(CNSNews.com) – Retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, a military strategist with the Pentagon, said on Wednesday that President Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East has “accelerated Christian genocide” and left the region in chaos.
“[Obama’s] Middle East policies – what they are – not only have accelerated Christian genocide but have left the region totally in turmoil and inflamed,” said Maginnis at a discussion about his new book at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., where he is a senior fellow.
Maginnis said he believes Obama has shaped his foreign policy -- including the fight against the so-called Islamic State and other terrorist groups that are perpetrating genocide -- around his administration’s efforts to cut a nuclear deal with the Islamic state of Iran.
“I think the real reason behind this is because he put that all aside – it was a deal he made with a devil, which is in Tehran and [Obama] says, ‘I won’t do this stuff, which interferes with you, as long as I get a deal with you,’ and, of course, we know that the Iranian deal is his legacy,” he said.
Maginnis described his book, “Never Submit: Will The Extermination of Christians Get Worse Before It Gets Better” as a “call to action to help those that are facing genocide in the Middle East.”
He cited statistics that show that when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, there were 1.5 million Christians living in the country. Now it is estimated that the Christian population in Iraq has declined to around 200,000.
“After all, Saddam Hussein allowed Christians to worship openly. They were part of his government,” Maginnis said. “The removal of Saddam and others, I would argue, started this ugly Shia/Sunni revolution that, in turn, spawned ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), and arguably as well started the Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia and spread across the region.”Maginnis doesn’t, however, blame only Obama for the ongoing persecution and extermination of Christians throughout the Middle East, including beheadings, the enslavement and rape of women and forced conversions. He claims that the current genocide dates back to toppling Saddam Hussein after the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003.
In his remarks, Maginnis laid out the solution to ending the genocide in the Middle East, including providing enclaves throughout the region where Christians can live safely, identifying the enemy as Islamic terrorists, and U.S. support for officially declaring the situation in the Middle East as genocide.