Iraq War "Ends"--Again, But Not for the Iraqis
by Thomas A. Droleskey
To reject the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King is to live under the iron rule of men whose minds are not conformed to the Sacred Deposit of Faith that Our King has entrusted exclusively to His Catholic Church for Its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.
To reject the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King is to live under the iron rule of men whose hearts are not consecrated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.
To reject the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King is to live under the iron rule of men who believe that they can "plan" or "will" "solutions" to domestic and international difficulties, convincing us that they need more and more of our money to do so.
To reject the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King is to live under the iron rule of men who wind up having no regard even for the constitutions and just civil laws that they have sworn to uphold (see He Swore to Uphold the Constitution, Not the United Nations).
To reject the sweet yoke of the Social Reign of Christ the King is to live under the iron rule of men who are mad, men who never want to admit that their schemes for prosperity at home and for peace in the world are doomed to miserable failure time after time after time (see All Caesars Go Mad.)
This country has been in one war or another, hot or cold, during most of the sixty years of my life as the military-industrial complex about which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, delivered on Tuesday, January 17, 1961, accustomed us to accept unjust wars, including wars without clearly stated goals and no true plans of what constituted victory, as just part of our daily lives. Consider again President Eisenhower's very prescient words:
Crises there
will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great
or small,there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular
and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current
difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense;
development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a
dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other
possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as
the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each
proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the
need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between
the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for
advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably
desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and
the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between
action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good
judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds
imbalance and frustration.
The
record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their
government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded
to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in
kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
A
vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our
arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential
aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military
organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my
predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War
II or Korea.
Until the
latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments
industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as
required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency
improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a
permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three
and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense
establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net
income of all United States corporations.
This
conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total
influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city,
every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize
the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to
comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood
are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the
councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never
let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic
processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial
and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals,
so that security and liberty may prosper together. (Dwight D. Eisenhower -- Farewell Address.)
Although Eisenhower did not
understand that the authentic security of one's nation is premised upon
its subordination to the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be
exercised by the Catholic Church, placing him in concert with today's
conciliar officials in the counterfeit conciliar church, the late
president and former five star General of the United States Army did
have a keen insight into the dangers posed by the rise of what he termed
so accurately as the military-industrial complex, which thrives on the
constant warfare that former President George Walker Bush and his advisers envisioned as
"necessary" to "secure" this country and "liberate" other peoples. The
precepts of the Just War Theory demand that military force be used as a
last resort in situations when there is a real and legitimate threat to a
nation's security and/or in situations where justice has been so
disturbed internationally that the only recourse to defend one's nation
and/or to restore justice is military force.
The judgment to use military force, which is
supposed to be governed in the United States of America by a declaration
of war passed by both Houses of the Congress of the United State, in
such situations must take into account many factors, including whether
the good end sought will be outweighed by the foreseen evil to be done
in the prosecution of military action. Even the best efforts to protect
noncombatants from injury and death will fail. Bombs go astray.
Noncombatants might be misidentified accidentally as combatants.
Soldiers make mistakes in the field of combat. War carries with it
terrible consequences, which is why the Catholic Church has taught from
time immemorial that every step be taken to assure, as far as is humanly
possible in this fallen world, that noncombatants are indemnified and
that the damage done to a country's infrastructure and food supply does
not create worse conditions that are meant to be redressed by the use of
military force.
The chaos wrought by the unjust and immoral invasion
of Iraq by the armed forces of the United States of America on March 19,
2003, has taken the lives of over 4,483 American service personnel
needlessly and opened up Iraq's borders, which were controlled very
tightly by the late dictator Saddam Hussein, to all kinds of Mohammedan
terrorists bent on fomenting violence among Iraq's fractious Mohammedan
sects and upon American military personnel and civilians based in that
country. While the violence has abated somewhat in the past few years, the
situation in Iraq continues to be violent and unstable. Indeed, more American troops were killed last six months ago, in June of 2011, than in any one month since 2008. And left mostly unreported
in most of the "mainstream" media are the continued attacks upon Eastern
Rite Catholics (and members of various Orthodox sects) in Iraq since
the American invasion in 2003 (see Go Tell Iraq's Catholics--and American Babies--About The "Lesser of Two Evils", As Blind Now As He As Always Been and More Catholic Blood Flows from the "Religion of Peace".)
