One of the arguments we heard against going to war with Iraq was that doing so would stir up opposition to the United States, and sympathy for Saddam Hussein and for terrorists, among people abroad whose goodwill we otherwise might have had. The prowar (pardon me, that should be “pro-liberation”) side dismissed such worries: the only opposition, we were told, would come from the usual suspects, reflexively anti-American or anti-Western.
These two items just in:
Christian Fuehrer, the Lutheran pastor from Leipzig who made his congregation a key organizing base in the struggle that toppled the Hoenecker regime, is now organizing against what he calls a “war of aggression.’
Meantime, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, grand sheikh of Al-Azhar University, regarded by some as the pre-eminent living Sunni religious scholar, who had denounced the 9-11 attack as unIslamic and described Osama bin Laden’s claims to spiritual authority as fraudulent,” has called all Muslims to a jihad “to defend the people of Iraq.”