A pastoral, cultural perspective on cancer...

Cancer killed 74,529 Canadians in 2009, making it the country’s top cause of death.
Every hour of every day 20 Canadians are diagnosed with cancer, every hour of every day eight Canadians die of cancer. (National Post, March 17, 2013)
The research on causes, treatments and prevention of cancer focuses mainly on the biological, the genetic, and the chemical, radioactive and surgical, with little, if any, research into the broader social, cultural, environmental and spiritual causes. Additionally, males have been dying at rates significantly exceeding females, from cancer, since the National Post figures start in 1982. There are, of course, obvious locations where, for example, chemical pollutants are so intense and so toxic that cancer rates have spiked, for example, in what was formerly known as "love canal" on the shores of the Niagara River and Lake Erie. Another example, more recent, is among the Chipeweyen whose cancer rates and deaths have spiked as a result of the toxic pollutants flowing through their community along the Athabaska River. They, and researchers who support them, point the finger directly at the "tar sands" oil project.
While there is legitimacy to the forms of research currently underway, there is also considerable evidence that points to the notion that cancer is, in part at least, a lifestyle disease. By that statement I am not refering to the coincidence of smoking with lung cancer. Rather, I mean that one's biography is too often a significant incidator that the body has responded or will respond, by turning against itself, a description that applies to most cancer cases. An obvious example is a young man who, at 29, suffers from testicular cancer, lives alone, has no social network, and spends all of his days grooming horses.
His own desperation that the severity of his condition is, or could easily be, directly linked to his lifestyle, his loneliness, his isolation tells his story in the most authentic way possible. However, his treatment team, including his oncologist and nursing staff, focus on his need for radiation treatment, even before he has successfully banked healthy sperm, for a life after cancer, should he be fortunate enough to have one. Following treatment, the option of fatherhood will be forfeited forever, given his impending sterility.
The statistics tell one element of the truth of the disease: that too many men and women in Canada are going to die from the ravages of this disease, no matter that treatment interventions have increased the rates at which people live longer with their disease in remission, or under control.
What they don't depict, however, is that we all live in a culture that is hurtling headlong toward a false brass ring, that is supported through billions of dollars of propaganda also benefiting from the "leningen march of the human ants" toward our own demise. We are indoctrinated on a diet of lies, misrepresentations, dissemblings, distortions, false accusations, imperfect investigations, siloed academic voabularlies and equations....all of them, not necessarily designed by some amoral force, but nevertheless, a product of "economic, social, political and professional achievement/success" that is completely inconsistent with the needs, aspirations, imaginations and hopes and dreams of the digits whose almost unconscious march is killing us.
We are fed a diet of bullying, competing, currying favour, sycophancy, lining up, following all directives, painting inside the lines by number, gaming, texting, preying upon the most vulnerable, graduating, adopting the culture of the part-time workplace, then the university, then the full-time workplace, integrating the faith dogma's of our families, deciding on the "right" partner amid the narrowest of options, parenting "de-rigeur" using the latest parenting guru's latest opinions from the most recent book, adopting the "life-style" of social role models, like Oprah, or some other model of success, affluence, and power....all in a mad race to find acceptance, relevance, status, the standard and typical family with house, car, television and digital equipment....
throughouth having suppressd, denied, avoided, or even medicated our strongest impulses that might have seemed "outside the lines" of some criterion of acceptability, whether from our parents, our church, our teachers, our coaches, our employers, or especially our peers.
If we have an artistic "bent" or talent, too often it is ridiculed, marginalized (as are we), shoved underground, or even tortured out of use. If we have a different colour of skin, or a different ethnicity, or a different religion from the majority, we too are marginalized, out of some kind of fear, similar to the fear that drives the march for conformity, propriety, political correctness and morality.
If we are poor, we already know that we are part of the underclass, whose values and needs are the result of our own failure "to take responsibility" even though we have not yet found out how that happened, even while the judgements are flying around us.
If we are poor, of a different skin colour, and considered part of the "savage" tribe, however that might be applied, we are not only marginalized but we are evil, by definition. "Evil" could mean something as simple as we do not follow the same time addiction that is at the centre of the "insider" culture, the one characterized by the voluntary and even eager enlistment in the "game" of winning, on the "inside". And for that we are labelled "lazy, slothful, lacking ambition and worthless."
In every culture and society, there is a hierarchy of people, and our commitment to the ostrasizing of the "savage" the "native" the "First Nations" led by our religious organizations who condemned them for their sinful ways, is one of the hallmarks of our desperately depraved culture and ethic.
And this from Chris Hedges, demonstrating the depths to which we have fallen in our addiction to power, money and denial of responsibility: (from truthdig.com March 17, 2013)
If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

