American Catholics need to deal with the following “facts on the ground.”
1. “Iraq no longer exists.”
see Malarkey on the Potomac by Andrew Bacevich.
2. Christians are leaving that area and won’t be going back.
see Isis in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn:
“But in the past six months Father Yako has changed his mind, and he now believes that, after 2,000 years of history, Christians must leave Iraq. Speaking at the entrance of a half-built mall in the Kurdish capital Irbil where 1,650 people from Qaraqosh have taken refuge, he said that ‘everything has changed since the coming of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State). We should flee. There is nothing for us here.’”
3. The United States government caused this catastophe.
see Hagel Didn’t Start the Fire by Pat Buchanan:
“But what were the ‘decisions’ that produced the ‘incredible debacle’?…
The first would be George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, a war for which Sens. John McCain, Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all voted.”
I would like to see this group organize protests against American militarism in the manner that Dan and Phil Berrigan did during the Vietnam War. We are now in greater danger of nuclear war than ever, including 1962. For now there are no summit conferences. There are only punitive sanctions, transformation of NATO into an interventionist force that now plants fascist governments on the Russian border. We have nothing but hawks in Congress. Even the progressives like Bernie Sanders never speak out about the hyper-militarism of present bipartisan American foreign policy. The last Congress member interested in peace was Dennis Kucinich, who was gerrymandered out of office by the right wing putsch that has happened throughout American government over the past several years, courtesy of the Koch brothers, sons of a founder of the far right John Birth Society. We are a fascist state in everything but name. There is no democracy left. The Ukraine disaster was fully orchestrated by imperialist Neocons, such as Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, married to arch-Neocon Robert Kagan. They backed, enabled and endorsed the coup. The coup is illegal under international law. Yet Russia is blamed. Western media is lockstep anti-Russian. And this is a capitalist Russia in which the Russian Orthodox Church has been restored to the place it held before the Russian But the Money Power that rules much of the world behaves like drunken compulsive gamblers in a casino. All they can see is their own financial gain. Monsanto wants to grow their GMO grain in Ukraine, the bread basket of that part of the world, and Big Oil wants to frack there. The Money Power controls all three branches of the American government, having been given that power by a thoroughly corrupt, criminal, traitorous Supreme Court majority. Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan and other conservatives from the Reagan and Nixon administration have stated this in their writings. See Roberts’s website under his name. Buchanan is on Unz and Antiwar. On the left, Noam Chomsky says many of the same things, particularly as regards NATO and the threat of nuclear war. Mikhail Gorbachev has warned about the danger of nuclear war, starting as a result of NATO expansion and encroachment on Russia, and arming Kiev’s fascists. Public protests ought to be organized against the American warfare state and endless war.
that should read Russian Orthodox Church has been restored to the place it held before the Russian Revolution.