BANGKOK, Thailand -- Saudi Arabian women scored a hilarious boost to their campaign for the right to drive when an Islamist cleric became an international laughingstock for insisting ovaries suffer damage if women hold a steering wheel because it "pushes the pelvis upwards."

Saudi cleric Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan's remarks in an interview published on the Arabic-language news site sabq.org on September 27, were quickly translated into English and went viral across Internet, attracting mockery, insults and dismay.

His rant was highlighted further when "Reuters earlier wrongly identified him as Sheikh Saleh bin Mohammed al-Lohaidan, a member of the Senior Council of Scholars, one of the top religious bodies in the birthplace of Islam," Reuters news agency said on September 29 correcting its initial report.

"By contrast, Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, the person quoted in the sabq.org report, is a judicial adviser to an association of Gulf psychologists," Reuters said in its newer update headlined: "Top Saudi cleric says women who drive risk damaging their ovaries."

As soon as the federal government shut down for the first time in nearly a decade, a surreal disquiet settled over the D.C. area. For political junkies inside the beltway the whole scene leading up to the shutdown was actually something of a spectacle. With countdown clocks, last minute deals, and dramatic speeches on the house and senate floors, this was political theatre at its finest. But as soon as October 1 came the hype started to fizzle and a harsh reality set in.

More than 800,000 federal workers were sent home without pay. Funding for national science programs all but completely came to a halt. National parks closed their access to the public. Cuts to the Head Start program were amplified, although the shutdown is only an additional burden to the across-the-board sequester cuts that affected Head Start in March.

The sickening terrorist attack carried out in Nairobi is a reminder of one thing among several others; talking points will not suffice when such devastation needs to be properly explained to the public. As Americans are once again forced to brush away the dust atop their maps they hurry to locate Kenya. Yet, as this story has unfolded, Kenya has proven to be just the tip of the iceberg. In order to gain a richer understanding of the terrorist attack in Kenya and its explicit motivations one must dig deeper into an older conflict involving the immediate region’s key player, Somalia.

Without a constant national government from 1991 to 2006, Somalia was essentially a modern day example of a stateless society. Between rampant crime and poverty throughout Somalia, chaos became the norm. To correct this nebulous conception of rule the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was created in the middle of 2004. Designed to impose order and crack down on the escalating crime rates and warlord-style governance, the ICU had another crucial element which cannot go overlooked; it meant to enforce Islamic law on the areas that it controlled.

This article is the foreword to David Swanson's new book, War No More: The Case for Abolition.

I lived in Iraq during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing. On April 1st, about two weeks into the aerial bombardment, a medical doctor who was one of my fellow peace team members urged me to go with her to the Al Kindi Hospital in Baghdad, where she knew she could be of some help. With no medical training, I tried to be unobtrusive, as families raced into the hospital carrying wounded loved ones. At one point, a woman sitting next to me began to weep uncontrollably. “How I tell him?” she asked, in broken English. “What I say?” She was Jamela Abbas, the aunt of a young man, named Ali. Early in the morning on March 31st, U.S. war planes had fired on her family home, while she alone of all her family was outside. Jamela wept as she searched for words to tell Ali that surgeons had amputated both of his badly damaged arms, close to his shoulders. What’s more, she would have to tell him that she was now his sole surviving relative.