While our death certificates may have under 'cause of death'... "cancer", we all know that we are participating in what someone from another planet might diagnose as a cultural case of thanatos, the wish to die.
We are a death-denying and a death-defying culture; we do not speak about the final curtain unless and until there is no other option, and the patient is in his or her final days. And we know, reinforced by theorists like Carl Jung, that whatever we deny will have extra power and influence over us, because we have pushed it aside. We have developed elaborate rituals in our attempt to cope with the death of our family members and our friends. However, we have not developed a similarly elaborate network of supports to bring death out of the closet. We do, however, see death marching in large headlines following the violence that is committed by some of us against others, even others innocent and without link to the source of the violence. And we continue to allocate huge amounts of public funds to our own killing machines, known euphemistically as "the military" or "homeland security" or "national intelligence" as our way of keeping others from harming us.
Meanwhile, we are fully engaged in promoting laws, public debates and political campaigns around the "citizens' right to defend," including the right to shoot first if "threatened" by whatever body movement or hand object that another might present, even something as simple as a wallet, in the case of the shooting by police of a young black man in New York. We even have heard such simplistic theories that point to "2% of all people as evil and thereby as criminal" while the rest are normal, and without criminality...a theory which merely distances the adherent from his own potential to commit cruelty or a crime against another, something we all share.
It is not that pursuing some academic field, hopefully one that attracts one's interest and talent, and practicing that profession upon graduation is, in itself, killing us. It is the degree to which we are urged to both pursue and to practice that is under the microscope here.
It is also the degree to which we reduce too many features of our lives, and the lives of our culture to simplistic dichotomies, to binary either-or's, and then wonder why there is no texture, a code word for complexity or artistry or the aesthetic in our lives.
In short, we are bent on killing ourselves in bending our personhood to fit a model of success that is simply incompatible with our capacity to endure the "active" rigours while sacrificing the more passive, reflective, integrative and spiritual pursuits that take a lot of time.
We have become a society of "bottles of beer" instantly and mass-produced as well as consumed, for the instant relief of whatever is our latest anxiety, suffering, pain, loss or defeat. And we are not restricting our medication to beer; we have oceans full of pharmaceuticals, and inducements/seducements to activities that are designed to distract us from our minor problems while we walk, fully asleep, through our more profound, and more rich and buried "treasures" from which the gold of our former pain can only be extracted.
President Bartlett, in The West Wing, is unwrapped from his cloke of public secrecy that surrounds his Multiple Slerosis condition, prior to his re-entry into the campaign for a second term. His Chief of Staff, Leo, himself a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, wants the matter kept out of the public eye. Leo opposes a Congressional censure, whereas the President looks up at Leo and utters words to this effect:
"Nobody takes responsibility any more, Leo, and I was wrong!"
When Scott Peck went looking for those responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, he walked throughout the Pentagon without success. No one would accept responsibility. Nevertheless, he knew, as do we all, that someone made the decision to carry out that massacre, and issued orders to others to follow.
When a young father, in the act of changing the diapers of his newborn daughter in the back-seat of his car is invaded by bullets that kill his daughter and wound him, leaving him in mourning for his deceased baby, as happened in Chicago last week, (or we could refer to hundreds of similar avoidable and preventable and tragic acts of violence) and the culture that breeds such acts, along with a culture that refuses to unpack its own attitudes, including normal fears, of death, while at the same time, inserting pain and anxiety in mourning as a psychiatric illness requiring treatment, we have lost our way! And when the people responsible for such an insertion are, to put it mildly, among the most "educated" in our culture, given years of post-graduate training in psychiatry, we have to lose confidence in our most precious processes like education, and the public policy and public funding that supports the infrastructure of the higher education processes.
And when the people we elect are driven by their own fears of being "primaried" into defending assault weapons for the defence of family, and into defending magazines that include thirty-to-forty rounds of ammunition for those assault weapons, as an integral part of the American tradition and culture of freedom, under the Second Amendment, we have lost our way.
We have, in short, become the victims of our own denials...of death, of fear, of failure and of not fitting it.
And we do not read such an analysis in the scientific journals attempting to document the most recent and most worthy research projects into the relief or prevention of cancer. And we are not about to read them there, anytime soon!
They are "off-topic" coming, as they do from a non-scientific point of view, an unscholarly perspective, without peer review, and without academic credentials elevating them to the status of "worthy of consideration" by those whose professional careers including both the treatment and prevention of cancers. These findings are not supported by statistical analysis that would link any of the denials to the generation of cancer and thereby they cannot be supported by any public body seeking respectability and credibility as a research laboratory.
And, since they come from what could be called a "pastoral" perspective, that looks at things a little differently from that of the pure scientist, they are not "expert" enough to be integrated into the body of public literature.
Nevertheless, there is hope.
On the front page of the Globe and Mail, immediately following the election of Pope Francis I, the headline read, "The Outsider" in a pointed reference to the radical choice of one from South America, a Jesuit as well, and now, one who is calling on the world, both collectively and individually, to exercise forgiveness and to be more merciful.
There are signs that, in spite of our massive military machine, linked to our even more massive global economy, and the disintegration of many dictatorships, and the conflicts that erupt from terrorist acts of martyrdom, and the millions of starving, diseased, and dispossessed, we have so far evaded nuclear war, so far evaded the destruction of Israel, evaded the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and other Middle East countries, and so far evaded the complete collapse of failed states like Pakistan, North Korea and others...we can still hear a still small voice from the balcony of St. Peter's calling for some reflection and a return to some new consideration of what is important, what is necessary and what cannot be denied, the truths of the human condition, including the stampeding of cancerous cells around the world.

