If so, then he along with the Blair-Bush Project's incompetence are responsible for Christians being persecuted in Iraq today.
I heard the audio of this report on then BBC (no longer available) and it was more devastating than even this...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7550048/Iraqi-Christians-under-fire.htmlThe campaign of violence against Christians is one of the most under-reported stories of Iraq since the invasion of 2003. And it could change the country's character in a fundamental way; by the time the dust finally settles on the chaotic current chapter of Iraq's history, the Christian community may have disappeared altogether – after 2,000 years as a significant presence. About 200,000 Iraqi Christians have already fled the country; they once made up three per cent of its population, and they now account for half of its refugees. <...>
I asked Dr Williams about the two politicians who took us to war in Iraq: Tony Blair and George Bush were the most enthusiastically Christian leaders we have had for many years. "The Christianity both of them were shaped by is, on the whole, a very, very Western thing," he said. "I don't sense that either of them had very much sense of the indigenous Christian life and history that there is in the region."
Iraq's Christians blame Western ignorance for many of their problems. Louis Sako is the Chaldean Archbishop of the Northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk: the Chaldeans are the largest of Iraq's Christian denominations. He is scathing about the Western missionaries he says came piling into Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the American invasion looking for converts.
In Baghdad alone, he told me, 30 new churches opened up shop, "with money, with books they were handing out to people on the street. I think this is provoking people. A Muslim cannot change his religion. It is not allowed. And they think they are here as missionaries to gain Muslims for Christianity."
The Chaldeans are in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and Louis Sako has been instrumental in persuading Pope Benedict to convene a special synod on the plight of Christians in the Middle East this October. In a pamphlet he has produced to bring the issue to the world's attention he writes: "Iraq is our homeland – we have been here long before the arrival of Islam. We are an indigenous people, not some colonial entity from somewhere else."
But he says that, since the invasion, many Iraqi Muslims have come to see Christians as exactly that – a colonial entity. Christianity has become associated with the West, and therefore with the Occupation.
The factors behind the eruption of violence against Christians are complex. Canon Andrew White, the redoubtable vicar of Baghdad, has watched the process from the start: he first came to the Iraqi capital in the late Nineties to reopen the city's one Anglican church, St George's, which had been closed down after the first Gulf War.
He, too, points a finger at western ignorance of Iraq's religious ecology. He recalls an early meeting with Jerry Bremer, the pro-consul sent by George Bush to sort out the chaos in Iraq in 2003. "I said we have to deal with the religious leaders and sectarian issues now.... Bremer said to me, 'Oh, don't worry about that. This isn't a religious country at all. It is very secular.' " It did not take long for Ambassador Bremer to change his mind. When they met again, he told Andrew White: "I can't even deal with water and electricity because religion keeps getting in the way." <...>
Andrew White knows what that trend means on the ground. Last year, he agreed to baptise 13 Iraqi Muslims who wanted to join his church. Within a week, 11 of them, he told me, had been killed.
I asked Rowan Williams whether he thought we might see Christianity disappear from the Middle East altogether in our lifetime. "I am sad to say that I think it is a possibility," he said, "and a possibility that appals me."
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