The Annihilation of Iraq's Christian Minority

Absolutely correct. Wherever Islam rules there is a dictatorship of some kind or another. There is also a desert and great poverty.

Doug,
Sorry to burst your anti-George W bubble, but Moslems have been carrying on like this since Islam started.
You make it sound like it was wonderful for Christians under Moslems in the Middle East, till big bad George W showed up.
Just ain't so, Doug. Sorry.
In 600 CE, North Africa was 80% Christian, 10% Jewish and 10% pagan.
In 700 CE, it was 90% Moslem, 5% Christian and 5% Jewish.
With lots of grovelling, lots of jizya payments, and occasional pogroms and kidnapping of young girls and boys, Christians and Jews succeeded in holding on, barely. But constantly, if more slowly, going down in number.
But every once in a while, there would be outbreaks of massacres or forced conversions, etc.
And it did not need an outside trigger.
For example, when the Wahabis started in Nejd [part of today's Saudi Arabia] in the 18th C., Jews and Christians, living in the area in a fragile but till then stable arrangement with their Moslem masters, were all of a sudden forced to convert or die. Yemenite Rabbis wrote dirges about the massacres.
Could George W have done more to get endangered Christians out? Yes, definitely.
The problem is, that Westerners thought the problem was ISIS/ Daesh [Doula Islamiya].
In reality, Islam and its murderous and totalitarian attitude towards other Faiths, is the problem.

And Moslems aren't insane. But their religion might be...

What a mistake to think that these Muslim countries can adopt democracy. That is Americas mistake to take out Saddam. Assad was doing a good job, qadafi was good to his country, Mubarak also. Muslim countries can only live under the whip of dictatorship, they cannot and will never have anything like democracies. Sharia law is to treat your country like dogs. Can you imagine half the Muslim population with only one hand.

The Egyptian police have made their presence felt by shooting "fugitive terrorist elements" of seven Coptics who died after an attack on two buses. (BBC News). Nasser had a purge on the Muslim Brotherhood, after a gunman shot eight times, but missed, which gave Nasser a golden opportunity to rally the country around him, removing dissidents.

very true, John; the very concepts of the freedom guaranteed by the constitution were derived directly from our judeo-christian heritage. the ancient greeks had democracy, and the ancient romans had a republic, but both had slaves, and "work" was something that slaves and really poor people did. citizenship was for those who were rich, because obviously, the gods were on their side; everybody who wasn't rich and powerful was not eligible. furthermore, the society of greek and rome were *NOT* like our civil society. again, if one were wealthy, one was treated respectfully by one's subordinates and peers, and even sometimes by those who were more wealthy and powerful. everybody else was treated like dirt, and those who had power would have considered our republic a mongrel state, doomed to fail because it was led by the underclass, who were too stupid to rule. judaism, and even more, christianity, changed the very rules of society, and gave us the ideal (although not the reality in the beginning) of all being treated equally.

now the left, who have controlled education, and thus the outlook of all our citizens, for decades now, has abandoned christianity and christians, and is allowing the pirate cult of islam to spread its hate everywhere. unsurprisingly, antisemitism, which is part and parcel of islam, is on the rise, and the left does not even acknowledge it, let alone try to do anything about it. at the very best, we are headed for the uncivil society of ancient greece and rome; what is much more likely is that our civilization will die out altogether, to be replaced by the gangsta cult of islam. islam is not a civilization, so technically, this is not a clash of civilizations, but is rather the attack of a diseased parasitic society on civilization. the result will be much like pakistan and afghanistan, except that in 300 or 400 years or so, 99% of all humans will be like the poorest peasants there today, and all knowledge of history, science, culture, and art will be gone.

we either drive almost all muslims out of our nations, sending them back to the s**thole nations from which they came, or civilization will end; it's that simple.

I agree 100%. Thanks for your thoughts on the matter.

well, rather than cast aspersions on the coalition forces, it is best to attack the leaders of the coalition, who are political types, not military. and yes, Michael, they should have killed the ulema and razed all the mosques. furthermore, the practice of islam should also have been made illegal, and the teaching of *why* islam is horrible, monstrous, and poisonous should have been required in every classroom in every school.

unfortunately, that would require a centuries-long military occupation of all muslim countries in order to ensure that the cult died out. another approach which i saw proposed, far more radical, could work in a single generation, but it would have been close to genocide and was utterly evil. the proposal was that every muslim country be occupied militarily, islam made illegal in all countries in the world, and all children removed from muslim parents and given to non-muslim parents. it would not matter *what* religion (including atheism) the adoptive parents had, so long as it was not islam. this approach indeed would have taken but a single generation to work, but the evil necessary to carry it out is so breathtakingly monstrous that even when i am most angry with the left and pious muslims, i do not even begin to be willing to desire that we do it.

i think that the best for which we can hope is to isolate most muslims in their own nations. islam is a mind disease, with which most of its victims are infected in early childhood, when they are most susceptible to mental manipulation. any ideas implanted in early childhood are extraordinarily difficult to overcome later, and by adulthood, the possibility that a muslim might reject his cult is almost zero absent a miracle. we don't want to attack disease victims, which is what muslims essentially are, but by the same token, proximity to muslims can be, and often is, fatal to non-muslims. hence, we must limit them to their own nations.