Justin Trudeau the Justin Bieber of Canadian Politics

Writing in the National Post, Rex Murphy, pictures the current Liberal leadership race as Trudeau (Justin) vs. Trudeau (Trudeau's Twitter account) Murphy can not remember nor has he (or any of the rest of  us) ever experienced a situation in which a political leader has asked for an extension of the voting time in order to increase an already substantial and undefeatable lead over his opponents.
Marc Garneau, he of astronaut fame, meekly desirous of a position of prominence in the Liberal Party led by M. Trudeau, has withdraw, and quickly morphed his singular attacks "the liberal party leadership is not about public relations but about policy and gravitas" (or words to that effect) when he was a candidate into a ringing endorsement for the likely winner.
It has been said by too many people, in too many places, over the last two or three years, that the last thing the Liberal party needs is a coronation.
And yet, in spite of echoes of that cadence ringing in the ears of both leadership candidates and party faithful, a coronation is about to creep out of the convention later this Spring.
And to think that the Trudeau "seduction" of "generating enthusiasm for politics" so that the "grassroots can contribute to policy development" has so enthralled the old-timers and the new "associates" elegible to vote, his father must be rolling over in his grave.
He has barely uttered a single word that would stand the scrutiny of even the most glib of policy analysts throughout his rock-star-tour of a campaign for the leadership. Justin Trudeau is the Justin Bieber of federal politics...a face, with a minimalist tune, a few managers who hope to get rich from his "fame/infamy" without having to declare an ounce of credibility, gravitas or authenticy and a promising career in spite of his failure/refusal to make a substantial contribution.
I would no more vote for the Liberal candidate who might serve under Trudeau's leadership than I would pay $1 for a ticket to the front row of a Justin Bieber sold-out concert. And to have to reconcile that with the facts that I endorsed the outstanding Liberal candidate in my riding in the last federal election, as well as the facts that I voted Liberal for all of the years of his father's leadership, licked stamps as a minimalist part of that leadership campaign in 1968 happily and honourably, and also that I took my young children to rallies where they might catch a glimpse of the Trudeau magic and the icy blue eyes.
My own political perspective may have changed a little, but not that much. I remained open to the Liberal Party's potential until the rejection of Sheila Copps as party President. When that occurred, I could see neither a future for the party nor a future for my association with whatever is left of the party.
Who cares about M. Trudeau's hair design?
Who cares about M. Trudeau's bank account and in inheritance?
Who cares about M. Trudeau's friendship with M. Leblanc, and the friendship of their fathers, Romeo and Pierre respectively?
The Canadian political process, unlike that of the southern neighbour, is not based on vacuity, on headlines and on charismatic leaders.
Obama does, indeed, have charisma, AND he also has substance, gravitas, vision and spine. He has been saying the same policy proposals since he entered the political arena. Everyone knows what he represents, what he stands for, what he stands against, and if one is a little uncertain, one has only to read one of his books, for instant clarification.
When did M. Trudeau last write a book? By contrast, his father had been writing in Cite Libre for decades, fighting for workers in the asbestos stike fight against Duplessis, teaching Constitutional Law, and served as this country's Minister of Justice in the Pearson Cabinet. What, by comparison, has Justin given the world lately, other than a bar-room boxing match with a Conservative Senator?
The Liberal Party, in electing M. Trudeau, will hopefully seal its own coffin, in the larger national hope that it will finally listen to those clarion voices that decried then and still decry the advisability of a coronation.
Either Joyce Murray or Martha Hall Findlay would prove to be a far more capable, in-depth, visionary, courageous and proven leader than the fly-weight M. Trudeau.
We do not want, and certainly do not need Peter Pan as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

35 million Vietnamese lifted out of poverty...and other successes

Vietnam becomes an Asian Tiger
By Daniel D. Veniez, The Blog on Huffington Post, March 13, 2013
While in Hanoi last week, I attended mass at Saint Joseph's (Hanoi), a beautiful neo-gothic Cathedral built by the French in 1886. I was reminded that for the better part of 2,000 years, the Vietnamese people have been fighting to free themselves from occupying foreign powers. Less than 40 years ago, Vietnam was ending a devastating war with the United States that obliterated much of the national infrastructure and cost millions of lives.

