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The Crusaders
“The Christian Taliban is Running the Department of Defense”
By Robert Koehler
05/03/07 "ICH"
-- -- Sixteen words may be all that stand right now between
the apparatus of government and the Founding Fathers’ worst
nightmare. And those words are starting to give.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof . . .”
When George Bush, in the wake of 9/11, puffed
himself into Richard the Lionheart and declared he would lead
the country in a “crusade” against terrorism - you know,
crusade, as in slaughter of Muslim infidels - turns out . . .
oh, how awkward (if you’re on White House spin duty) . . . he
may have been speaking literally.
What’s certain, in any case, is that a lot of
people in high and low places within the Bush administration -
and in particular, the military - heard him literally, and
regard the war on terror as a religious war:
“The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He
lives in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him,” a lieutenant
colonel, according to a BBC reporter, said to his troops on the
eve of the destruction of that undefended city in post-election
2004.
“I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that
my God was a real God and his was an idol,” Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense Jerry Boykin notoriously boasted a few
years back, speaking of a Muslim warlord in Somalia. And by the
way, George Bush is “in the White House because God put him
there.”
And, of course, just the other day, Lt. Col.
Ralph Kauzlarich, who conducted the first official investigation
into Pat Tillman’s death, opined that Tillman’s family is only
pestering the Army for the, ahem, truth about how he died
because their loved one, a non-believer with no heavenly reward
to reap, is now “worm dirt.”
Until I read the newly published “With God on
Their Side” (St. Martin’s Press), Michael Weinstein’s disturbing
account of anti-Semitism at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I
shrugged off each of these remarks, and so much more, as
isolated, almost comically intolerant noises out of True
Believer Land. Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they
do . . .
Now my blood runs cold. Weinstein, a 1977
graduate of the Academy and former assistant general counsel in
the Reagan administration, and a lifelong Republican, has
devoted the last several years of his life to battling what he
has come to regard as a fundamentalist takeover of the Academy,
turning it, in effect, into a taxpayer-supported Evangelical
institution. He charges that the separation of church and state
is rapidly vanishing at the school, which routinely promotes
sectarian religious events, tolerates the proselytizing of
uniquely vulnerable new recruits and, basically, conflates
evangelical interests and the national interest.
If you think this is just a fight over some
abstract principle, with ramifications only for atheist, Jewish,
Buddhist and other cadets who may be “offended” by
fundamentalist God talk, I urge you to check out Weinstein’s
book or website.
He documents a chilling phenomenon: The whole U.S. military, up
and down the chain of command, is coming to be dominated by
members of a small, characteristically intolerant sliver of
Christianity who truly regard themselves as Christian soldiers,
on a God-appointed mission to harvest souls and battle evil.
Weinstein, whose family tradition of national
service is pretty impressive, does not do battle lightly with
those who now run his alma mater. One of his sons is a recent
graduate of the Air Force Academy and the other is still a cadet
there. The fact that both of them endured anti-Semitic
harassment initially spurred him to take action. But this goes
deeper than disrespect for other faiths. The attitude he has
encountered in his attempt to hold the institution, and the rest
of the military, accountable smacks of a coup: “The Christian
Taliban is running the Department of Defense,” he told me. “It
inundates everything.”
Can you imagine a contingent of religious
zealots, with their contempt for secular values (and such
manifestations of secular order as the U.S. Constitution) - and
with their zest for holy war - in control of the most potent
fighting force and weaponry in human history? Is this possible?
Well, said Weinstein, consider the 523rd Fighter
Squadron, based at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., which calls
itself The Crusaders, and whose emblem consists of a sword, four
crosses and a medieval knight’s helmet. Check ‘em out at
globalsecurity.org, which reports that the payload on the
F-16s they fly consists of “a wide variety of conventional,
precision guided and nuclear weapons.”
And listen once again to Commander-in-Chief
Bush, speaking in 2003 to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud
Abbas, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “God told me
to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed
me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to
solve the problem in the Middle East.”
If this is a religious war - a “clash of
civilizations,” waged by competing agents of God’s will -
victory may be indistinguishable from Armageddon. God help the
human race.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning,
Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services
and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column
at bkoehler@tribune.com.
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