it is sad that almost 2 billion people are poisoned by this mind disease, but other than prayer, there is little that any non-muslim can do, since there is essentially only one cure: the victim must accept a different religion. since the pious among the ummah are vigilant, it is important for an apostate to hide his apostasy to stay alive. currently, the ummah has been under the influence of the non-muslim world for about 100 years. in the best of times for the ummah (the worst for everybody else), the ulema kept most muslims in the dark; the average muslim has always been told what to do at friday khutbah rather than reading it for himself in the quran and sunnah, and that has not changed in the past century. that 100 years of positive influence from europeans and their judeo-christian heritage helped mellow a lot of muslims, and we can still reach them, but because we can't read minds, we must prevent almost all of them from living among us.

we must also stop buying petroleum and petroleum products from any muslim nation. there are other sources of energy; for instance, we could put mirror farms and nuclear reactors into high earth orbit, crack water into H2 and O2, and send them back to earth in autonomous re-entry vehicles. the H2 could be burned at electric plants (the better to collect and eliminate NOx emissions, if any), and the salafists of saudi barbaria could go suck oil sand. without burning petroleum, there would be *lots* of it available for chemical feedstocks (plastics, etc.), and the carbon footprint of the human race would shrink to a fraction of its current value.

all this would be very expensive, but it isn't only governments that can put vehicles into orbit now; there is no reason that investors couldn't pull it off. furthermore, since we are at *W*A*R* with the pirate cult, *any* cost is acceptable in order to survive. and finally, we need to vote out the traitors who are ensuring that civilization has no future, arrest them, try them, and if found guilty, imprison them for life (no matter how long that may be).

there is zero chance of *any* of this happening; instead, those who are betraying us are ensuring the destruction of civilization, and only the most slimy among them, the most hard-core of the left, who will become muslims when the time is appropriate (sword at the neck), will live. it is only fitting that these f***ing bottom-dwelling parasitic creatures - our lying, treasonous "leaders" - take a place among the most cutthroat monsters of history, responsible for more deaths than all non-muslim dictators of every stripe in history, put together.

There are biblical precedents for wars of annihilation. The critical factor in justifying the extermination of the Canaanites and the Amalekites was that they defied God's judgements manifested in signs and wonders that put the fear of Him into all the people who witnessed the Exodus. So they were fighting their consciences as they fought the Israelites. Except for the Amalekites, who had neither conscience nor fear of the Lord.

No, I do not agree that the destruction of a criminal ideology/religion would be genocide, provided that the Muslims were first given an opportunity to change their religion, failing which mass destruction would be unleashed on them.

Muslims are idolaters in violation of their own consciences, in that they render to Muhammad the reverence, love and obedience, and the sanctity, that are due to God alone, knowing him to be only a man.

The analysis would depend on what the original purpose was, and how much success there was in attaining it. I certainly can't speak for the Bush administration, or know what their intentions may have been, but I can give an assessment of the Iraq situation based on what I understood it to be at the time (and why I would have invaded Iraq, had I been in W's position).

The Iraq invasion had nothing to do with Saddam, his weaponry, or any of the other reasons given to the public. It was the answer to the military question of how to bring an enemy (al-Qaida and affiliated terrorist groups) to battle that has no state, seat of government, industrial base, transportation system, military installations, etc. to attack. The invasion of Iraq was to provide the terrorists with an Arab-Muslim state that they would find it in their interest to defend from the infidel invasion (and with hopes of ruling it whenever the Americans left). They came by the tens of thousands to fight, and were killed by the tens of thousands. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the effort, and lost so many of their more intelligent people that they've had no competent leadership, and haven't been able in the fifteen years since the invasion to mount a substantial terrorist attack (equalling, or surpassing what they did in New York in September 2001).

By this standard, Iraq was very successful militarily. But, what the Bush administration did in the aftermath, in the writing of a constitution, the type of government they imposed, and the people selected to run it, was a stupid disaster. Almost anything would have been better than what they did -- giving Iraq back to Saddam would have been better.

JB, i have been researching, as time permits, why antisemitism exists among christians. the reason i initially became curious was that the first christians *were* jews. they were indeed persecuted by the jewish authorities (or at least, as much as the romans would allow), but the christian doctrine about oppression is to turn the other cheek when struck in the face, to love one's enemies, and to pray for them. the gospel has always been that Jesus died to save *all* from sin, since none can save themselves. it was not really the romans or the jewish authorities who killed Him; it was *ME*, or rather, my sin, and the sin of every other human being, that killed Him. He died to cover our sin, which will ultimately allow us to be in the presence of G-d. a hatred of jews for killing Jesus simply demonstrates a deep MISunderstanding of christianity.

i have found no writings of the early church fathers that teach that jews must suffer, but there seems to have been an idea (where it arose i have not yet found; i'm a slow researcher with other irons in the fire) that jews should not be killed, but also that they should not prosper - rather like the attitude of muslims towards those pesky "people of the book," upon whom muslims run a protection racket. over time, that attitude among christians has receded, but it most certainly has not disappeared.

furthermore, i recently read a comment from a londoner, who complained that a nearby community of assyrian christians from the middle east was essentially a community of thugs. when one looks at the mafia, whom i thought had perfected, if not invented, the protection racket, one finds that muslims ruled sicily for over 250 years; perhaps the mafia called it "la cosa nostra" (our thing) to differentiate the gang from the muslim gang that ran the entire island. finally, spain was occupied by muslims for 700 years, and spanish culture is decidedly more macho than other european cultures. might it not be that when one lives under the domination of muslims, and witnesses innumerable thuggish behaviors in day to day life, one unconsciously adapts such behaviors as one's own? in other words, perhaps western christians like myself must do more - *much* more - to encourage christians from the middle east to become more accustomed to civilized behavior, and point out that if they are really christians, it is utterly evil to attack jews for the death of Christ, because the blame for that is on us all.