Is Christianity under attack?

Tom DeLay says there is a "war on Christianity" in America

Hardball
MSNBC


Evangelical Christians met up for a Washington event called War on Christians and the Values Voters of 2006 this week. Speakers gave impassioned testimonies about Christian persecution across the country.

At the event, Tom DeLay had this to say: "We are, after all, a society that abides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and often treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition. Seen from this perspective of course there is a war on Christianity."

Chris Matthews discussed this with Al Sharpton, a former presidential candidate and the president of National Action Network, and Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council.

MATTHEWS: Tony, do you believe that Christianity is under active assault politically right now?

PERKINS: It's not just me, Chris. A poll by the anti-defamation league end of last year, 64 percent of Americans say religion in America is under attack. Eighty percent of evangelicals agree that religion in this country, in particular, Christianity, is under attack.

MATTHEWS: What are the specifics of that charge?

PERKINS: Well, clearly, it's not a war on Christianity like we talked about last week with Abdul Rahman and what he was under, but it's a hostility nonetheless. I mean, just last week in San Francisco, 25,000 young evangelicals gathered there for a rally, and the board of supervisors passed a resolution.

It's first time I've ever seen a legislature pass a resolution condemning them as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist group that spreads hate. That was the official language. I mean, you see that. You see Indiana were the legislature there no longer allowed to open their sessions in prayer, if they pray in the name of Jesus.

…

Iraqi Perspectives Project

A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam's Senior Leadership

By Kevin M Woods et al
United States Joint Forces Command


Wikipedia highlights:

• A shorter analysis of these documents by the study's principal authors, Pentagon analysts Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray entitled "Saddam's Delusions" argues that the documents above all confirm that Saddam's overall strategic calculus was based on misinformation and faulty judgement regarding the country's confrontation with the United States. "As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far," the authors wrote, for example, "there was no national plan to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of a military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such a plan as its world crumbled around it. Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power. And his military and civilian bureaucrats went through their daily routines until the very end."
  
  
• Prior to the war, Iraq's long term goal was to use its oil revenues to influence the UN (particularly France and Russia) and lift sanctions. (Study, page 90). However, Saddam also believed that for diplomatic purposes, he had to convince numerous competitors that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, particularly since the belief in his WMD increased his status in the Arab world. (Study, pages 91–93). For example, Chemical Ali reported that while he personally believed that Iraq did not have WMD, "Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack." (Study, page 92). Saddam's deceptions on the issue of WMD were sufficiently successful that even months after the 2003 war, senior Iraqi officials continued to believe it possible "that Iraq still possessed a WMD capacity hidden away somewhere." Ironically, these officials' belief were based on a combination of Saddam's deceptions, the secrecy and compartmentalization of the Iraqi government, and on the Iraqi officials' faith in the CIA assessments of the Iraqi governments WMD programs. (Study, page 92).
  
  
• The study also cites documents demonstrating that key evidence presented by Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2003 had been misinterpreted by the U.S. government. According to the study, Saddam decided in 2002 to attempt to persuade the UN that Iraq was free of WMD. However, after a decade of intentional attempts to deceive weapons inspectors, Western intelligence services interpreted instructions such as a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders discussing the removal of the words "nerve agents" from "the wireless instructions," or to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it," the intelligence services interpreted those instructions as an attempt to conceal WMD rather than ensure compliance with UN regulations. "What was meant to prevent suspicion thus ended up heightening it." (Study, pages 93–94).
  
  
• Even so, there is additional evidence of failure to cooperate on the part of the Iraqis. For example, a December 15, 2002 memo from an undercover Iraqi Intelligence escort for a UN inspection team wrote: "Inside Bader WMD inspection site, there are Russian and Turkish scientists. When we visited the site, they were forced to hide from inspectors' eyes." The study authors concluded that "even when viewed through a post-war lens, documentary evidence of messages are consistent with the Iraqi Survey Group's conclusion that Saddam was at least keeping a WMD program primed for a quick re-start the moment the UN Security Council lifted sanctions. (Study, page 95).

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Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways

The Situation Room


WOLF BLITZER: The Bush administration says Iran, with its suspect nuclear program, may be the greatest challenge facing this country. But just today, the president counseled some patience.

BUSH: It's important for our citizens to understand that we have got to deal with this issue diplomatically now. And the reason why is because, if the Iranians were to have a nuclear weapon, they could blackmail the world.

BLITZER: But there are times when the United States should strike first to prevent terror attacks or to blunt a threat by weapons of mass destruction — at least, that's the argument that the Bush administration makes.

The administration's own national security blueprint says, that option is absolutely necessary for America's self-defense. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz takes up the issue in his latest book. It's entitled "Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways."

Alan Dershowitz is joining us live now from New York.

Alan, thanks very much for joining us.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Hi, Wolf. Thank you.

BLITZER: What does that mean, a knife that cuts both ways?

DERSHOWITZ: Well, preemption should never be taken off the table. We only wish that Britain and France had preempted Nazi Germany in the 1930s and avoided the Second World War.

… It may be necessary to use preemption against Iran. It's possible that we picked the wrong target to preempt, when we went after Iraq. But these are some of the issues that I discuss in "Preemption."