The Vietnamese are a profoundly resilient and fiercely independent people. Scars are fading away and are being replaced by a sense of possibility and optimism.
Home to 88-million souls and roughly the total area of the State of New Mexico, Vietnam has become an energetic source of economic and political progress. Change has been quick and spectacular. According to the World Bank, Vietnam's poverty rate fell from 58 per cent in 1993 to 14 per cent in 2008. A staggering 35-million Vietnamese have been lifted out of poverty.
In 2007, Vietnam became a member of the World Trade Organization. Since then, foreign direct investment has been on a steady upward trajectory and a tireless entrepreneurial class is making its mark. This month, Pham Nhat Vuong, 44, who heads real estate developer Vingroup, made the Forbes billionaires list with a net worth put at $1.5 billion. That news was met with cheers throughout Vietnam.
World leaders have taken notice and are beating a path to Vietnam's door. With an average annual GDP growth rate of 7.2 per cent in the 10 years before the 2008-2009 financial meltdown, Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It has a rapidly expanding middle class and the market for consumer goods is strong and getting stronger. Since the '80s, Vietnam has adopted market-oriented policy reforms that have accelerated since 2007. Vietnam has achieved middle-income status, with a per capita income of $1,200, an unimaginable threshold a few decades ago.
At the heart of Vietnam's astonishing transformation has been Nguyen Tan Dung, elected by the National Assembly to serve as the prime minister. When Dung took office in 2006, GDP was $52 billion. Despite the seemingly impenetrable obstacles, it hit $124 billion last year, a whopping 138 per cent increase in six years.
Inflation has been a consequence of exponential growth. Dung and his colleagues moved decisively to stabilize the Dong and wrestle inflation to the ground. In 2011, inflation hit 19 per cent. Politically bold but painful monetary tightening resulted in a dramatic improvement of macro-economic conditions last year when inflation stood at 9.2 per cent.
Prime Minister Dung and his colleagues have held the line on public spending. Total public debt was 48 per cent of GDP. That's a pretty impressive accomplishment when one considers that Japan's public debt, for example, is 219 per cent of GDP. The United States is 105 per cent, France 89 per cent, United Kingdom 89 per cent, and Canada 84 per cent.
The Government led by Dung has done all of this while keeping unemployment down to 4 per cent, improving health care, education, and modernizing national infrastructure. It is easy to underestimate the gargantuan complexity of rebuilding the country and ushering it into the 21st century. The political skill and managerial discipline of underpinning Vietnam's steady recovery has been nothing short of miraculous.
In a new report, "Growing Beyond Asia," Ernst & Young economists forecast a return to robust growth by 2014-2015, with Vietnam's GDP climbing to 7.1 per cent.
E&Y says stability of the banking system and streamlining foreign direct investment rules is key. Vietnam's political leadership strongly concurs with these observations. Last December, Victoria Kwakwa of the World Bank congratulated Hanoi for stabilizing the Dong, which took "strong political commitment and resolve, which has allowed the needed bold actions."
However, problems are inevitable in any country in the midst of such remarkable growth and transformation. Complications arising from poor management of certain state-owned enterprises, a weak banking and financial sector, and some inefficiency in public investments necessitate restructuring. Here too, Dung has confronted the issues head-on by instituting reform and accountability measures.
Of course, none of this is unique to Vietnam. Yet the self-righteous criticize the Vietnamese Government and Communist Party for SOE's that functioned beyond their mandate and became overextended.
Effective governance is a major test of national leadership everywhere in the world, including all western democracies. The financial meltdown had its genesis in the United States. It cost the world economy tens of trillions of dollars and their state-owned or controlled organizations are no better.
According to ProPublica, the cost of the fix of mortgage insurers, Fannie May and Freddie Mac was $142 billion. The banks received hundreds of billions for taxpayer-funded bailouts. Meanwhile, their executives received pay packages in the hundreds of millions.
In Vietnam, executives were fired, and some sent to prison. And some have the nerve to give lectures to these people?
Vietnam's miraculous advancement in the past 15 years has been remarkable. Still, no one in the country -- much less its leaders such as Dung and his colleagues -- is satisfied or smug about the arduous task that remains.
Yet, skeptics persevere. What far too many observers of Vietnam fail to understand is that at the root of its struggles is an unquenched thirst for national independence and self-determination.
Fredrick Logevall chronicles that fight in his wonderful book, Embers of War. He describes the attempts made by the remarkable Ho Chi Minh to reach out to various U.S. Presidents.
Ho was a great admirer of the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and was inspired by the American Revolution. He believed that Americans would innately grasp the resoluteness of the Vietnamese anti-colonial mentality. Ho naturally thought that he would find a kindred spirit in the United States. It was not to be. While Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower resisted U.S. intervention in Indochina and encouraged France to let go of its colonial ambitions, a fragile and treacherous post-war geostrategic environment trumped all else. Vietnam became a battlefield of the Cold War.
As has been the case throughout its long and rich history, Vietnam is intent on securing the peace while fiercely protecting its sovereignty. This and strengthening economic ties is the heart of Prime Minister Dung's aggressive foreign policy outreach strategy.
It is unmanageable for those of us born and raised in a prosperous western society to conceive how infinitely more complex the task of leadership is in Vietnam. An uncommon finesse and statesmanship was needed to navigate Vietnam from the Third World debacle it was to the thriving "Asian Tiger" it is.
Our instant gratification culture is too often an impediment to reasoned perspective. It blinds us to the formidable feats of leaders like Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam and the immensity of the contributions of this new Vietnam on the regional and global stage. It is in our interest to notice. Our economic self-interest depends on active engagement, and steadfast support for the transformative work underway.
Editor's Note:
As a Canadian who had the opportunity to formally welcome a Vietnamese family to our city and community, when there was a surge of what were then called "boat people" from Vietnam, all of us were and remain highly impressed by the decency, the discipline and the ambition of these people. "Our family" has continued to hold responsible positions in their workplace, raised their family and integrated into Canadian culture in ways that, had the shoe have been on the other foot, I doubt I and many other Canadian families would have survived as well in their country.
They knew little or no English, and set about to learn.
They knew little to nothing about Canada, and they set about to learn.
They fed us Vietnam food, hosted us in their home and shared their success and their questions with us for many months following their arrival.
While I have never been to Vietnam, I have no evidence to doubt Mr. Veniez's account of what he witnessed there, based on my own experiences of their people.

