Thursday, 23 February 2006 - 5:38 PM CST

"The schism between the Shia and Sunnis is certainly deeper than anything going on in Christianity today."

There is no schism between Shia and Sunnis anywhere but Iraq. Are you really surprised that a civil war has erupted as the direct result of our turning the society upside down, putting the majority underclass in power, thereby taking the lid off the pressure cooker? Of course, there were sectarian tensions. But what you have here is purely about political power. The sectarian war that went on for decades in N. Ireland was likewise not about Roman Catholic vs. Protestant theology. In both cases, Iraq and N. Ireland, the underlying political clash lined up across a sectarian divide, but religious ideology is not and was not the essential nature of the conflict. We - Bush - caused this civil war. Don't cluck your tongue patronizingly at the foolish Sunni and Shia. It's ours and we were warned by none other than our own CIA and State Dept. that this would happen.

Thursday, 23 February 2006 - 9:20 PM CST

I know, sometimes I come off as a tin-foil-hat crazy person, but I sincerely believe this was not a crime perpetrated by muslims of any sort.

Seems to me that no matter what kind of muslim you were, you would know this was a kind of blasphemy that would surely land you in the worst part of hell.

I'm convinced it was an outside job, carried out by people who hope to sow the seeds of discord in that region. To guess at who would be silly, since there are truly too many people who would stand to gain. But I wouldn't put it past any of the usual suspects.

Saturday, 25 February 2006 - 5:22 PM CST

"A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed. One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom." -- Wm. F. Buckley, from "It Didn't Work"

He gets it. But he still doesn't get it. The problem is not religious differences. The problem with Bush's postulate was that the Shia were both the majority and the underclass, poor, uneducated, and looked-down upon. The American occupation was the instrumentality for turning Iraqi society upside-down. We have created a situation with many parallels to the Reconstruction South. Forget differences and suspend internal divisions to get on with life in a structure that guaranteed freedom for all? "Forget, Hell!"

All wars are horrible (Eisenhower said as much about WW II, in which he was Supreme Allied Commander). What makes religious wars even moreso is that religious wars are almost impossible to stop once they start. To observe, "It didn't work," as though reporting on a laboratory experiment, is an arrogant, self-serving understatement.

Monday, 6 March 2006 - 4:12 PM CST

Related only to the photo:

Is it just me or does it appear that this building was basically a freakin' sand-castle painted to look like it had some actual masonry-work? I can't fathom how even a large explosive device could reduce something to heaps of sand.

Though I still believe this KERBOOM-ing to have been a despicable act, I must say they might do better to rebuild it out of something a bit more durable. Mebbe they should try bigger sand. We call it 'rocks'. When stacked and cemented together by intelligent folks they can help to prevent your building from being reduced to anything smaller....like the small-grain sand of which this holy house was obviously constructed.