A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (31 page)

By rejecting and outrightly scorning the Iranian offer, the Bush administration unmistakably signaled to the Iranians that offers of conciliation and compromise would not be respected. Carnegie’s Parsi explained that in the wake of the humiliating U.S. rejection of their overture, “Iranian officials decided that the United States cared not about Iranian policies but about Iranian power.” Worse, the incident “strengthened the hands of those in Iran who believe the only way to compel the United States to talk or deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers but by being a nuisance,” Parsi said.

With the U.S. refusing meaningful diplomatic engagement with the Iranians, and with the president adopting increasingly bellicose and threatening rhetoric about them, U.S.-Iranian relations became more hostile than they had been since the 1979 revolution.

A CONFEDERATION OF WAR-SEEKING FACTIONS

W
hy would the president, in the midst of substantial and growing cooperation with the Iranians, suddenly decree Iran in 2002 to be part of an axis of evil, and all but declare Iran an enemy on whom war must inevitably be waged? Numerous and disparate factions surrounding the president each desired, albeit for different reasons and with different motives, hostility and conflict with Iran. Those factions perceive that belligerence toward Iran, rather than a negotiated peace, would promote their respective agendas. And each was able to depict Iran in the Manichean terms that would ensure that the president would see Iran as an implacable foe he was duty-bound to defeat.

Numerous ideologies and belief systems have played prominent roles in shaping the president’s Manichean militarism toward Iran. Initially, the president surrounded himself with traditional, garden-variety hawks—those who are driven by a central belief in the virtue and justification of America’s use of its superior military force to impose its will on other nations. Such hawkishness is embodied by both Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and exists independent of any specific geopolitical reasons for seeking Middle East hegemony. Hawks of this sort have cheered on every warmongering step taken by the president. A highly influential strain in the Bush administration seeks war because it believes in the use of war as a principal tool for securing America’s interests and dealing with other nations that refuse to submit to America’s will.

And then there is the related set of concerns: the emerging prospect that the world’s demand for oil will outstrip supply, and that with Saudi oil production potentially peaking, the largest strategic reserves will be in Iran, where U.S. access can be ensured only with a pro-American government in place. Oil is a critical resource for a nation’s strength, prosperity, and security. It is also finite and becoming scarce. Those who insist that such considerations are irrelevant to foreign policy decisions regarding the most oil-rich region on the planet, and the most oil-rich nations in that region, are advancing claims too frivolous to merit serious consideration. Access to and control over the Middle East’s oil supply pervades, to one degree or another, virtually all power struggles within that region.

Such oil-related objectives would likely motivate most mainstream American political leaders, let alone ones such as George Bush and Dick Cheney, who share a background in the oil industry and who retain substantial ties of every type to that industry. There are multiple reasons why the United States continues to sacrifice so much of its resources, its attention, and many of its lives to continued influence and even domination of the Middle East (versus other regions of the world where we appear more or less indifferent). Those who seek to deny that ensuring our influence over the oil supply is a significant factor in why we have made the Middle East our predominant national priority are either incredibly naïve or indescribably dishonest.

Regarding the most important issues of the Bush presidency—the invasion of Iraq, the treatment of Iran, and enhanced and unprecedented domestic police powers—traditional hawkishness and concern over the Middle Eastern oil supply have worked in perfect tandem with one another. And that agenda has also converged with two other critically influential factions of the Bush presidency—namely, the president’s base of Christian evangelicals who view political power as a means for promoting their theological objectives, and independently, the Israel-centric strain of neoconservatives. The agendas of all of those factions have been promoted by the same policies—the invasion of Iraq, expanded police powers at home, and the treatment of anti-American regimes in the Middle East as mortal enemies to be shunned, demonized, and attacked.

An influential faction of Christian evangelicals has loyally supported the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East (except to complain periodically that it is insufficiently aggressive). That faction is driven by the general theological belief that God’s will is for Jews to occupy all of “Greater Israel,” which will occur only once the enemies of Israel are defeated. There is no question—because many of their key leaders have said so themselves—that evangelicals, who compose a substantial part of President Bush’s most loyal following, have become fanatically “pro-Israel” in their foreign policy views because they believe that strengthening Israel is a necessary prerequisite for Rapture to occur—for the world to be ruled by Christianity upon Jesus’ apocalyptic return to Earth—and they believe that can occur only once “Greater Israel” is unified under Jewish control.

For obvious reasons, those theological yearnings have led evangelicals to be almost perfect allies of both the Israel-centric neoconservatives and the more traditional warmongers. All three groups—with different premises and different motives—have an interest in depicting multiple Middle East countries as Evil and urging the need to wage war on them.

Related to the specific evangelical drive to bring about Rapture by strengthening Israel is a more general belief among some evangelical Christians that wars against Muslims are justified and necessary because Muslims are an enemy of Christianity. The extent to which this belief is held is difficult to quantify, but various incidents have left no doubt that, at least in some discrete Bush-supporting circles, the “War on Terrorism”—and specifically more wars on more Islamic states such as Iran—is supported because they are seen as religious wars to be waged in defense of Christianity.