Pray for Pope Francis I to give voice to the voiceless

"Will Francis the First be able to bear the full truths of a conflicted world, walk amidst gray smoke and tigers, rage against loss of deep and abiding compassion in a world demanding doctrine and battle?" (from "paradox" in Gaia Compass blog, by Michelle Atkins, March 14, 2013) ( For full disclosure, the writer is my wife.)
For Pope Francis to move the world from doctrine and battle, from debates over gay marriages, abortion, and women in the church, to a comprehensive and reflective embrace of Lady Poverty, to whom Saint Francis dedicated his life, would be not only a spiritual revolution but also a political, economic and cultural revolution.
The gap has grown exponentially between the have's and the have-not's, across the globe, without the church or the political leadership coming to grips with causes, symptoms and solutions. The church has been seemingly fixated by the dust balls of pettiness, power and control, while millions of lives are literally threatened with disease, poverty, lack of education, health care and clean water. And while church growth is the over-riding motive for any measures to improve the lot of those so dispossessed, the new evangelization, nevertheless, whatever projects that can and will be inspired by the new pontiff to lift the starving out of their depravity, in all corners of the world, will never be enough.
Nevertheless, if and when this holy man brings a message of compassion, concern, agape and challenge to the board rooms of the elite in every culture, he will light a fire of hope in the hearts and minds of those to whom he has dedicated his pontificate.
He will be, as was Francis, scorned, ridiculed, rejected, alienated even by those he calls friends. He will, like Francis, carry stones to chapels to rebuild their eroding walls, only to be shown the exit and the contempt of even the clergy he is attempting to support.
Eating with tax-collectors and prostitutes is not a ministry that seems congruent with the aspirations of most people sitting in pews in all churches around the globe. It was Morley Callaghan, the Toronto writer, in Such is My Beloved, who portrayed a congregation calling for the head of their priest, merely because he provided clothes for two prostitutes, without engaging them in anything remotely sexual, more from an innocent and idealistic motive to help them see the nature of their lives. The priest was eventually committed to a mental hospital, for his indiscretions, or as the congregation called them, his sins. You see, he was bringing dishonour on their parish.
Imagine Jesus bringing dishonour on his little band of disciples by befriending his choice of human beings.
The church, and this includes all christian churches, not only the Roman Catholic, have so much work to do to transform the attitudes of the people sitting in their pews, whose self-righteous faux-piety, and whose "control of the church" purchased with their substantial contributions renders the ministry cut-off at the knees before it even begins, because the people in charge are blind to the plank in their own eye, while they busily point out the speck in the other person's eye.
We hope and pray that Francis I is, through humility, reflection, prayer, and persistent dedication to his chosen ministry, able to shake the barnacles of tradition, the fossils of superiority, and the harnesses of hypocrisy from the leadership in Rome, from the thelogical colleges, from their candidates for priesthood, from the religious and from the 1.2 billion parishioners, and spark the kind of quiet revolution that measure the flow of interest, compassion and even dollars out to the deserts of Africa, and the slums of Beunos Aires, to the reserves of Attawapiskat, and even through the catacombs of the Vatican.
Whether we are christian or not, whether we have any faith at all, we can all envision a new Pope bringing hope where there was despair, love where there was hate, and joy where there were only tears.
And can all pray for such a global transformation....and carry a little flicker of that candle in our hearts as we move about in our daily routines.