Once again, however, we are faced with "end" to the Iraq War, although former President George Walker Bush pronounced the "end" of the war with his "mission accomplished" speech onboard the U.S.S. Lincoln on May 1, 2003:
Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking
a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and
precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without
directing violence against civilians. No device of man
can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral
advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war
than the innocent. (Applause.)
In the images of celebrating Iraqis, we have also seen
the ageless appeal of human freedom. Decades of lies and
intimidation could not make the Iraqi people love their
oppressors or desire their own enslavement. Men and women
in every culture need liberty like they need food and water
and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices;
and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear. (Applause.)
We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order
to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing
and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held
to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for
hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know
of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping
to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself,
instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with
the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government
of, by, and for the Iraqi people. (Applause.)
The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take
time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will
stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we
will leave behind a free Iraq. (Applause.)
The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that
began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on. That
terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a
hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world
a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words
of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the "beginning
of the end of America." By seeking to turn our cities
into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed
that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force
our retreat from the world. They have failed. (Applause.)
In the battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban,
many terrorists, and the camps where they trained. We continue
to help the Afghan people lay roads, restore hospitals,
and educate all of their children. Yet we also have dangerous
work to complete. As I speak, a Special Operations task
force, led by the 82nd Airborne, is on the trail of the
terrorists and those who seek to undermine the free government
of Afghanistan. America and our coalition will finish what
we have begun. (Applause.)
From Pakistan to the Philippines to the Horn of Africa,
we are hunting down al Qaeda killers. Nineteen months ago,
I pledged that the terrorists would not escape the patient
justice of the United States. And as of tonight, nearly
one-half of al Qaeda's senior operatives have been captured
or killed. (Applause.)
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign
against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and
cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is
certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass
destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is
no more. (Applause.) (End of Major Combat in Iraq.)
What about the network of terror and death and destruction that exists in this nation's abortuaries and hospitals?
As has been noted in other articles on this site,
Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug who liquidated political and ethnic
opponents at will. He did, however, maintain a sense of order in Iraq,
protecting the Christian minority there for a variety of reasons, one of
them most admittedly having to do with his own self-interest. The
neoconservative geniuses who planned the invasion of Iraq by exploiting
the events of September 11, 2001, and by manufacturing "evidence" to
"prove" that Hussein was stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction" that
he had long before destroyed (or had used after having been supplied them by the United States of America in the Iran-Iraq War and then on the Kurds in northern Iraq
in 1991 after the conclusion of the so-called "Gulf War") believed in their delusions that an American invasion would
usher in an American-style pluralist democratic republic. It never
dawned on these bright lights, many of whom, shall we say, deny the
Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that an
American invasion would go bad or that a "liberated" Iraq would make it
easier for various Mohammedan sects to wreak violence upon Catholics.
The flight of over a quarter of million of Iraqi Catholics from their
homeland since the American invasion in 2003 has been one of the most
tragic consequences of the neoconservatives' efforts to build a "better
world," principally, as they saw it, for the security of the State of
Israel, by means of the "enlightenment" provided by a quick war
prosecuted with advanced technologies
Finally, however, we are supposed to be believe that the Iraq War is over as result of the withdrawal of the last remaining American troops:
BAGHDAD — At a crowded market in the city center here, the flotsam of
the war is for sale. Ripped Fuel workout supplement. Ready-to-eat meals,
macaroni-and-cheese “Mexican style.” Pistol holsters. Nothing seems off
limits to the merchants out for a quick dinar, not even a bottle of
prescription pills from a pharmacy in Waco, Tex., probably tossed out by
a departing soldier.
The concrete blast walls that shielded the shopping stalls have lately
come down. Since then, three explosions have struck the market, killing
several people.
“This will be an easy target for car bombs,” said Muhammad Ali, a
merchant who lost two brothers during the cruelest times of the
conflict. “People will die here.”