The president himself was forced to apologize after he described the U.S. War on Terrorism as a “new crusade,” evoking the historic wars of invasion waged by Christians against Muslims. Further Muslim-Christian sectarian flames were fueled by the statements of U.S. General William G. Boykin, the Bush administration’s deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who specifically described the war against Islamic extremists as a war of righteousness against the forces of Satan and claimed Muslims are not protected by God because they worship a mere “idol.”

In a November 2006
New York Review of Books
article, Garry Wills detailed another incident involving General Boykin. After President Bush’s 2000 election but before his 2004 re-election, General Boykin appeared in full military uniform before evangelical congregations and insisted that President Bush was installed in the White House by God:

Ask yourself this: why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?…I tell you this morning he’s in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this.

As Wills reports, Boykin, in part of his stump speech in churches, would typically present a slide show with photographs of individuals such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and various Taliban leaders while asking if each was “the enemy.” He “gave a resounding no to each question,” and then explained:

The battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it’s a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan….Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.

Though President Bush distanced himself from those remarks, claiming that they do not “reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration,” then-Secretary Rumsfeld defended General Boykin. And though a Pentagon review found that Boykin had violated several military regulations by failing to make clear that his comments were not made in his official capacity as a general, no action was taken against him and he continued to serve in critical Pentagon posts, involved at the highest levels of America’s Middle Eastern wars.

Devout evangelicals are among the most steadfast supporters of his aggressive and militaristic policies toward the Islamic world, and many expressly defend those policies on theological and moral grounds. That the president finds some of his most loyal support for his War on Terrorism among such theologically driven groups lends further support to the connection between religious beliefs and President Bush’s militaristic, Manichean foreign policy in the Middle East.

Of course, it has long been clear that Islamic extremists in the mold of Osama bin Laden also see the war they are waging as primarily religious in nature. Religious invocations to the Islamic duty to wage jihad against infidels are rhetorical staples for Muslim extremists. Most Muslim terrorists who engage in suicide missions or who devote their lives to violent attacks against the West are engaged in what they perceive as religious warfare on behalf of Islam. Beyond this Manichean fervor, some are motivated by more traditional political agendas, such as anti-imperialistic sentiments against U.S. influence in their region, the American alliance with Israel, or, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, garden-variety nationalistic opposition to an invading and occupying foreign military. But there is also clearly a similar theological component driving some of the support for increasingly warlike policies in the United States.

Evangelical leader James Dobson told Larry King in a November 2002 interview: “I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture.” Dobson is an almost completely reliable supporter of the neoconservative line, condemning the Baker-Hamilton report’s recommendation that the United States negotiate with Iran by predictably equating the recommendation to appeasement of the Nazis: “That has the same kind of feel to it as the British negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run-up to World War II.”

And evangelical minister John Hagee of Texas addressed the first annual conference of his new group, Christians United for Israel, during the Israel-Hezbollah War in July-August 2006. He declared that war to be “a battle between good and evil” and insisted support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.” The following day, Hagee went to the White House to meet with President Bush’s top Middle East adviser, neoconservative Elliot Abrams, and he delivered the same message, adding that “appeasement has never helped the Jewish people.” Hagee advised the
New York Times
that Abrams largely agreed with his views.

Evangelical leader Gary Bauer told the
Times
in November 2006 that as a result of his intensely anti-Israeli rhetoric, Iranian President Ahmadinejad has become one of the most despised foreign political figures among American Christians: “I am not sure there is a foreign leader who has made a bigger splash in American culture since Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians.”

U.S. senator James Inhofe, a Republican social conservative from Oklahoma, actually placed blame on the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks, by asserting that the U.S. had itself opened “the spiritual door” for those attacks by failing to support Israel steadfastly enough. Senator Inhofe declared in a March 2002 speech on the Senate floor:

One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States was that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them.

It is certainly true that this extremist, theological commitment to Israel as a means of facilitating Jesus’ return is not shared by a majority of Christians. But these are hardly fringe views either. Christian evangelicals have played an important role in both of President Bush’s election victories and in the general preservation of Republican power. Many of the evangelical leaders who spout these extremist “pro-Israeli” theological views exert substantial influence at high levels of the Bush administration and with the president himself. Their doctrinal convictions have played a substantial role in generating support for the president’s militarism in the Middle East and his Manichean approach to Israel’s enemies.

Those who seek to wage war on Iran typically cite the radical Islamic religious beliefs of President Ahmadinejad as evidence of Iran’s irrational Evil. Specifically, Ahmadinejad subscribes to the view that, like Christians waiting for the return of Christ, Muslims are awaiting the return of the “twelfth imam,” whose return will bring about the supremacy of Islam and the restoration of peace and the reign of the Good. The two doctrines are similar in their fundamentals, and both can generate demands for Manichean wars and conflagration.

General Boykin’s view that the War on Terrorism is compelled by theological, pro-Christian objectives is shared by scores of evangelical leaders who are vital parts of the president’s political base and who, in many cases, are close associates of the president himself. Thus, as Garry Wills put it, “Boykin was safe under the sheltering wings of a religious right that the White House did not dare to cross.”