Too bad Bush didn't READ: "A Peace to End All Peace"

Fred Kaplan: Get ready for a new Middle East

By Fred Kaplan, Special to the National Post, March 13, 2013

On Feb. 26, 2003, then-U.S. President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in the Middle East. “A liberated Iraq,” he said, “can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example … for other nations in the region.”

He invaded Iraq three weeks later. The spread of freedom wasn’t the war’s driving motive, but it was considered an enticing side effect, and not just by Bush. His deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had mused the previous fall that the spark ignited by regime-change “would be something quite significant for Iraq … It’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world.”
Ten years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast “a very large shadow” indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.
Bush had been warned. Two months before the invasion, during Super Bowl weekend, three prominent Iraqi exiles paid a visit to the Oval Office. They were grateful and excited about the coming military campaign, but at one point in the meeting they stressed that U.S. forces would have to tamp down the sectarian tensions that would certainly reignite between Sunnis and Shiites in the wake of Saddam’s toppling. Bush looked at the exiles as if they were speaking Martian. They spent much of their remaining time, explaining to him that Iraq had two kinds of Arabs, whose quarrels dated back centuries. Clearly, he’d never heard about this before.
Many of Bush’s advisers did know something about this, but not as much as anyone launching a war in Iraq, and thus overhauling the country’s entire political order, should have known.
It wasn’t rocket science; it was basic history. And to learn the history, they didn’t have to read vast, dry dossiers assembled by the CIA or the State Department (though that might have helped). There was just one book that would have told them, in this respect, everything they needed to know: David Fromkin’s 1989 bestseller, A Peace to End All Peace.
Subtitled “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East,” Fromkin’s book (still available in paperback) tells the tragic story of how, toward the end of the First World War, British and French diplomats redrew the map of the Middle East in ways that were certain to sow violence for decades, perhaps centuries, to come.
Prior to that war, the countries we now know as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey did not exist. They were all part of the Ottoman Empire, and had been for 500 years. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the face of war, the British and French made plans to weave the territories into their own empires. Country names were coined, boundaries were drawn, tribal leaders were anointed, co-opted, or traded promises for their obeisance. As it turned out, though, the war exhausted the British and French — their treasuries and their people’s patience — and over the subsequent two decades, their empires collapsed.
But the borderlines they drew in the Middle East survived. These lines bore no resemblance to the natural, historic borders between tribes and sectarian groups; often they divided the members of a group from one another, or imposed the rule of minorities over majorities. The Western-installed rulers of these artificial states survived too, and one of their main tasks was to oppress the groups, or buy them off, or play them against one another, in order to sustain their own rule.
What is happening in much of the Middle East now is the collapse of this system. When the U.S. military ousted Saddam Hussein, this process took a leap; initially, it was unclear to what effect. Soon it became obvious that the administration had no plan for post-war Iraq, in part because Bush didn’t think one was needed (democracy would spring forth naturally, once the dictator’s jackboot was lifted), in part because neither Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld nor the top military leaders had much desire to wade into “nation-building.”
The coup de grace came when the U.S. proconsul, L. Paul Bremer, issued his two infamous orders, abolishing the Iraqi military and blocking Baathist party members from holding government jobs — as a result of which, order broke down completely. In the vacuum emerged the insurgency, which was never a unified rebellion but rather a multiplicity of groups, harboring a multiplicity of resentments and ambitions, some of them against the interim government, some against the American occupiers, some against one another. The fighting intensified and widened, the American commanders (at least for the occupation’s first three years) had little idea what to do about it — and so it degenerated into civil war.
The main parties in this bourgeoning civil war were Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Each faction had allies in neighbouring states, and some of them took the new phase of the war as a rallying cry either for coming to the aid of their brethren in Iraq or for mounting their own rebellions at home. As the authorities in these always-artificial (and therefore illegitimate) states weakened for various reasons (some of them having little to do with the Iraq war), the internal clashes between Sunni and Shiite came to dominate local — then regional — politics.
The question is how far this unravelling goes. Will civil wars erupt in one artificial state after another? That is, will the path of Syria be followed by Lebanon, then Jordan, then (hard as it may be to imagine) Saudi Arabia? Will Sunnis or Shiites, or both, take their sectarian fights across the borders to the point where the borders themselves collapse? If so, will new borders be drawn up at some point, conforming to some historically “natural” sectarian divisions? There have been many such alternative-maps proposed over the years, none of them quite alike, which raises the possibility that the definition of “natural” borders may itself be a contentious matter, likely to set off its own disputes or wars. Will these new borders conform to the results of these new battles? (Borders, like histories, are usually drafted by the winners.)
David Fromkin foresaw all this when he wrote A Peace to End All Peace a quarter-century ago. He also noted that the then-impending havoc would go on for quite a while, likening the situation to that of Europe’s in the 5th century “when the collapse of the Roman Empire’s authority in the West threw its subjects into a crisis of civilization that obliged them to work out a new political system of their own.” Fromkin went on:
“It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states … The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an age-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed.”
There is a danger that such a cosmic view of world politics might breed passivity: The dynamics of conflict seem so inexorable, and so glacial, that outside intervention — even outside interest — appears futile. That’s not necessarily the case. History still walks on two feet. Leaders of nations can take steps, in alliance with other leaders, to reduce the human misery, control the level of violence, prevent the rise of some new empire that, in its full power, might threaten our own security.
But one clear lesson of Fromkin’s tome is that there are limits to what we in the West — especially we, as sectarian outside powers — can do. Another clear lesson is that, if our leaders are going to intervene in another country’s fate (and not just in the Middle East), they should have some understanding of the country’s politics, history, and culture — which is to say, they should have some notion of the consequences of their actions — ahead of time. We and much of the rest of the world would be much better off today, if a few people in the Bush administration had read that one book.
Slate.com



