- "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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- www.monbiot.com
-
- 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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