 By Roberto Rivera y Carlo|Published Date: May 24, 2010
Current plans call for the withdrawal of all but 50,000 troops from Iraq by August 31st. While, by any reasonable standard, 50,000 troops are a lot of troops, the political reality is that the American people, with the obvious exception of service members and their families, have already put the war, Iraq, and its people behind them.
This would be true even if the ostensible mission had been accomplished. Given the – shall we say? – uncertain outcome of our involvement in Mesopotamia, it’s understandable that we are especially ready to get the you-know-what out of Dodge.
We’re in such a hurry to get out that we don’t notice the bodies we’re stepping over: the ones belonging to Iraqi Christians.
On May 2nd, two buses containing Christian university students and workers were bombed as they traveled between Hamdaniya to Mosul in northern Iraq. One person, a nineteen-year-old named Sandy Shibib, was killed and 188 were injured. The sense of outrage and vulnerability caused by this attack and others like it were captured by one of Shibib’s schoolmates who told Reuters that “we were heading to university, not to a battlefield. We carried no weapons. Nevertheless, we were targeted.”
Being targeted is something that Iraqi Christians have become accustomed to: last Christmas Eve, in the run-up to Iraq’s national elections, a Christian bus driver in Mosul was pulled from his bus and killed. The day before, a bomb inside a 1200-year-old church killed two worshippers and injured another five.
Attacks on Christians led to a “toning-down” of Christmas celebrations across Iraq and caused Christmas Eve masses to be celebrated in the afternoon instead of at midnight, as tradition holds.
If being a Christian minority in an overwhelming Islamic society weren’t bad enough, Iraqi Christians’ ancient homeland, the Nineveh Plains, sits atop some of the world’s richest oilfields. The other groups, especially the Kurds, covet the revenues these fields represent and they, unlike the Christians, have militias.
So whether it’s being despised as Christians or being targeted by those coveting their land, the end result is the same: at best, Christians have to “keep a low profile,” even at Christmas, so as not to “provoke” attacks or they become Iraq’s punching bag.
As I have noted elsewhere, even a nail sometimes yells “enough!” The latest attack prompted approximately 3,000 Christians to march through the streets of Hamdaniya. The Council of Christian Church Leaders of Iraq issued a statement that called on the government to take steps to insure the safety of Iraqi Christians in Nineveh province.
As if to underscore how low their expectations of life in Iraq have become, they also demanded that the students targeted by the bombers be allowed to take their final exams “in a safe place” and not “forfeit the current academic year.”
They shouldn’t hold their breath: at best, the fate of Christians isn’t a priority, or even a concern, of the various Shiite factions jockeying for power in Baghdad.
Little wonder, then, that since the 2003 invasion, half of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country. It’s why, despite only being 3 or 4 percent of the population, Christians are 40 percent of Iraqi refugees.
The bottom line is that, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put it, Christianity in Iraq is being “obliterated.” A campaign of what Daniel Jonah Goldhagen would call “eliminationist” violence against Iraq’s Christians is being waged in full view of the world for the second time in less than 100 years.
The first one, called Sayfo in Aramaic, took place at the same time and was perpetrated by the same people as the Armenian genocide. Between 1914 and 1920, at least 250,000 Assyrian Christians died at the hands of the Turks and their Kurdish allies.
Inasmuch as only Sweden has officially recognized the Sayfo, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the rest of the world has turned a blind eye to the current attempt to finish what the Turks started.
Nina Shea, who has been a tireless exception to the aforementioned indifference, is correct when she writes that “Unless the Obama administration acts fast to develop policies to help [Iraqi Christians], their hope [of remaining in Iraq] will likely be in vain.”
It’s also true that the current administration’s likely failure to act will be yet another example of the foreign policy continuity with the Bush administration that has dismayed its more liberal supporters.