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Sharia law permits firing squads in Saudi Arabia

Capital crimes resulting in the death sentence last year included murder, armed robbery, drug smuggling, "sorcery" and "witchcraft".

Saudi Arabia has executed 17 people so far this year, Amnesty International said this month,
compared with 82 in 2011 and a similar number last year. (From "Saudi shortage of swordsmen prompts approval of executions by firing squad," from Reuters, in guardian.co.uk, in National Post, March 11, 2013, below)
Compare a justice system based strictly on sharia law that includes, permits and even advocates firing squads, and one, for example in Canada, where capital punishment has been completely abolished, if you are interested in attempting to reconcile two different cultures, religions and political/legal systems.
They are, in a word, irreconcilable.
And, for those who might be concerned, any attempt to import, impose, or adopt sharia law into a currently non-muslim country must be opposed at every turn.
We are living in the twentyfirst century, and we have moved beyond firing squads, beheadings in the public square. And to think that Saudi Arabia has been and continues to be an ally of the United States, the source of much of its oil supply, and some say, a voice of moderation and stability in the middle east!
Some moderation!
Some stability! both achieved, among its own people, with bullets from a firing squad, and/or beheadings in the public square.
I can only imagine if such a system of justice were in effect in Canada, in what most of the world recognizes as a relatively "peaceful, moderate and stable" country that the foundations for a similar list of adjectives to describe our national culture would change dramatically. Instead of tolerance, justice, due process and something approaching compassion and rehabilitation, at the core of the Canadian justice system, they would all be replaced by FEAR!


Saudi shortage of swordsmen prompts approval of executions by firing squad
Saudi media reports late arrival of overworked executioners has led to firing squads being approved as an alternative

Reuters in Dubai from guardian.co.uk, in National Post,  March 11, 2013

Saudi Arabia has authorised regional governors to approve executions by firing squad as an alternative to public beheading, the customary method of capital punishment in the kingdom, the Arab News reported on Monday . The English-language daily gave no explanation.

