"Single-Issue" Voters?

For a fine analysis of "Catholics, Kerry, and the 'Single-Issue' Voter," see this analysis in Against the Grain (Gratia tibi, Christopher).

Kreeft says he's lying ... Can you see why?)

"Non-Christians and even Christians can take opposite positions on abortion even when they think rationally, honestly, and with good will. The continuing controversy over abortion shows that it is a truly controversial issue. It is not simple and clear-cut, but complex. Just as the choices for action are often difficult for a woman contemplating abortion, the choices for thought are often difficult for open-minded philosophers."

"Everything I have said so far is a lie, in fact a dangerous lie," says Kreeft.

(Can you see why?)

Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains why it is not only philosophically unsound, but willfully dishonest, to deny that personhood begins at conception. Article here, Kreeft's homepage here, Kreeft's enigmatic target here. (Gratias tibi, Jamie.)

Correcting Cardinal Maida on Tridintine Rite

Ad Limina Apostolorum reported recently that Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida is reaching back 40 years to revive a traditional form of the Latin mass, hoping its unusual appeal will help save one of Detroit's most famous Catholic churches, St. Josaphat.

"When the pope authorized bishops to allow this mass in 1984, the idea was that this was a pastoral response to older people who still are so attached to this older mass that they need it," Reese said Monday. "The idea was never to create a new desire in people for this mass."

Whether or not that was the idea, that's what's happening. Perhaps in the minds of the many in the presbyterate and episcopate, "the hope is that this mass eventually will fade away," but many of the faithful are weary of experimentation and theatrics.

Actually, while it may have been the hope of the "progressivist" Novus Ordo innovators that the "older Mass" would eventually "fade away," this wasn't the rationale of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which never envisioned the rupture and "replacement" of the traditional Roman Rite by anything resembling the Novus Ordo. It's rationale, rather, was a "reform" of the traditional rite, which would have meant an organic development and refinement of it, such as it had undergone throughout its age-old history, most recently in the Gregorian reforms under Pope St. Pius X. This is clear not only from Ratzinger's own repeated statements, but from such movements as Fr. J. Fessio's Adoremus Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy. Thus, while the Novus Ordo movement has become a defacto liturgical movement within the Church, the Novus Ordo is far from being an established rite in its own right, as attested by the continual tinkering with it over the last decades. The Novus Ordo is a valid Mass, as it was duly promulgated by Pope Paul VI, but it was never envisioned or mandated by the fathers of Vatican II. Sacrosanctum Concilium, rather, envisions two things: (1) the ongoing existence of the traditional Roman Rite, and (2) the careful reform of that rite, not a replacement of it, such as Ratzinger has called the "rupture" of the Novus Ordo, which has calles "grave damage" to the faithful.

Thus, when bishops such as Detroit's Cardinal Maida describe the tridentine Mass as a rite they hope and expect will die out with the older generation of fuddy-duddies sentimentally attached to it, and will be replaced throughout the universal Church by the Novus Ordo, they're not only missing the point, but engaged in pure fantasy. The traditional Roman Rite is here to stay, along with all the other perfectly licit rites, such as all of the many Eastern rites affiliated with Rome.

Maida story here, kudos to Sanctificarnos. On a similar note, Alan Phipps at Ad Altare Dei records some interesting observations upon attending a Tridentine mass in Sacramento. (Gratias tibi, Jamie.)

More musings

The Illusions of Egalitarian, by John Kekes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003), was recently reviewed by Jude P. Dougherty in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 44-46. Looks to be an excellent and timely read.

"Meterosexual" is the term now used for the androgynous male who embraces feminism, the ideal straight dandy who is easygoing, caring, open-minded, sensitive, in touch with his feminine side, and the target of those marketing $40 face creams, Bruno Magli shoes, and custome tailored shirts for men. See Michael Rose's guest column article, "Effeminacy in the Service of Capitalism" in the July-August New Oxford Review.

In the same issue is a fascinating article reviewing a video entitled Herb Meyer's The Siege of Western Civilization. Meyer, who was Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council during the Reagan Administration, attempts to cover four major points in 42 minutes, according to the article's author, Charles A. Coulombe.

