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Iraq

Top Ways Dan Senor Could have avoided offending Iraqi Muslims

Juan Cole 08/16/2010

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Former Bush administration spokesman in Iraq Dan Senor is against the building of a Sufi Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. He says he is concerned that interfaith understanding may be damaged.

Since Senor is so worried about religion and hurt feelings, he no doubt feels badly about what he and his team did to Iraqi Muslims. So here are the top ways Dan Senor could have avoided hurting the feelings of Iraqi Muslims:

5. He could have avoided lying about the anger in Iraq in 2004, a prelude to the civil war. He say, “I can tell you that the majority of this country, the majority of the population, is returning to normalcy and wants a stable, democratic Iraq to take hold.”

4. He could have told the truth about the horrific security situation in Iraq early on. He once joked off the record to journalists asking about the deteriorating security in Iraq, replying, “Off the record: Paris is burning,’ he told them. ‘On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.’ ”

3. He could, like, stop defending the Bush administration’s having lost track of $9 bn. of Iraqi money

2. He could have avoided being liar in chief for a brutal and duplicitious occupation of a major Muslim Arab country, which has left 4 million displaced, hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of torture victims, and a country in shambles without so much as a government at present.

1. He could have not been involved in an illegal act of naked aggression against a major Muslim Arab country.

Mr. Senor does not want a Muslim mosque near him? What in the world was he doing in Baghdad then? Or maybe he is a supremacist who only wants to be near Muslims who are under Occupation.

I think he may have done rather a lot of damage to interfaith understanding, from which even Karl Rove admitted it will take us a generation to recover.

Filed Under: Iraq, Islamophobia, Uncategorized

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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