In truth, the fate of the Assyrians and other Iraqi Christians was sealed by Dick and Don’s not-so-excellent (shockingly awesome?) adventure in Mesopotamia. To be fair, the Christian population of Iraq had been in decline since at least the end of the first Gulf War. The combination of economic sanctions that beggared Iraq’s people and Saddam Hussein’s brutality, which was periodically directed at some, but not all, parts of Iraq’s Christian population, prompted Christians, who are Iraq’s best-educated and most entrepreneurial group, to emigrate in search of a better life.
But while the Christian population had been declining in both relative and absolute terms, the invasion of Iraq and the sectarian violence it unleashed turned that decline into the aforementioned obliteration.
People who scarcely, if at all, knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis gave scant thought to the aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein. When the expected choruses of “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” turned out to be the sound of automatic weapons fire and IEDs, they scrambled to put together a government that would allow them to extricate the United States from Iraq with a minimum of losses and a maximum of face.
By definition, the Iraqi parties to that scramble were the ones with the guns: Shiites, who comprise 60 percent of Iraq and who, as Vail Nasr and others have documented, had long been positioning themselves to govern Iraq in the post-Saddam era; Sunnis; and the Kurds.
Apart from ritual obeisance to “religious freedom,” the well-being of people whose ancestors worshipped the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ while ours were bowing before idols and sacrificing the occasional virgin didn’t enter the negotiations.
The result was as predictable as it was brutal. Before the invasion, church officials in Iraq spoke of a “rising tide of Muslim fanaticism.” While they decried Saddam’s increasing “appeasement” of the fanatics, they warned that a “a poorly managed transition to democracy” would produce something a lot worse.
That’s exactly what has happened and no one should be surprised. Figuring this out didn’t require psychic powers – all you needed was some curiosity and, oh yeah, to care about what would happen.
Still, my ire isn’t so much directed at our government. Modern nation-states don’t go to war out of love for neighbor or other ideals. They wage war for reasons having to do with their perceived interests. As the best-known treatise about modern warfare famously says “war is the continuation of policy by other means.” (Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.)
Sometimes these reasons meet the requirements of jus ad bellum. More often, they don’t. Given what we know – or should know – about why and how wars are fought it would be silly to expect governments, including ours, to automatically take into account the impact on tiny religious minorities.
But it would be great if the minorities’ co-religionists did and that’s exactly what didn’t happen in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. With some honorable exception, nearly all of it on the “religious left,” the consequences of an American invasion on Iraq’s Christians played no role in our deliberations and debate about the morality of that invasion.
That’s because we didn’t see them. We didn’t ask what would happen to them because, as far as we were concerned, they didn’t exist. What was about to happen in Iraq was about us: our security, our well-being, and our role in the world. Channeling William McKinley, some of us even justified the upcoming war as a way to bring Christianity to Iraq.
The kind of ignorance at work here is culpable. It’s at best negligent and at worst willful. Whether out of laziness or arrogance we didn’t ask the questions we needed to ask – in fact, we didn’t think any questions were necessary. Our guy told us war was necessary so we learned a little Pidgin Just War theory and helped make the case for war.
As a result, our brethren are now sporting t-shirts that read “My Co-Religionists Supported Invading Iraq and All I Have to Show for it is this lousy t-shirt. Really. It’s literally all I have.” (The writing is on both the front and back.) Could we have prevented the invasion? No. Could we have made sure that the well-being of Iraq’s Christians played a greater role in policy deliberations? Probably not. As I said, modern nation-states wage wars for their own reasons and then expect, sometimes even coerce, their citizens to go along.
But is it too much to expect that, next time, when our guy asks us to join the war party we stop and think about it first? We might even want to venture outside our epistemic cocoons and do some reading. And if that’s not possible, can we at least try to keep a low profile?
For more insight to this topic, get the book, Who Are the Christians In the Middle East?, by Betty Jane Bailey and J. Martin Bailey, from our online store. Or read the article, “Forgotten Christians,” by Virginia Stem Owens.
For more insight to this topic, get the book, Who Are the Christians In the Middle East?, by Betty Jane Bailey and J. Martin Bailey, from our online store. Or read the article, “Forgotten Christians,” by Virginia Stem Owens.
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