He first identifies Western Civilization, for better or worse, as the merging of Greek philosophy, Judaisim, Christianity, and post-Renaissance secularism; then he ticks off three threats to that civilization:

(a) Radical Islam: those who wish to convert the world are a real danger, he suggests.

(b) A "Second Civil War" in the U.S. and elsewhere, waged between those who support and those who oppose the traditions of the West as regards marriage, family, culture, etc.

(c) The demographic problem: North America and Europe are aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence.

Interesting.

The National Right to Life News Vol. 31, No. 7 (July 2004), p. 4, has an article (not available online, unfortunately, but only in the print issue), stating that fetal stem cells may bring healing to mothers long after pregnancy:

Cells from unborn babies survive for years in mothers' blood, which may allow doctors to retrieve the cells without killing a child, according to a study in the July 7 Journal of the American Medical Association.

All the potential benefits of stem cell research for preventing Alzheimers and other diseases may be available without the 'need' to 'manufacture' (and destroy) fertilized human embryos, which involves the unjustifiable taking of human life.

Catholic sources of modern science

"The [Catholic] Church's true role in the development of modern science remains one of the best-kept secrets of modern history," writes Thomas Woods points out in his article, "The Church and the Birth of Modern Science," in Latin Mass magazine (Spring 2004). Writes Wood: "The Catholic Church has been unjustly attacked over the years on more grounds than many of us care to recall, but her alleged hostility toward science may be her greatest debit in the popular mind. The caricatured and cartoonish version of the Galileo affair with which most people are familiar is very largely to blame for the widespread belief that the Church has obstructed the advance of scientific inquiry." It was not coincidental, notes Wood, that the birth of science as a self-perpetuating field of intellectual endeavor should have occurred within a Catholic cultural milieu. (Read more.)

Comical conclusion of DP Convension

DNC CONVENTION DIRECTOR ON-AIR CNN: 'Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddammit... There's not enough coming down! All balloons, what the hell! There's nothing falling! What the f@#k are you guys doing up there?'... (For an AUDIO [MP3 FILE], click on Drudge Report, below.) Here's the transcript:

DNC CONVENTION DIRECTOR DON MISCHER AIRED ON CNN AS KERRY ENDS SPEECH, HEARD WORLDWIDE:

'Go balloons, go balloons! Go balloons! I don't see anything happening. Go balloons! Go balloons! Go balloons! Standby confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring it- balloons, balloons, balloons! We want balloons, tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet.

'No confetti. All right, go balloons, go balloons. We need more balloons. All balloons! All balloons! Keep going! Come on, guys, lets move it. Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddammit. Go confetti. Go confetti. More confetti. I want more balloons. What's happening to the balloons? We need more balloons.

'We need all of them coming down. Go balloons- balloons? What's happening balloons? There's not enough coming down! All balloons, what the hell! There's nothing falling! What the f@#k are you guys doing up there? We want more balloons coming down, more balloons. More balloons. More balloons'...

(Drudge Report)

Around the blogsphere

Times Against Humanity continues its top to bottom coverage of the DP (Death Party) Con-vention by the irrepressibly charming Earl Appleby. In related news, The Curt Jester introduces "The Secularizer," whose patented unfilter technology called CorruptPlay^TM injects the profanity, violence, and pornographic content that contemporary Democratic TV viewing audiences have come to expect, should the need arise. Elliot Bougis, taking over Mark Shea's blog under the revised name, "Not quite Catholic but still enjoying it," describes Kerry's DP Convention speech as knocking Nixon's "Checkers Speech" from its pedestal and reaching the "You make me want to puke" point in record time. The Jewish World Review offers an analysis of Arab coverage of the U.S. presidential race in Stephen Stanlinsky's "Arab Guide to the 2004 Election" (thanks to David Mills at Touchstone). It seems the Iranians and others are terrified of Bush, which may explain their all-out support for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. (Let the voter beware!) Jimmy Akin (Defensor Fidei) covers the reception of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ in Malaysia, which is surprisingly different from that of other Muslim countries in the Middle East (Kuala Lumpur, Reuters). John da Fiesole offers the following apt question for political observers, under the "Personally Opposed to Murder" button (pictured right):

"Okay, I understand everyone says stupid things at times. When we do, we should notice that what we've said was stupid and correct ourselves without compounding the stupidity.

