The Essay

Pushed Under the Carpet

"I also have this belief, strong belief that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." –President George Bush, press conference, April 2004

George Bush may not read, but he sure can pray.

Unfortunately, his prayers appear to go unanswered and, as with other holy missions, his zeal, instead of liberating the world, oppresses it.

Endowed as he is with his personal vision of himself as holy liberator to the world, Bush has clearly decided that the faith of the Sunnis is lesser than his own. In his language, they are the insurgents, the rebels and the enemy—and so too are those Americans who do not share his vision.

During the last 20 years, the tension between the Christian right and the rest of us has increased significantly. While I respect the beliefs and views of Christians, I do not believe that a Christian agenda should influence American politics. Perhaps that’s naïve on my part, or perhaps it is inevitable—yet, for the greater part of our history we have managed to maintain the separation between church and state, but this distinction has been nearly obliterated by the Bush administration—let’s make no mistake—Dubya clearly believes he’s acting as God’s agent. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who surpasses even Dubya in his fervor, is still more frenetic in his beliefs: He’s a right-wing Christian who believes in the coming of the rapture (for more info on the rapture check out www.raptureready.com). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is another fervent Christian.

You might well ask why and how any of this matters.

Here’s one pragmatic instance: When Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received more than 100,000 angry e-mails from Christian fundamentalists and hence never mentioned the matter again, according to George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian. Why would Christian fundamentalists support an aggressive Israeli policy? Because a core group of Christian fundamentalists believe that the Rapture is going to come—but, before it can, the battle at the Temple Mount must be staged.

Sound far-fetched? It might to most of us, but as Monbiot argues, for Christian fundamentalists, who comprise 15 percent of American voters, “the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.”

Then there’s the issue of bringing democracy and “freedom” to other countries. Let’s deconstruct this notion for a moment. Freedom, U.S. style, is ethnocentric—it doesn’t consider various cultural traditions, religions and belief systems. It presupposes that freedom, like the Holy Grail, is portable and meaningful to all people in the same ways—never mind the fact that in the U.S. our own freedoms continue to be compromised daily—whether or not it is through the guise of the Patriot Act, increased surveillance, smart dust, cameras or, in general, suspension of our civil liberties. But freedom isn’t something you bring to people, like a change of clothing—it’s a belief system that must be embraced and, yes, even intellectualized.

Meanwhile, as I write, we’re bombing Fallujah in the name of freedom. Not including these recent “skirmishes,” U.S. casualties to date are 723 troops in the last 406 days of fighting. These troops have died for Bush’s vision of “God’s work” and—bonus!— helping out Dubya’s friends at Enron, Halliburton and Bechtel.

“Those of us who have been following such things know that the Bush administration is so deeply enmeshed in the energy industry that it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Campaign contributions are part of it, but it's also personal: George Bush and Dick Cheney are only two of the many members of the administration who grew rich by relying on the kindness of energy companies,” writes Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

This kind of conflict of interest used to be criminal. Nowadays, it’s simply shrugged off.

Might makes right in this administration—and I’m not speaking only of their inherent Christian convictions. Bush doesn’t believe that he’s accountable to anyone. Not to the Supreme Court, not to Congress and not to the citizenry. In recent days we’ve learned (from Bob Woodward’s new book) that the administration took the funds earmarked for Afghanistan and subverted them to prepare for war with Iraq—without the permission or knowledge of Congress. The phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction have become a painful national joke and all evidence points to the fact that if Dubya could be bothered with a little reading, he’d have known this.

“‘I know he doesn't read,’ one former Bush National Security Council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office,” writes Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian.

But, with God on his side, he doesn’t need to read. And with God on America’s side, we are free to Crusade in the name of freedom. –A.M. McNary