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Pastimes : Peace! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eashoa' M'sheekha who wrote (87)	2/16/2003 1:50:39 AM
From: Eashoa' M'sheekha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186

At Assisi, Iraqi Envoy Publicly Prays for Peace By FRANK BRUNI SSISI, Italy, Feb. 15 — The public relations battle between Baghdad and Washington came today to this unlikely hilltop front, where a senior Iraqi official found the ripest of metaphors for his claims that his country is harmless and doing all it can to avoid war. Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, traced the footsteps of St. Francis, the patron of peace and protector of the weak. As religious pilgrimage met media event, Mr. Aziz knelt before the gray stone tomb of the saint. The somber strains of organ music were punctuated by the percussive snap-snap of news photographers' cameras. Mr. Aziz, a Chaldean Christian, walked and talked among the saint's followers, devotees of peace who greeted him before a phalanx of television crews. He prayed, and in a special guest book on an altar near the tomb, he inscribed a wish. "May God the Almighty grant peace to the people of Iraq and the whole world," he wrote. "Amen." Mr. Aziz's visit to Assisi, where St. Francis was born in 1182 and died in 1226, occurred at the same time that demonstrators gathered in cities around the world for a large-scale protest against a possible American-led military invasion of Iraq. The two events, vastly different in scale but similar in goal, reflected an increase in efforts to sway international opinion and to influence the course of events as a moment of American decision seems to draw nearer. Mr. Aziz, who had a private meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome on Friday, said that the purpose of his visit to Assisi was simple. "My message is peace," he told reporters outside the Basilica of St. Francis. "The people of Iraq want peace, and millions of people around the world are demonstrating for peace," he said, referring to the day's protests. "So let us all work for peace and resist the war and intentions of aggression." In a news conference in Rome on Friday night, Mr. Aziz had repeatedly characterized American plans for a possible strike against Iraq as unprovoked, unwarranted and imperialistic. He said Iraq was cooperating fully with weapons inspections and trying to pave a path toward peace. The time he spent in this storied central Italian city of famous religious monuments represented a symbolic complement to those comments. He was welcomed outside the basilica by the Rev. Vincenzo Coli, the leader of the Franciscans here, and by Bishop Sergio Goretti of Assisi. At a subsequent ceremony in St. Francis's tomb, underneath the basilica, those Roman Catholic leaders presented Mr. Aziz with two symbols of peace. One was an ivory horn that had been given to St. Francis in 1219 by Melek el-Kamel, the sultan of Egypt. "St. Francis used this horn to call his monks to prayer and the silence of peace," Father Coli said. "Let us try to remember that today amid all the noise." The other symbol was a tiny lamp that commemorated a meeting here early last year, when the pope brought together leaders of various religions to pray for peace in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. During the ceremony, Bishop Goretti made an impassioned plea against war. "We are convinced that wars have never resolved the problems of humanity," he said. "They have always left a frightening wake of suffering." His remarks, however, were directed at a larger audience than the United States, perhaps including Iraqi officials and Mr. Aziz, who listened quietly, his hands clasped in front of him. "We condemn every form of terrorism, which is the new worrying plague of humanity, as well as building the devastating weapons of destruction," the bishop said

To: Eashoa' M'sheekha who wrote (87)	2/19/2003 12:29:58 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186

During the Nixon administration, demonstrations became more broad-based. More Democrats came out against it once Johnson was gone. Plain and simple, mainstream opposition to the Vietnam War grew exponentially as the war became more costly and less winnable. In other words, when the war began to hurt America, it began to be questioned. The idea that we were hurting Vietnam was never a serious mainstream issue. Tom