"So, when are the politicians who have said they can't force their morality on their constituents going to correct themselves without compounding their stupidity?"

In other news, Greg Krehbiel, responds to the question, "Pornography never hurt anyone, right?" by taking us from "the fantasy universe of the privacy Nazis -- 'It's nobody's business what I do privately'" -- to a report from the real universe that hotel workers want porn-rated movies banned. Krehbiel, commenting also on the presidential race, quotes Ann Coulter:

"Among the four major candidates for president and vice president this year, who has the smallest net worth? Answer: George Bush."

But most interesting of all is Krehbiel's analysis of Sobran's take on fixing "same sex" marriage. On the question of Kerry's character and military service record, see the astute Catholic Analysis by Oswald Sobrano. Also see his analysis of Kerry's Speech, Like Michael Moore, Undermines Troops. For a detailed analysis of Ron Reagan's duplicitous speech at the DP (Death Party) Convention, see Christopher Blosser's piece in Against the Grain. See also his links to the discussion of George Sim Johnson's recent articles in Crisis magazine on the consequences and implications of the Second Vatican Council. Benjamin Blosser offers a detailed Augustinian analysis of sex and marriage in Ad Limina Apostolorum. In another post, "Fr. Pavone levels the playing field," Benjamin quotes Fr. Frank Pavone as saying:

"If a candidate who supported terrorism asked for your vote, would you say, 'I disagree with you on terrorism, but where do you stand on other issues?'"

"'I stand for adequate and comprehensive health care.' So far, so good. But as soon as you say that a procedure that tears the arms off of little babies is part of 'health care,' then your understanding of the term 'health care' is obviously quite different from the actual meaning of the words."

"'My plan for adequate housing will succeed.' Fine. But what are houses for, if not for people to live in them? If you allow the killing of the children who would otherwise live in those houses, how am I supposed to get excited by your housing project?"

Summary: "It's easy to get confused by all the arguments in an election year. But if you start by asking where candidates stand on abortion, you can eliminate a lot of other questions you needn't even ask."

See also Pavone's original article, entitled "You Wouldn't Even Ask," as well as his organization, Priests for Life.

For a very interesting discussion of the presidential race, read Michael Novak's "Why the Dems Will Lose." Here are a few excerpts:

of the political commentators I admire most for his astuteness said yesterday that the paroxysm of hatred the Democrats have been indulging for the last six months is the worst American political delusion he has seen in his entire life.

What will it be like -- if after all this hatred, all this effort, all those millions upon millions of dollars spent to express disdain, contempt, and hate -- Bush wins again, flashes a victory symbol over his head, grins, strides around shaking hands, glows with exuberance and radiance?

For Democrats, losing is much worse than for Republicans.... Democrats without power suffer much more. Democrats go listless, purposeless."

And, finally, a quote for the day from George Washington:

"Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Oblate pre-novice graduates and heads for the novitiate

On 21 May 2004, Benjamin Adam Roberts (pictured left) graduated Summa Cum Laude in philosophy from D'Youville College in Buffalo, NY. Ben is a convert to Catho-licism from Hickory, NC, where he previously attended Lenoir-Rhyne College (Note: Lenoir-Rhyne College Campus Pastor, Andrew Weisner, is pictured second from right). Roberts has been a member of the Bishop Fallon Community, under the direction of Fr. George Kirwin, Order of Mary Immaculate (OMI), since 2002. He will enter the Novitiate in Godfrey, IL, in August after working at St. William's Parish in Tewksbury, MA, this summer. Read more.

Iraqi prisoner calls Abu Ghraib "a joke"

While few of us would want to absolve those who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, this former prisoner of Saddam Hussein puts the matter into perspective and reminds us why so many Iraqis are relieved to be free of Saddam Hussein:

Ibrahim Idrissi has mixed feelings about the recent uproar caused by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the US occupation. "As a humanitarian organization, we oppose this," he says. "But these are soldiers who have come to Iraq to fight, not to be prison guards. It was to be expected. Of course, if there are innocent people in there ... it is possible, I guess, that some of them are innocent."