After nearly nine years, some 4,500 American fatalities and about $1 trillion, America’s war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish Thursday with a modest
ceremony at the airport days before the last troops traverse the
southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the
United States’ most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since
Vietnam.
Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not
exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop
“surge,” but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and
political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future,
for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” Emad Risn, an Iraqi columnist,
recently wrote in the pages of Assabah al-Jadeed, a government-funded
newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis, too.”
Iraq will be on its own to find its place in a region upended by
revolutions and to manage its rivalry with Iran, which will look to
expand its influence culturally and economically in the power vacuum
left by the United States military. While American officials worry about
the close political ties between Iraq’s Shiite leadership and Iran, the
picture at the grass-roots level is more nuanced. Iraqis complain about
shoddy Iranian consumer goods — they frequently mention low-quality
yogurts and cheeses — and the menacing role of Iranian-backed militias,
which this year killed many American soldiers.
The Iranian rivalry frequently plays out in the Shiite holy city of
Najaf, where Iraq’s religious authorities are headquartered. Iran, which
like Iraq is majority Shiite, recently installed one of its leading
clerics in Najaf, raising worries that Iran is trying to spread its
brand of clerical rule to Iraq. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the
anti-American cleric with very close ties to Iran, has recently said
that with the military withdrawal, American diplomats are now fair game
for his militiamen.
Iraq faces a multitude of vexing problems the Americans tried and failed to resolve, from how to divide the country’s oil wealth to sectarian reconciliation to the establishment of an impartial
justice system. A long-standing dispute festers in the north over how
to share power in Kirkuk between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, an ominous
harbinger for power struggles that may ensue in a post-America Iraq. A
recent deal between Exxon Mobil and the Kurdistan government has been
deemed illegal by Baghdad in the absence of procedures for sharing the
country’s oil resources.
“We are in a standstill and things are paralyzed,” said Adel Abdul
Mahdi, a prominent Shiite politician and former vice president of Iraq,
describing the process of political reconciliation between Iraq’s three
main factions, Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. “We are going from bad to
worse.”
A surprising number of Iraqis refuse to believe the Americans are really
leaving, the effect of a conspiratorial mindset developed over years
living under the violent and repressive dictatorship of Saddam Hussein,
and a view of history informed by the Crusades, colonialism and other
perceived injustices at the hands of the West.
Rani Basil, who drives a taxi in the capital, said, “Iraq will be a
great place if the U.S. withdraws,” but he does not believe they will.
“I do not think the United States will leave Iraq, because they are
about to attack Iran,” he said. (Ravaged and Remade, Iraq Is on Its Own as U.S. Ends War.)
The Iraqis know more about the truth of their country than do most Americans, diverted by bread and circuses into thinking that the unjust and immoral American invasion and occupation of Iraq has made this country "free" and planted the seedlings of a "vibrant democracy."
Nearly a trillion of American taxpayer dollars have been spent thus far to buy the arms
that destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and to fight the armed
resistance against the invasion and occupation while at the same time
attempting to put down a civil war among Iraq's Mohammedans. Billions
more have been spent rebuilding the infrastructure that was destroyed by
"coalition" munitions, a rebuilding effort that has been characterized
by sloth and incompetence that have left millions of ordinary Iraqis
without basic services (water, electricity, sanitary facilities,
housing). American corporations and private contractors, at least one of
which was hired to engage in "enhanced interrogation" methods (read:
torture), and individual American entrepreneurs with ties to the
administration of former President George Walker Bush have been the real
beneficiaries of all this while almost nothing has been done to
alleviate the suffering of the nearly three-quarters of a million
Catholics who have stayed in Iraq, to say nothing of the plight of those
who left the country to go into exile, forfeiting their homes to
Mohammedan mobs who are grateful now to be rid of the "infidels" once and for all.
