"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
How churches played into Iraq's hands: From an opinion piece by Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Church leaders would be well advised to step down from the pulpit and assess their own responsibility for the conflict. For there is considerable evidence that Saddam and his advisers, including Aziz, took comfort from the give-peace-a-chance line that found expression in the governments of France, Germany and Russia and the so-called peace movement.
In January Saddam was reported as having hailed the anti-war protests as a sign that Bush's "evil and destructive policies" did not have support at home (Britain's Weekly Telegraph, January 23). The following month Mohammed Mehdi Saleh, a senior Iraqi official, said that the fact that "demonstrations took place" against Bush and Blair indicated the coalition of the willing would not take military action (The International Herald Tribune, February 24).
No group in the West protested more actively than the Christian churches. An unintended consequence of Aziz's audience with the Pope was to send a false message to Saddam in Baghdad. He came to believe that the West was too soft to stand up to Iraq. Sure, as Stalin is reported to have commented, the Pope has no military divisions. But other Christian believers - in particular, Bush and Blair - do, thus demonstrating that not all Christian soldiers are cut from the same cloth.
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