If Idrissi seems a bit callous about the fate of the Iraqis in US-run jails, he has probably earned the right to differ. He recalls a day in 1982, at the General Security prison in Baghdad:

"They called all the prisoners out to the courtyard for what they called a 'celebration.' We all knew what they meant by 'celebration.' All the prisoners were chained to a pipe that ran the length of the courtyard wall. One prisoner, Amer al-Tikriti, was called out. They said if he didn't tell them everything they wanted to know, they would show him torture like he had never seen. He merely told them he would show them patience like they had never seen."

"This is when they brought out his wife, who was five months pregnant. One of the guards said that if he refused to talk he would get 12 guards to rape his wife until she lost the baby. Amer said nothing. So they did. We were forced to watch. Whenever one of us cast down his eyes, they would beat us."

"Amer's wife didn't lose the baby. So the guard took a knife, cut her belly open and took the baby out with his hands. The woman and child died minutes later. Then the guard used the same knife to cut Amer's throat." There is a moment of silence. Then Idrissi says: "What we have seen about the recent abuse at Abu Ghraib is a joke to us."

(Read the whole story in The Daily Star)

Why we didn't invade the "wrong country"

In a weekly column in World Watch entitled, "Did we invadethe wrong country?" Orson Scott Card writes: "I find it just a little amusing that pundits -- especially opponents of the war -- are now saying, 'It looks like we invaded the wrong country, if we wanted to get the governments that supported 9/11.'" Read Card's detailed and cogent analysis on why we invated Iraq. The reasons are still good. Card concludes "we can't afford to replace Bush with a candidate who has been an enemy of American defenses for his entire career -- starting the day he got home from Vietnam and threw whatever he threw over the fence." Read the whole article.

Kierkegaard, critic of Luther

Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish Lutheran and one of Denmark's most revered philosophers,
and began his theological career quite sympathetic to Luther . But that opinion underwent a significant change. By the end of his life, as Walter Lowrie wrote, Kierkegaard had "nothing but denunciations" for Luther. The change in Kierkegaard's thinking is discussed in a recent article by Alice von Hildebrand, "Kierkegaard: A Critic of Luther," Latin Mass magazine (Spring, 2004), pp. 10-14. Some of the quotations from Kierkegaard, tracking the shift in his thinking, are posted on my Philosophia Perennis blog. Just a few are offered below to whet your appetite:

-- [S. Kierkegaard] --

Directly challenging Luther, Kierkegaard writes:

"Luther, your responsibility is great indeed, for the closer I look the more clearly do I see that you overthrew the pope and set the public on the throne.... You altered the New Testament concept of 'the martyr,' and taught men to win by numbers."

Again, Kierkegaard criticizes Luther:

As for the rest, the closer I examine Luther the more convinced do I become
that he was muddle headed. It is a comfortable kind of reforming which consists in throwing away burdens and making life easier.... True reforming always means to make life more difficult, to lay on burdens; and the true reformer is therefore always put to death as though he were the enemy of mankind. Luther's 'hear me, thou Pope' ... sound[s] to me always disgustingly worldly. Is that the sacred earnestness of a reformer ... who knows that true reformation consists in becoming more inward? Such an expression is just like a journalist's slogan. That unholy political attitude, that desire to overthrow the pope is - [Martin Luther] - what is so confusing about Luther."

Kierkegaard became increasingly convinced that Luther had systematically watered down Christianity:

"[I]t can come to the point in Protestantism when worldliness is honored and venerated as godliness. And that, I maintain, cannot happen in Catholicism.... No wonder Luther very quickly got such great support. The secular mentality understood immediately the break.... [T]hey grinned in their beards ... at Luther ... that chosen instrument of God who had helped men so splendidly make a fool of God."