But another newspaper, Al Youm, reporting the measure on Sunday, said the reason for the change was a shortage of swordsmen.
An interior ministry spokesman said he was not immediately able to comment but would look into the report.
The Arab News added that a ministerial committee was looking into scrapping beheading as a form of capital punishment. The kingdom has been criticised in the west for its high number of executions, inconsistencies in the application of the law and its use of public beheadings.
Capital crimes resulting in the death sentence last year included murder, armed robbery, drug smuggling, "sorcery" and "witchcraft".
Saudi Arabia has executed 17 people so far this year, Amnesty International said this month, compared with 82 in 2011 and a similar number last year.
Al Youm reported a circular by the government's bureau of investigation and prosecution as saying the use of firing squads was being considered because some swordsmen were arriving late to the public squares where executions are normally carried out.
"A shortage in swordsmen and their unavailability in a number of areas" meant the executioners had to travel long distances sometimes to get to the place of executions, making them sometimes late, the newspaper reported the circular as saying.
The circular stated that death by firing squad was not a breach of sharia, or Islamic, law. The Saudi legal system is based on a strict version of sharia.
Al Youm said a firing squad had been used to carry out the death sentence against a convicted female in a case in Ha'il in north-western Saudi Arabia a few years ago.

We are all sinners, and also created in imago dei and need to live "in" both

On this, the first day of the College of Cardinal's secret conclave to vote for the next pope, in the Sistine Chapel, I was listening to some political commentators urging the church to recover the teachings of Jesus, compassion for the poor, the sick the infirm and the sinful.
And in the next breath, one, Chris Matthews of MSNBC, was nearly shouting that the Roman Catholic church needed a man who would clean house of all the clergy and bishops who had sinned, specifically in the child abuse matter.
And also, listening to a piece recorded by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who articulated a sentence I had never grasped previously, "While the church is not of the world, but in the world, and while those crimes of sexual abuse are committed in the world, then that becomes a matter for the church."
The church is "not of the world" a phrase that takes me back to a debate in a church when I was an adolescent, the resolution of which read:
"Christians are to be and remain separate and apart from the world"
In this debate, I was assigned the negative, arguing as I did for complete engagement in and with the world as part of the christian's way  of life being both beacon and provocateur. In a purist, fundamentalist, evangelical protestant church, where the judges were all avid members of the church, the 'affirmative' side won the debate.
In the intervening six decades, I have neither changed my mind about christians needing to be among the world, nor found it in my perspective to agree with the Chris Matthews judgement of "cleaning the house" of the church of all miscreants.
Precisely, I take a very different point of view: I view all of us as sinners, and all of us as potential disciples of God, created in the image of God. Based on these caveats, there can be no separation between the church and the world, in fact, if not also in symbolism. And the Roman Catholic church, to its great and tragic sadness, has elevated the gospel words, "You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church"....as the cornerstone of their megacorporation.
Unfortunately, the Pope is and always will be, in an untenable position, having to walk a fine line between the holy and the secular, the spiritual and the secular, without the parishoners having the nuanced perspective of that position.
Access, affability, selling the faith....these are the words ascribed to the projected image of pope by those seeking a more open, accessible and user-friendly church.
However, the life of prayer, meditation, reflection and scholarship is often at odds with the secular.
"Jesus with an MBA" is one phrase that a writer has coined to sum up the kind of person the College of Cardinals should be attempting to select....given the dichotomy of spirituality and management expertise.
We have so bifurcated excellence into so many different  files, some of them academic, some of their aesthetic, some philosophic... that one who is strong in management skills and also commanding a high level of respect for his spiritual discipline is almost literally self-eliminated, mainly because of our narrow perceptions.
We are unable to conceive of one whose two charisms as spiritual discipline and management excellence.
It is our narrow band of consciousness, unchallenged by our prays to a higher power, unchallenged by our conversations with our peers, and most of our reading and reflection that fossilizes each person into some cardboard cut-out, including each member of the College of Cardinals.
If we are determined to separate secular from sacred, then we have no hope in our struggle to reduce and eliminate  climate change and global warming. If we do not see the earth as sacred, as do the indigenous people, we have imprisoned ourselves in our blindness. Similarly, if we are unable to integrate our deployment of forgiveness with our outrage at cleric sins, regardless of the magnitude of those sins.
If we are determined to concentrate our spirituality on the superior judgements of others whom we consider impure, as compared with our own spiritual purity, we are caught in a window-and-doorless cave of our own perceptions.
So long as we are worshipping our human incapacities to bridge what may seem unbridgeable, we will continue to engage in conflicts about status, power, money and control...and fail in our blindness to compassion, faith, forgiveness and spiritual forging in the furnace of struggle and critical self-examination.
We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God....and until we come to fully integrate our impurity and our imperfections in a healthy and inclusive way to our discipleship as followers of God, we will forever dig a trough of our own habit, without ever venturing outside that trough.....something God did not have in mind when he announced that he came so that we might have life, and have it more abundantly...
And whoever next sits on the throne of Saint Peter will have to teach us the complexities and ambiguities of our own refusal to bridge our sin and our holiness without insisting on their complete separation.