ICC Note: This week marked the 15 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks against the US. At the time, the attacks warranted a strong military response from the US government. Now 15 years later, we can see the repercussions of that response, especially on Iraqi Christian communities. Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at the Catholic University of America, explains how life under Saddam Hussain is now considered a ‘golden age’ for Christians remaining in the terrorized lands of Iraq.

09/12/2016 Iraq (Catholic World Report): On the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center terror attacks, we shouldn’t overlook how Middle Eastern Christians have suffered from the unintended consequences of U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy, says one expert.

“The U.S. Catholic bishops, in their statement after the Sept.11 attacks, made it clear that the response has to be a response that brings more peace for all, not just greater security for U.S. citizens,” said Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at the Catholic University of America.

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Thus, “it’s really taken a long time,” she said, to help those crafting U.S. foreign policy “to understand that religious actors can be a positive force in international politics for peace, for prosperity, for development, and not only or merely a source of conflict.”

Middle Eastern Christians and other religious minorities have also suffered greatly from the unintended consequences of U.S. post-9/11 foreign policy, despite the ultimately-prophetic warnings from Catholic leaders, including Pope St. John Paul II, against the War in Iraq, Love explained.

“Christians in the Middle East are in a fight for their lives,” she said, and “in a large part the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks certainly played a role in that.”

With the war beginning in 2003, attacks on Iraqi Christian communities increased and Christians left the country. While over 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq in 2003, there are fewer than 500,000 now.

Also, militant groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – which did not exist at the time of the U.S. invasion – came into Iraq, Love noted.

“One thing many Iraqi Christians will tell you, they had no love for Saddam Hussein, but they all point to that as a golden age, that their lives were so much better under that regime than they are now,” she said. “They said then we had one brutal dictator to worry about; now we have many. And the sources of instability are much larger, much wider. And they’re under threat from many more corridors.”

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