[Peace-discuss] re: Bush's Crusade

[peter john rohloff]

Opinion

How a War Became a Crusade

President Bush's war plans are risky, but Mr. Bush is no gambler. In fact
he denies the very existence of chance. "Events aren't moved by blind
change and chance" he has said, but by "the hand of a just and faithful
God." From the outset he has been convinced that his presidency is part of
a divine plan, even telling a friend while he was governor of Texas, "I
believe God wants me to run for president."

EW Brunswick, N.J. - This conviction that he is doing God's will has
surfaced more openly since 9/11. In his State of the Union addresses and
other public forums, he has presented himself as the leader of a global
war against evil. As for a war in Iraq, "we do not claim to know all the
ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them." God is at work in world
affairs, he says, calling for the United States to lead a liberating
crusade in the Middle East, and "this call of history has come to the
right country."


Mr. Bush's speeches are not the only place one finds this providentialist
spirit - everyone from Christian fundamentalists to interventionist
liberals is serving up missionary formulas: bogus analogies to the war
against Hitler; contrasts between American virtue and European vice;
denials that sordid material interests could have anything to do with the
exalted project of exporting American democracy.

To those who worry about the frequent use of religious language, Mr.
Bush's supporters insist that the rhetoric of Providence is as American as
cherry pie. This is true, but it is crucial to understand that Providence
can acquire various meanings depending on the circumstances. The belief
that one is carrying out divine purpose can serve legitimate needs and
sustain opposition to injustice, but it can also promote dangerous
simplifications - especially if the believer has virtually unlimited
power, as Mr. Bush does. The slide into self-righteousness is a constant
threat.

The great rhetoricians of Providence have resisted the temptation of
self-righteousness. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a
Birmingham jail that "we will win our freedom because the sacred heritage
of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing
demands," he was seeking common ground with white Southerners, not
predicting perdition for satanic segregationists.

Likewise, when Abraham Lincoln invoked Providence in his second inaugural
address, his message to the victorious North and the defeated South was
one of reconciliation. By characterizing the Civil War as a national
expiation for the sin of slavery, he wanted "to bind up the nation's
wounds" and make some moral sense of the appalling losses on both sides.
At its best, providentialist thinking can offer a powerful antidote to
self-righteousness.

Too often, though, American politicians and moralists have reduced faith
in Providence to a religious sanction for raw power. In the 1840's, with
the emergence of the idea that the United States had a manifest destiny to
expand to the Pacific, the hand of God was no longer mysterious (as in
traditional Christian doctrine) but "manifest" in American expansion. As
for the natives who unproductively occupied the Great Plains, Horace
Greeley, the journalist, said in 1859: "`These people must die out - there
is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and
cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against his righteous decree."

By the end of the century, Senator Albert Beveridge and other imperialists
had made Manifest Destiny a global project, insisting that God had
"marked" the American people to lead in "the redemption of the world."

In the wake of World War I, Woodrow Wilson showed that it was possible to
use redemptive rhetoric for aims that went beyond nationalism, and yet to
still fall victim to hubris. By intervening in the war and ensuring a just
peace, said Wilson, "America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her
destiny and saving the world."


The failure of Wilson's postwar dream helped make most Americans skeptical
of world-saving fantasies during World War II. Thus our most necessary war
was also the most resistant to providentialist interpretation. It was a
dirty job, and somebody had to do it: that was the dominant view, among
policymakers and the public. Only in retrospect has World War II acquired
an aura of sanctity.

To be sure, the cold war fitfully revived the nationalist uses of
Providence, at least among true believers like Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles - not to mention Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric arrayed the
"city on a hill" against the Soviet "evil empire." But for most Americans,
the failed crusade in Vietnam eviscerated the delusion that we had a
sacred duty to export American ways - by force if necessary - to a
recalcitrant world.

Until now. The proposed war against and rebuilding of Iraq has brought the
sentimental, self-satisfied sense of Providence back into fashion. One
might have supposed that an attack on our country would have rendered
utopian agendas unnecessary - as it did for most Americans during World
War II. But while a war on terrorism may not need Providence to justify
it, a war to transform the Middle East requires a rhetoric as grandiose as
its aims. The providentialist outlook fills the bill: it promotes tunnel
vision, discourages debate and reduces diplomacy to arm-twisting.

Worst of all, it sanitizes the messy actualities of war and its aftermath.
Like the strategists' faith in smart bombs, faith in Providence frees one
from having to consider the role of chance in armed conflict, the least
predictable of human affairs. Between divine will and American know-how,
we have everything under control. So the White House and its backers can
safely predict that the unpleasantness will be over in a few weeks, with
low casualties on both sides.

Combat veterans, from Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf down, reject these
scenarios. We can be sure that the soldiers in the Persian Gulf region do,
too. This should come as no surprise: there has always been a chasm
between the war planners and the soldiers on the ground. The planners are
convinced that they can control outcomes; the soldiers know the arbitrary
cruelties of fate at first hand - maiming this one, leaving that one
alone. They know the power of luck.

There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are not many believers in
Providence in them either. Combat soldiers have always been less confident
than politicians that God is on the premises. They have paid homage to an
older deity, Fortuna. From the Civil War through the Persian Gulf war,
American soldiers have festooned themselves with amulets and lucky charms
- everything from St. Christopher medals and smooth stones to their
girlfriends' locks of hair. And why not? Ritual efforts to conjure luck
speak directly to their own experience.

But the power of providentialist thinking persists, drawing strength from
the fervent beliefs of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalists. The
more humane interpreters of those traditions are increasingly ignored, and
the ideologues take command, convinced that they are doing God's will.

Certainly those of us who doubt the divinity (not to mention the efficacy)
of the president's plan must continue to challenge it. But as we watch Mr.
Bush prepare for righteous battle, ignoring the protests of "old Europe"
and many in his own country, even the most rational among us might be
pardoned for fingering a rabbit's foot from time to time.


By JACKSON LEARS