Bush Wrong, JPII Right?

Some remember the clear, near-strident warnings from Pp. John Paul II about invading Iraq.  Since Catholics are not simply anti-war as are the Quakers or Jehovah's Witnesses, there had to be something more than mere 'war' driving JPII's concerns.

Well, there was.  Here is an essay/partial transcript of an interview with John Zmirak.

...Zmirak framed Saddam Hussein as a lesser of several evils with respect to competing forces – namely Islamists – vying for control of Iraq. Toppling Hussein, he added, facilitated subsequent persecution and ethnic cleaning – including mass rape, sex-trafficking, and murder campaigns – of Christians by Islamist groups such as ISIS.

“Saddam Hussein was a sponsor of terror against Israel, he was a brutal dictator, but he was a secular ruler,” Zmirak explained. “The ancient Christian communities of Iraq … were safe under him. Part of his bolstering of his secular reputation was protecting those communities.”...

How did Bush proceed?


....“The Bush administration showed absolutely zero concern for the Christian communities of Iraq,” said Zmirak. “And we’re not talking five or six hundred people; 1.3 million Christians lived in Iraq when the Iraq War started, and they have lived there for two thousand years. They were some of the earliest Christian communities in the world. Way before there were Catholics in Rome, or before Constantinople existed, there were Christians in Iraq.”

“Seventy-five to eighty percent of [Iraq’s Christian communities] were ethnically cleansed while George Bush was president, while he was commander-in-chief, while he ruled that country as absolutely as Kim Jong-un rules North Korea. He didn’t care,” Zmirak stated....

People in the US tend to think of the Vatican as some sort of 7th century collection of nice old buildings and artworks populated by collared geezers who speak Latin and who cannot operate a cell-phone.  In fact--if you stop to think about it--he Vatican has the single largest HUMINT operation in the world and might actually have something useful to add to the DeepState's NSA-intel.

Clearly, JPII knew something that Bush did not.

Worse, Bush didn't give a rat's ass.