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Thursday, December 21, 2006
Chuck Colson :: Townhall.com Columnist
Avoiding the Final Betrayal
by Chuck Colson
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Who won Tuesday's presidential debate?


There are duds, and then there’s the final report of the Iraq Study Group. Some in Washington had hoped—naively, I believe—that this group of Washington “wise men” (and women) would somehow come up with an instant, Solomonesque solution to the war. Not so.

Both the White House and its critics were cool to the group’s recommendations. There was nothing new in the reports. And so last week, the White House postponed a planned nationally televised address, which had originally been intended to follow the release of the report.

These events speak volumes about the difficult choices facing the nation, and they remind us that there’s no easy solution.

For example, not even the harshest critics of the war believe we can simply pull our troops out of Iraq. As I have said before on “BreakPoint,” this would only embolden and strengthen Iran and put the fate of Israel in grave peril.

There is one thing, however, Christians can bring to this discussion. It is the fate of Iraq’s Christians. There are an estimated 600,000 to as many as one million Christians in Iraq. They are called “Assyrians” or “Chaldeans,” and as these names suggest, they have lived in Iraq since time immemorial. What’s more, they are one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, dating back to at least the second century. If any group has an historical claim to their part of Iraq, it’s them.

Yet an increasing number of Iraqi Christians have concluded that “there is no future for Christians” in Iraq. As one Christian put it, “We have no militia to defend us.”

That matters because, as the New Republic put it, “Sunni, Shia, and Kurd may agree on little else, but all have made sport of brutalizing their Christian neighbors.” Since neither Iraqi nor Americans officials are willing to protect them, Christians are leaving their ancestral home. Continued...

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About The Author
Chuck Colson was the Chief Counsel for Richard Nixon and served time in prison for Watergate-related charges. In 1976, Colson founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, which, in collaboration with churches of all confessions and denominations, has become the world's largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, crime victims, and their families.
 
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Subject: History of Iraqi Christians
One thing you need to know about the Assyrian/Chaldean/Jacobite Christians in northern Iraq, northern Syria (where there is still a large community) and Eastern Turkey (where there are very few left) is that something like 2/3 of them were lost in massacres by Kurds after WorldWar I. This includes my husband's grandfather and uncle, and members of every Christian family from that area I have met. They have reason to not trust their neighbors.

Christians in Iraq
True, Saddam was a monster. I don't mean to defend him when I note that under his iron first the various ethnic groups were forced to live in peace.

Moreover, he protected the Christians. Some observers wrote that he even favored them since they were not eager to overthrow his regime, as both the Kurds and Shiites were. They had been accustomed to living as a minority for centuries and had learned to manage.

One of the many negative results of our foolish invasion of Iraq is the growing persecution of Christians. Some of it stems from age-old resentment among a few militant Muslims toward any other faith. More so, Christians now are viewed by many more as sympathetic to the Christian invaders, even though this has been untrue. They have generally tried hard, as always, to stay aloof from politics. There were a few exceptions. Aziz, for example, Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam, was a Catholic.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope 2007 is better for world peace than 2006.
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