More sunny news out of Iraq

Interesting article on a demonstration at the European Union headquarters held today, which hoped to draw attention to persecution of Christians in Iraq.

This isn't something I'd thought a lot about until last year, when an Iraqi Christian minister (I want to say he was Presbyterian...) spoke to a class at Salem. Listening to him was absolutely heartbreaking. He talked about how, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, Christians in Iraq were pretty much left alone. Not that Saddam was pro-Christian...It was more that, being the shrewd dictator that he was, Saddam understood that a healthy Christian minority counter-balanced the Shia majority, so that the Sunni Muslims could stay in power more easily.

(Side rant: Saddam's dictatorship was secular. Al-Qaeda are fundie radicals. So, you know, not people who would logically EVER work together, no matter how bad Bush/Cheney, et al, would like to pretend they would. It would be like if Bill Maher and Pat Robertson joined forces. Just sayin'.)

I'm not at all suggesting that the world is not a better place with Saddam gone. But the plight of Christians in Iraq today - regularly targeted by the Islamic fundamentalists largely kept down during Saddam's regime - is one of the many subtleties that this administration (not to mention the media) glossed over in the run-up to the war. Read this article from Christian World News for more.

Some 30,000 Christians have fled Iraq since 2003, when this war started. Most of them, according to the minister that I heard speak, end up in Egypt or other Middle Eastern countries, where Christians may or may not be exactly embraced. It's hard for them to be granted asylum in the U.S., because that would involve our government admitting that Iraq is unsafe for them in the long-term...something this administration can't do for political reasons.

I hope you're not looking for me to lay out a quick solution to this, because I don't have one. As badly as I want every American soldier out of the quagmire in Iraq yesterday, I can't help thinking about how the withdrawal would affect the lives of ordinary, non-whackjob fundie Iraqis like that minister, who spoke movingly of how much worse things would be if not for the protection of our military there. Like I said, it absolutely breaks my heart.