And I try to come up with a jurisprudence, a framework for analysis, when we should preempt, when we shouldn't preempt.

BLITZER: So, what is — what are some of the moments when the United States — or any country, for that matter — has the moral, the legal, the political right to launch a preemptive strike? Give us a few examples.

DERSHOWITZ: Well, primarily when the people who are threatening to attack us can't be deterred, when they're suicide bombers. And you can't deter a suicide bomber by threatening to kill him or imprison him.

So, we may have to go after suicide bombers preemptively. And I think everybody agrees with that, the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. The question really is whether you go after a nation preemptively. And a nation like Nazi Germany, yes. A nation like Iran, perhaps. It's a very, very complicated issue.

I think any government that could have prevented 9/11, or the subway attacks in London, or the Bali attacks outside of — killing many Australian citizens, would have preempted, if they could have. So, it should never be taken off the table.

When your previous guest, Helen Thomas, says she's against preemptive war, that's like being against punishment, or being against any concept. You can't be against preemptive war. You can be cautious about it, and say it should rarely be used, but everybody will agree that, on certain occasions, a preemptive attack to prevent imminent harm is not only desirable, but lawful, under international law.

BLITZER: Here's what you write in your book: "No one can be certain what the effects of a successful or failed preemptive strike on Iran, for example, would be, except that the law of unintended consequences would rear its always unpredictable and often ugly head."

In other words, let's get to the issue of Iran right now, which is in the news. Under what circumstances would the U.S. be authorized to launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear reactors, facilities, along the lines of what the Israelis did at the Iraqi Osirak reactor back in 1981?

DERSHOWITZ: Well, I think the United States already is lawfully authorized, as is Israel, to attack Iran. The leaders of Iran have said that, if they develop a nuclear bomb, they will use it to wipe one of the United States' allies, Israel, off the face of the Earth.

And we can't ignore that kind of threat made by the leader of a country. The question is not whether it's lawfully authorized, but whether it is wise. Right now, it would not, in my view, be wise, because there is a strong dissident movement in Iran.

And the one thing all Iranians agree about, whether they want regime change or not, is, they do agree that Iran should be able to get nuclear weapons. So, we would probably end the dissident movement at this point, which is why I agree with the president that diplomacy has to come first, every option, short of preemptive war.

Moreover, the Osirak model doesn't work. Osirak was a one-shot attack, only one casualty. Israel managed to disable virtually all of the Iraqi nuclear capacity. That is not true now.

In Iran, there are many nuclear facilities buried underground, some of them perhaps under schools in Baghdad (sic). It would take a multifaceted attack on Iran to set back their nuclear program by perhaps 10 or a dozen years.

BLITZER: That raises this other issues — and you discuss it in your book — a preemptive strike that you know is going to result, not only in the destruction of the target, but in what they call collateral damage. A lot of innocent civilians, women and children are going to be killed. When is that justified?

DERSHOWITZ: Well, actually, preemptive attacks have far fewer civilian, in general, than reactive attacks, because preemptive attacks are always directed against military targets. Israel, preemptive attack in Osirak, or the preemptive war in 1967 caused very few casualties.

When you retaliate, tit-for-tat retaliation — you bomb our city, we will bomb your city — you are targeting civilians. So, in terms of civilian casualties, preemption generally causes fewer civilian casualties.

But the downside, the reason it's a knife that cuts both ways, is that, when you preempt, you don't know whether you have prevented anything. You don't know whether or not there would have been an attack. You are always basing something on probabilistic inferences, whereas, whether you wait — when you wait to be attacked, you know you have been attacked, and you have to respond.

But, sometimes, the stakes are simply too high. The risk of a nuclear attack is too high. And if we could prevent it, if we knew it was imminent and relatively certain, we would have an obligation to do that, even though the law of unintended consequences could produce terrible, unforeseeable consequences, as they have in Iraq. So, use it with caution, if you're going to use it at all.

BLITZER: Does the world community, the international community, need new international law to codify, if you will, this whole issue of preemptive strikes?

DERSHOWITZ: Yes. And, in my book, "Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways," I talk about the U.N. actually now redefining the charter. …

Why the US went to war

Press Conference
The White House


Helen Thomas, Press Corps: … My question is, why did you really want to go to war? … You have said it wasn't oil — quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?

The President: … I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect. … No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We — when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that's why I went into Iraq…

I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That's why I went to the Security Council; that's why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.

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Cherry picking

Inside Politics

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"Both ABC News and The Washington Post ignored their own poll that showed a majority of Americans support electronic eavesdropping by the FBI and the NSA to combat terrorism — but they did report some poll results that fit their liberal media agenda," the Media Research Center reports at www.mrc.org.

Instead, ABC's "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America," as well as The Post, "all stressed how 80 percent believe 'civil war' is likely in Iraq," the MRC said.

"ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas and political commentator George Stephanopoulos also ignored Bush's approval level of 41 percent, 7 points higher than the 'all-time low' for Bush last week in a CBS News poll which was much-touted by the networks. That 41 percent number, however, is just 1 point lower than the 42 percent level in the last ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in January — well within the 3-point margin of error.

"Nonetheless, on Tuesday's 'Good Morning America,' Robin Roberts asserted that 'President Bush's job approval rating has sunk to a new career low.'"

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