Never Mind The Bulwarks?

Nick Cohen, who is so good when he is good, certainly did not care about women or Christians when he urged on the almost immeasurable worsening of their condition by the removal of Iraq's bulwark against the people who now control that country.

The neoconservatism with which Cohen has allied himself defines "the West" in the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual terms of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, imposed by force of arms. It defines itself against the foundation of our civilisation by, in, through and as the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. Therefore, the more enthusiastically supported by the neoconservatives is a regime or movement that is Islamic, Middle Eastern or both, then the more hostile it is to Christians: Pakistan, Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, Mubarak's Egypt, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and the wider Russian Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Israel, "liberated" Iraq.

Whereas the more hostile the neocons are, the better are relations with those who embody the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ: the Christian-majority provinces and the Christian festivals as public holidays in Syria, the reserved Assyrian and Armenian parliamentary representation in Iran, Lebanon in general and the new governing coalition in particular, the seats for Christians in Palestine east of the Jordan (the present Hashemite Kingdom), the Christian quota for the Palestinian Authority, Iraq before 2003. An Egyptian government including the Muslim Brotherhood, which freely accepts that it will never govern alone, by no means augurs ill for the Copts, who have hardly had it easy under a "key Western ally". Any more than have Egypt's women, whereas women outnumber men at university in Iran.