New Iraqi film counters Farenheit 911

Saddam's Mass Graves, a documentary making the rounds in the heartland of America, makes a compelling case for Bush, even though the film offers not a single image of Bush. "I wanted to keep the message absolutely free of politics," says director-producer Rosebiani, a soft-spoken native of Iraq's Kurdistan. And this he does religiously -- even cutting tempting footage of gushing families in northern Iraq who have named their new baby sons "Bush." Rosebiani's film lacks the entertainment value of Moore's political partisanship and venomous vitriol in Farenheit 911, and the quiet director is a bit shy when he suggests that Moore's film was engineered to appeal to the "dumb and dumber" set. But those who have watched Moore's Fahrenheit 911 might conclude the corpulent director was from another planet when his film portrayed Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a modern-day Shangri-la with children dancing in the streets. Rosebiani reveals, to say the least, a different Iraq. Following a simple formula of "just show it," Rosebiani has Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds recount in their own words how their brothers, husbands, children and friends were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, beaten and starved at holding camps, and finally shot -- their bodies pushed into mass graves. The carnage under Saddam's regime was of horrific proportions, leaving an estimated 300,000 civilians dead. In the so-called "Anfal" ethnic cleansing of 1988 alone some 4000 villages were wiped from the face of the earth. Paramount is the conclusion that Saddam Hussein could have only been stopped by direct military intervention. Saddam's Mass Graves debuted recently at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where, as Rosebiani recounted to NewsMax, "I had some tough customers there to see the film -- they were solidly against the U.S.'s intervention in Iraq. They told me that this was no longer their opinion after seeing the film." (Source: Dave Eberhart, "The Democrats Won't See This Film in Boston," NewsMax.com Tuesday, July 27, 2004)

The disappointment with Jimmy Carter

I voted for Jimmy Carter both times he ran for office. Until the end of his administration, I was a Democrat. I supported the Democratic platform until then, because, like many Catholics still mistakenly believe, I genuinely believed then that the Democrats supported the traditional hardworking family man -- the proverbial "little guy" -- against the presumed real enemy, big business. It was only during the latter part of the Carter administration that I saw the writing on the wall. The emerging outlines of a cultural divide were already then slowly becoming apparent, a divide that increasingly paralleled the division between the two major parties. Already in 1973 two gauntlets had been thrown down in Row v. Wade (legalizing the killing of unborn babies) and in the American Psychiatric Association's politically-inspired declassification of homosexuality as a disorder in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (allowing homosexual behavior to be increasingly viewed as normal and even healthy, in conformity with the now discredited data of Kinsey's Report). But there were many individuals, including myself, who sincerely failed to see what was coming. Not only was the Democratic party no longer for the "traditional hardworking family man" at all; it was undermining the foundations of traditional families.

When Jimmy Carter retired from the Presidency to help build houses for Habitat for Humanity and teach weekly Sunday School classes in his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, I regarded him with a great deal of admiration and respect. Here was a man who, if he had not exactly succeeded at being a great President, had committed himself to helping the poor during his retirement years. He seemed to stand in some way for some of the best ideals in the Christian tradition. And this admiration for Carter has continued up to the present.

Increasingly, though, since the first days of the Reagan administration, the ways in which the major US parties lined up on the issues made it more and more difficult to vote with the Democrats. Increasingly, it was the party of Abraham Lincoln (the GOP) that carried the ball when it came to legislation that could be called "liberal" in the classic sense of opposing big government. "That government is best which governs least," is a liberal political sentiment stemming from the basic Judeo-Christian insight of Lord Acton: "all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But it was also the GOP that increasingly took on the mantle of the proverbial David against the Goliath of the activist courts, which have been rapidly legislating away the natural and civil rights of individuals under the rubric, ironically, of a "right to privacy." What had started out as (1) the idea of "freedom" firmly rooted in the Christian idea of the liberty of the sinner redeemed by Christ became (2) the Lockean idea of freedom rooted in Stoic ideals of reason and natural law, and then (3) the idea of complete autonomy utterly divorced from any conception of good as constitutive of freedom. But anarchy is always closely related to tyranny, as Plato saw in his Republic, and as J.L. Talmon, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, clearly discerned in his book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. In was not for nothing that J.J. Rousseau said in The Social Contract that the masses must be "compelled to be free" -- and it was not for nothing that Simone de Beauvoir famously asserted that women shouldn't be allowed a choice to stay home as a wife and mother because too many women would choose to do so.

