Posted on 01/10/2005 7:29:30 AM PST by areafiftyone
VATICAN CITY - The Italian cardinal sent by Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II last year to try to dissuade President Bush (news - web sites) from invading Iraq (news - web sites) said Monday the president promised that the U.S. operation would be "quick."
Cardinal Pio Laghi visited Bush at the White House on March 5, 2003, to relay the pope's position that dialogue, not arms, should be used to resolve the crisis over Iraq, which the United States accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction.
"When I went to Washington as the pope's envoy just before the outbreak of the war in Iraq, he (Bush) told me: `Don't worry, your eminence. We'll be quick and do well in Iraq,'" Laghi told Italian Catholic TV station Telepace, which was broadcasting the pontiff's annual address to diplomats.
When the United States went to war in Iraq, Laghi called the attack on Baghdad "tragic and unacceptable."
"Unfortunately, the facts have demonstrated afterward that things took a different course — not rapid and not favorable," the prelate told Telepace. "Bush was wrong."
Laghi was the Vatican (news - web sites)'s first envoy to Washington in the 1980s and established a friendship with Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush.
Who said this? LaRussa?
Well, as wars go, it was quick. Were we supposed to be out of there in a week?
The operation was quick -- it was over in three weeks.
You have to wonder if the Cardinal may have been on the oil-for-food take like our UN "allies."
Good Lord, now it's getting even tougher to be Catholic.
But, as we all know, it is still BUSH'S FAULT.
And, as is common, the headline (BROKEN PROMISE) is at odds with the content.
The impeachment drumbeat begins....
Dialogue? Yeah, that worked reeeallly well.
Also, underestimating the terrorist attacks there does NOT constitute "breaking a promise."
...about as quick as the Catholic diocese has removed and fired the pedofiles within the ranks...
Okay, Cardinal Pio Laghi is now on the record. He wants us to turn Iraq over to the terrorists. I'll take a pass on that idea.
These same folks had no plan for stopping what Hussein and his cronies were doing in Iraq.
I guess we should have allowed millions more to have been slaughtered. Our bad.
Bingo! The Vatican hasn't done a whole lot to improve their credibility on any issue after turning a blind eye for years as to what was going on with their pedofile priests.
Clean up their own house first before telling others they are wrong. Their foreign policy expertise is nil as far as I am concerned after also turning a blind eye to all the atrocities of Saddam including welcoming members of his regime to the Vatican!
If that's the case we'll be in Iraq for another twenty years.
Sounds to me like Cardinal Pio Laghi has something to hide. Was he on the take from Saddam and is worried about it being found out?
I wonder if this guy ever met with Saddam at all. So in otherwords Saddam could massacre thousands and thousands of Iraqi citizens and not a peep out of the Vatican or the U.N. and the U.S. decides to liberate the Iraqi people and stop the slaughter and we are told to "make it quick"! I'm a Roman Catholic and I hate when the Vatican acts like they can dictate foreign policy.
"Cardinal Pio Laghi visited Bush at the White House on March 5, 2003, to relay the pope's position that dialogue, not arms, should be used to resolve the crisis over Iraq, which the United States accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction."
When the Vatican has a real government and a military institution - which it dosen't and shouldn't - they maybe Bush should listen to them.
Like the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, some of the Catholic Church's higher clergy have become an obnoxious bunch of pacifistic back-stabbing losers.
The U.S. should start billing the Vatican for the court cost of all those paedophile trials. Then maybe they'll shut up and mind their own business when it comes to international politics - of which they are apparently totally ignorant - just like the rest of the Euroweenies.
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Being "wrong" is a matter of perspective. In one sense, we are still taking casualties at a rate as high as when the war first began, so one could spin this as Bush being wrong.
But the headline states that Cardinal Laghi essentially called Bush a liar. If that is true, that Cardinal Laghio is a liar. Although I suspect the journalist is the liar.
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