For what? For what? For the prospect of yet a major war in the Middle East that will, despite the judgment of some "experts," result in a confrontation between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--excuse me, Russia? (See Power Shifts Push Mideast Closer to War.) Mohammedans who take their blasphemous false religion seriously are on the ascent in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. The nation that controls almost the entirety of American military policy in the Middle East, Israel, will sit still if such a war breaks out. A world where Christ is not King and Our Lady is not honor as Queen is one where men, steeped in one error after another, will war against each other because they are war with God by means of their unrepentant sins. We will live in a world of endless wars that will make the "just ended" American occupation of Iraq and the ongoing "global war on terror" that is taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan seem like mere skirmishes in comparison.
Remember these words of Pope Pius XI, contained in his first encyclical letter, Ubi Arcano Consilio, December 23, 1922:
There exists an institution able to
safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part
of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys,
too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the
Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is
adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned
to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the
constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions
and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly
increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a
venture where others assuredly will fail.
It is apparent from these considerations that true
peace, the peace of Christ, is impossible unless we are willing and
ready to accept the fundamental principles of Christianity, unless we
are willing to observe the teachings and obey the law of Christ, both in
public and private life. If this were done, then society being placed
at last on a sound foundation, the Church would be able, in the exercise
of its divinely given ministry and by means of the teaching authority
which results therefrom, to protect all the rights of God over men and
nations.
It is possible to sum up all We have said in one
word, "the Kingdom of Christ." For Jesus Christ reigns over the minds of
individuals by His teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each
one's life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His
example. Jesus reigns over the family when it, modeled after the holy
ideals of the sacrament of matrimony instituted by Christ, maintains
unspotted its true character of sanctuary. In such a sanctuary of love,
parental authority is fashioned after the authority of God, the Father,
from Whom, as a matter of fact, it originates and after which even it is
named. (Ephesians iii, 15) The obedience of the children imitates that
of the Divine Child of Nazareth, and the whole family life is inspired
by the sacred ideals of the Holy Family. Finally, Jesus Christ reigns
over society when men recognize and reverence the sovereignty of Christ,
when they accept the divine origin and control over all social forces, a
recognition which is the basis of the right to command for those in
authority and of the duty to obey for those who are subjects, a duty
which cannot but ennoble all who live up to its demands. Christ reigns
where the position in society which He Himself has assigned to His
Church is recognized, for He bestowed on the Church the status and the
constitution of a society which, by reason of the perfect ends which it
is called upon to attain, must be held to be supreme in its own sphere;
He also made her the depository and interpreter of His divine teachings,
and, by consequence, the teacher and guide of every other society
whatsoever, not of course in the sense that she should abstract in the
least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she
should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects
human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men
to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and by that very fact
make them the more deserving and certain promoters of their happiness
here below.
It is, therefore, a fact which cannot be questioned
that the true peace of Christ can only exist in the Kingdom of Christ
-- "the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ." It is no less
unquestionable that, in doing all we can to bring about the
re-establishment of Christ's kingdom, we will be working most
effectively toward a lasting world peace. (Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922.)
We must, therefore, bear the cross with joy and gratitude in this time of chastisement, recognizing that the errors of Modernity in the world and those of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism are intertwined with each other as but similar manifestations of the errors of Russia (see Conversion of Russia Update). We have much to suffer for our own sins. We must suffer well as we place not our trust in the princes of naturalism in this world or the princes of false "reconciliation" and "dialogue" with false religions in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. We must place our trust in the Immaculate Heart of Mary as we give this heart, out which the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus was formed, all of the sufferings of the present moment so that she can present whatever merit we earn from patiently and lovingly enduring them to the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity.
Catholicism is the one and only foundation of social order. You have heard this before? You will keep hearing until the day I die or the day that I am unable to continue work on this site as a result of physical and/or mental infirmity, whichever shall first occur (and I realize that some of you believe that the latter condition obtains at the present time). Catholicism is the only and only foundation of personal and social order. Period. It is Catholicism alone that men and their nations are reconciled to Christ the King through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary our Queen, who has given us Heaven's Peace Plan, her Fatima Message, as the means by which the errors of Russia, which are the the errors of Modernity in the world and of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
We must, therefore, enfold ourselves into the love of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as we make reparation for our own many sins, which are so responsible for the worsening of the state of the Church Militant on earth and of the world-at-large, as we seek to restore all things in Christ the King and Mary our Immaculate Queen, praying as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits.
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
