- "The death of Uday and Qusay," the commander
of the ground forces in Iraq told reporters on Wednesday, "is definitely
going to be a turning point for the resistance." Well, it was a turning
point, but unfortunately not of the kind he envisaged. On the day he made
his announcement, Iraqi insurgents killed one US soldier and wounded six
others. On the following day, they killed another three; over the weekend
they assassinated five and injured seven. Yesterday they slaughtered one
more and wounded three. This has been the worst week for US soldiers in
Iraq since George Bush declared that the war there was over.
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- Few people believe that the resistance in that country
is being coordinated by Saddam Hussein and his noxious family, or that
it will come to an end when those people are killed. But the few appear
to include the military and civilian command of the United States armed
forces. For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions
made by those with access to intelligence have proved less reliable than
the predictions made by those without. And, for the hundredth time, the
inaccuracy of the official forecasts has been blamed on "intelligence
failures".
-
- The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really
expected to believe that the members of the US security services are the
only people who cannot see that many Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the
US army as fervently as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein?
What is lacking in the Pentagon and the White House is not intelligence
(or not, at any rate, of the kind we are considering here), but receptivity.
Theirs is not a failure of information, but a failure of ideology.
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- To understand why this failure persists, we must first
grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print. The United States
is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered
Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and
their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush told his
troops on the day he announced victory: "Wherever you go, you carry
a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words
of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives, "come out," and to those
in darkness, "be free".'"
-
- So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial
combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing
enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the
faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of
little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents
from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who
send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that
the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to
convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former
dictator of Iraq.
-
- As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen
People, published last year, the founding fathers of the USA, though they
sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine
purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States
should depict the Israelites, "led by a cloud by day and a pillar
of fire by night". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address,
that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token
of providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the
American identity was part of a process of "supersession". The
Roman Catholic church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect,
as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused
the Catholics of breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the beloved
of God. The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn,
had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people,
with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago,
as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark
of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual
energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of
mankind."
-
- Gradually this notion of election has been conflated
with another, still more dangerous idea. It is not just that the Americans
are God's chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project.
In his farewell presidential address, Ronald Reagan spoke of his country
as a "shining city on a hill", a reference to the Sermon on the
Mount. But what Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem, but
the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan's account, was God's kingdom
to be found in the United States of America, but the kingdom of hell could
also now be located on earth: the "evil empire" of the Soviet
Union, against which His holy warriors were pitched.
-
- Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America
the divine has been extended and refined. In December 2001, Rudy Giuliani,
the mayor of that city, delivered his last mayoral speech in St Paul's
Chapel, close to the site of the shattered twin towers. "All that
matters," he claimed, "is that you embrace America and understand
its ideals and what it's all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the
test of your Americanism was ... how much you believed in America. Because
we're like a religion really. A secular religion." The chapel in which
he spoke had been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact that George
Washington had once prayed there. It was, he said, now "sacred ground
to people who feel what America is all about". The United States of
America no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad
to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has
become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name
of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood.
-
- So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are
no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans".
Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their
time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests.
The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend
... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something
other than the American way of life.
-
- The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation.
Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like George Bush, that it possessed
a heaven-sent mission to "liberate" Asia and extend the realm
of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted:
"light the darkness of the entire world". Those who seek to drag
heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.
-
- - George Monbiot's books Poisoned Arrows and No Man's
Land are republished this week by Green Books.
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- www.monbiot.com
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1007741,00.html
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