Thus it is those (typically Democrats) who talk in the most glowing terms about "toleration" and the "rights" of individuals to such things as abortion and same-sex "marriages" are also most vociferous in their intolerance towards the rights of unborn babies, traditional families, and Jews and Christians who adhere to traditional heterosexual understandings of marriage, the usage of masculine pronouns for God, and so forth. Their viceral hatred of such traditional values can be seen, for example, in Linda Rondstadt's recent remark that her ability to enjoy her performances is stymied when she learns that there are Republicans or "fundamental Christians" in the audience, or in Michael Moore's unmitigated and gratuitious invective against the values of the Bush administration in Farenheit 911. These things have come to comprise the thematic of the Democratic Party over the last decades, and try as they might, they cannot hide it. Not even with extreme image makeovers of the sort attempted at their convention in Boston. Sooner-than-later, the underlying agenda animating their activity emerges: a culture of death-dealing abortuaries funded by free-access support for Planned Parenthood, a culture perpetuating attitudes of chip-on-the-shoulder victimization and resentment among African-Americans, radical feminist antipathy toward the values of motherhood and traditional families, neo-Marxist redistributionism, post-Christian loathing of all Judeo-Christian values, postmodern deconstruction of all traditional Western institutions (legal, educational, political, religious), and a homosexual agenda aimed at undermining the traditional institutions of heterosexual marriages and families. The time for subtlety is past.

Thus when Jimmy Carter spoke at the Democratic Convention in Boston on Monday in support of John Kerry, whose convention organizers have befittingly wrapped him in the mantle of Bill "I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman" Clinton, I was disappointed with him. I was disappointed that he would even sit on the same platform as those who identify themselves with Clinton's lifting of the ban on partial-birth abortion, let alone drag in references to his Christian faith and prayer in the context of a party unequivocally hostile to traditional Christian belief in objective and inviolable absolutes. Above all, however, I was disappointed that Carter let himself -- willingly or unwillingly, I do not know -- be reduced to an aging attack dog for the Kerry campaign, impugning the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq when Kerry and Clinton supported it and when no Democrat has said specifically what he would have done differently, and feting the duplicitous and self-serving heel whom even many Democrats recognize Kerry to be with perfumed mendacities such as these:

"Twenty years ago I was running for president, and I said then, 'I want a government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate as are the American people.' I say this again tonight, and that is exactly what we will have next January with John Kerry as president of the United States." (Source.)

MA residents know Kerry only too well

A poll of 500 registered voters, weighted to reflect the Massachusetts electorate (which means three Democrats for every Republican), reveals that Massachusetts residents know him well:

• 49 percent, nearly half of Massachusetts voters say that Sen. Kerry says what he believes people want to hear rather than what he really believes
  
• 53 percent a majority of Massachusetts voters say he is more concerned with raising his national profile to being a serious legislator
  
• Again nearly half 48 percent believe that flip flopper is a fair label and I'll remind you this is a poll weighted 3-to-1 Democrat
  
• They also believe that John Edwards is more charismatic by 70 percent to 15 percent than is John Kerry
  
• Sen. Kerry said that in 1991 he said, "I'm a liberal" but a few weeks ago he said, "I'm not a liberal I represent conservative values." But the people of Massachusetts have a different perspective they believe by 47 percent to 8 percent that Sen. Kerry takes liberal rather than conservative positions.

More details at DemsExtremeMakeover.com. (Gratia tibi, Christopher.)

Soldier who captured Saddam

Ever wonder who captured Saddam Hussein? One of the first guys to find and capture Saddam Hussein was an American soldier of Iraqi descent, who fled Iraq in 1991 to escape persecution under Hussein's regime. Read more. One of the best Iraqi blogs for getting an on-the-ground Iraqi point of view is The Iraqi Model. (Gratias tibi, Christopher Blosser.)