Battles of the Righteous
A terrifying revelation of September 11 was that America had been attacked in the name of Allah. It’s especially frightening to recognize that someone not only wants to kill you but thinks killing you will serve his god, and I have wondered if a calculation was made in Washington that there was no way to defeat those Islamic “evildoers” that spared their theology. The mainstream press might write quizzically of Bush’s evangelism, but Falsani observes that “there’s a Christian conservative press that thinks it’s great that he’s speaking the truth and it’s about time.” She adds, “There are people out there very, very threatened by the spread of Islam.”
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If there has been such a calculation in Washington, it might be a dangerous one. “One hopes,” Martin Marty wrote in last week’s Newsweek (its theme was “Bush & God”), “that the Bush people will keep in mind that claims of God’s always being on our side are alienating to many former or would-be allies.” Essayist William Pfaff warned last week in the International Herald Tribune that a military defeat of Iraq would not draw the Islamic world closer to the West but further alienate it. “The real modernizing force in Islam today may prove to be resistance to the West, or to be more exact, resistance to the United States and Israel,” he wrote. “Al Qaeda’s activists are mostly educated people with Western experience. Their movement in another context might be called prerevolutionary, signal of a young elite’s determination to replace old and failed leaders.”
The Civil War is remembered with affectionate irony as a war fought by pious armies that prayed to the same god. The religious context being imposed on war in Iraq makes that war seem trivial by comparison. No wonder Falsani’s editors want her on her toes. “I’d like to see somebody send a religion reporter to see what’s going on on the ground,” she says. “I’d go in a heartbeat.”
But isn’t this one situation that was foisted on America?
Was It Something He Said?
Dold says he read the column so late the night the page was made up that there was no time for a discussion: “The options were to spike the column or edit it so it was suitable to run.” What ran, he says, “was still a strong anti-war piece.”
