to avoid civilian casualties. The other side uses civilians as human shields and deliberately targets them as a matter of policy.

I think the author needs to climb down from his high horse and take a good stiff drink of reality.

As for Iran I have no clue where he is getting his information from. He claims our own intelligence says three is no nuclear weapons program. If so I missed that. Every report I have seen flatly states the exact opposite. Even Russia is now reluctantly turning on their long time business partner.

Still if Iran does go over the top and Israel decides it's not inclined to wait and see how nutty Iran's dictator is, that's their business. As for us, I see almost no chance we will become involved in another war. I have little use for Obama, but he is I think coming to terms with an unpleasant reality. We are broke and wars cost money. He won't do anything that might endanger his precious domestic agenda.

What's more is I suspect that his military people have told him the same thing they told George Bush. Iran is not a military midgit. And they posess the ability to inflict a cripling blow without ever using nukes. They control the land on the eastern side of the Straits of Hormuz. That means that they can very easily shut down the flow of about half of the world's oil supply and short of a full scale invasion there is damned little we could do about it.

The simple truth is that we have no real military option for dealing with Iran. And unfortunately, they know it.

'Obliterating' Iraq's Christians

What is most startling about the report of the heartless double bus bombings on May 2 that targeted and injured 80 Christian students traveling to northern Iraq's Mosul University was that the young Christians there attend university at all. Since the U.S. invasion, Iraq's Christians have been mostly driven out of the country by violence directed against them for their religion. Their communities are shattered. That these young people continued to dream of preparing themselves to serve their country signals that community's deep commitment to Iraq and a modicum of hope they still harbor for its future.

Unless the Obama administration acts fast to develop policies to help them, though, their hope will likely be in vain.

Relentless waves of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortions and rapes have triggered a mass exodus of Christians from Iraq over the past seven years. Since 2003, over half of the estimated 1.5 million Iraqi Chaldean Catholics, Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox, and Armenian Christians, as well as some Protestants have fled to Syria, Jordan and farther flung places. While only 3 or 4 percent of Iraq's pre-2003 population, they account for 40 percent of its refugees, the UN reported.

Read the rest here.

Trying to ease an almost unbearable grief

Continuing with today's rather morbid postings...

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — Shortly after 4:20 a.m. on Easter Sunday, a pair of flag-covered cases with the remains of two Marines, both killed the previous week in Afghanistan, were carried out of the belly of a C-17 into the sight of their waiting families.

As two mothers, a widow and a knot of other kin watched from the tarmac, the bodies of Sgt. Frank J. World, 25, of Buffalo and Lance Cpl. Tyler O. Griffin, 19, of Voluntown, Conn., were loaded into a large van. Marines in white gloves and camouflage fatigues gave a final salute in the dark chill, then marched in formation behind the van as it rolled slowly toward the base mortuary, the largest in the nation.

In the past year, as the remains of 462 service members along with nearly 2,000 relatives have passed through Dover, the experience on the flight line has become as common as it is excruciating. Now, to meet the demand and to accommodate what Dover officials expect to be increasing casualties from Afghanistan, the military has embarked on a building surge at this main entry point for the nation’s war dead.

In January, Dover opened the Center for the Families of the Fallen, a $1.6 million, 6,000-square-foot space of soft lighting and earth-toned furniture where parents, spouses, children, siblings and other relatives assemble before they are taken to the flight line. On May 1, there is to be a groundbreaking for a new $4.5 million hotel for families who need to spend the night. The same day, ground will also be broken on what Dover officials are calling a meditation center, a nondenominational space with an adjacent garden where relatives can pray or be alone.

Read the rest here.

God, Evangelicals & War

The below excerpt is from a very profound article in the Boston Globe which I recommend in its entirety. I definitely am not inclined to some of the liberal sub themes the author is presenting. However this article stands as a stark reminder that one overtly religious segment of our country's population was a major component in rallying support for a war that has proven disastrous on too many levels to itemize. It represents the extreme danger to the body politic that can result from the de facto melding of church and state. Over the last quarter century we have witnessed Protestant Evangelicalism (they used to be called Fundamentalists) become a virtual adjunct of one of the two political parties in our country. Such direct, massive and overt politicization of religion should be a source of grave alarm to any American who fears for our constitutional republic.

EARLY ONE SUNDAY morning in the spring of 2003, in the quiet hours before services would begin at the evangelical church where I worship in Charlottesville, Virginia, I opened files compiled by my research assistant and read the statements drafted by Christians around the world in opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.

The experience was profoundly moving and shaming: From Pentecostals in Brazil to the Christian Councils of Ghana, from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East to the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, from Pope John Paul II to the The Waldensian Reformed Church of Italy and the Christian Conference of Asia, the voices of our brothers and sisters in the global ecumenical church spoke in unison.

Why did American evangelicals not pause for a moment in the rush to war to consider the near-unanimous disapproval of the global Christian community? The worldwide Christian opposition seems to me the most neglected story related to the religious debate about Iraq: Despite approval for the president's decision to go to war by 87 percent of white evangelicals in April 2003, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, almost every Christian leader in the world (and almost every nonevangelical leader in the United States) voiced opposition to the war.

Food for thought.

Hat tip to Jake. (Caution: The linked site is very liberal.)