The American Spectator

While it is true that there no dominoes fell in the Far East, forgetting about the absolute catastrophe that overtook Cambodia and the boat people from Vietnam, the true dominoes were elsewhere. They were not suspected. They were Afghanistan and Iran. The American weakness embodied in the Carter Administration was the direct result of Vietnam and lead to the overthrow of the Shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From those experiences came Al-Qaeda, the regime in Iran and Hezbollah (aided by our withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983). From them came ultimately 9/11 and Islamic terrorism worldwide.

p>The American people have a natural desire to avoid war and they tire of it quickly. They do not yet fully understand or have been misled about the present war. It is a war for survival. Iraq is just the first trial. The winner is the one who can sustain its will over the long long race. So far, we have given our enemies to understand we do not have that will — even in the short term. This lack of will unfortunately has been a temptation for one particular political party who has rightly seen it as a way to regain power. It is to that party and its leaders that Churchill’s phrase should be first directed, but it is a warning to us all. br> — David Sonenstein br> Las Vegas, Nevada /p> p> AT THE END OF THE MAINLINE br> Re: Faith McDonell’s Out of Africa : /p>

So — a paper with declining readership and ad revenues (due to its mendacity and shameless partisanship) defends the declining “mainline” Anglican Communion by slamming a breakaway group of Anglicans that, in spite of persecution, is growing because it has chosen to remain true to God’s Word. The New York Times sought to diminish the reputation of Archbishop Peter Akinola by citing his aversion to a risky lifestyle proscribed in the Bible and by mentioning his illiterate mother (overlooking the fact that the mothers of many of the early church fathers were probably illiterate as well). Meanwhile, the first female head of the American Anglican Union isn’t worried about her denomination’s declining membership — n-o-o-o, that’s a good thing: fewer humans to impact God’s creation, don’t you see.

p>The “mainstream” Anglicans, along with the Methodists, Presbyterians, and other “mainline” Protestant denominations, are hemorrhaging members because they have chosen to diminish Christ and edit God’s Word to fit their syncretist, socialist world view (capitalist U.S. — bad; Marxist and Islamist third-world kleptocrat autocracies — good). Meanwhile, those benighted “fundamentalist” (I prefer the term “orthodox”) churches that have remained faithful to the Bible and have shunned the “progressive” trends of a poisonous secularist culture find their memberships increasing. My question is, with 17 million