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Religion and Foreign Policy: Politics by Other Means
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
[This is a great essay, by someone who clearly knows that religious
strife is often only an allegory used to rile up the cannon fodder to
fight wars for imperialism, or to keep them fighting one another,
as Hallinan says, for "the few crumbs available to them, [and] the
British authorities stepped in to keep order, sadly shaking their heads
about the inability of people... ever to govern themselves." And
meanwhile, most of the world thinks it's all about the Protestants
versus the Catholics. -NY Transfer]
Counterpunch - Oct 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan10022007.html
Religion and Foreign Policy:
Politics by Other Means
By CONN HALLINAN
"Religion, sometimes, is a continuation of politics by other means,"
notes Jon Alterman, director of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies Middle East division, and it was hard to avoid
that thought about last month's conference of Christians United for
Israel (CUFI) in Washington D.C.
There was Gary Bauer, former head of the right-wing evangelical
Christian organization, the Family Research Council, bringing a crowd
of 4,000 conventioneers to their feet with a prayer that "the people of
Israel-even under American pressure-never give up even one centimeter"
of land in the Occupied Territories.
According to the weekly Jewish newspaper, The Forward, a choir struck
up "Blow the Trumpets in Zion, Zion," while delegates "danced between
the rows waving Israeli and American flags; some people wept."
If there was something slightly bizarre about apocalyptic Christians
weeping over the fact that Israel might trade land for peace, there was
nothing fringy about the foreign policy heavy weights CUFI has gathered
under its wing. On hand to address the convention was Senator Joseph
Lieberman, Republican heavy weight Newt Gingrich and the man who will
quite likely to be the next prime minister of Israel, Benjamin
Netanyahu.
The force behind CUFI, Texas Pastor John Hagee, counts President George
Bush, Republican Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, and the
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee among his supporters, as well
as a number of Democratic legislators, including U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel
of New York.
Hagee's organization-active in all 50 states-is currently pressuring
Congress to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon, increase aid to Israel, and
toughen sanctions on Iran, although the Texas minister himself doesn't
think Teheran will respond to anything but war: "It is time for America
to adopt Senator Lieberman's words and consider a military pre-emptive
strike against Iran." Hagee also advocates attacking Syria and the
Palestinians.
Lieberman and Hagee are not the only ones talking about attacking Iran
these days. President Bush recently told the American Legion
convention, "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations
everywherewe will confront this danger before it is too late. According
to an "informal poll" taken by ex-Middle East CIA field officer, Robert
Baer, "The feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps" within six months. The Sunday Times reported Sept. 2 "The
Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1200
targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranian military capacity
in three days."
Are Christian evangelicals, in what is arguably the most religious
administration in U.S. history, driving the Bush Administration's
agenda in the Middle East and Africa? Or is the religious content of
U.S. foreign policy "politics by other means"? Is the current culture
war against Islam by people like historian Bernard Lewis, philosopher
Francis Fukuyama and Pope Benedict XVI, a return to the religious mania
of the First Crusade, or does it have more in common with TV
evangelists whose concerns are the contents of their parishioner's
wallets rather than the state of their souls?
Certainly the Bush Administration has appointed religious activists to
key policy positions. Long-time religious activist and neo-conservative
Elliot Abrams, former chair of U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom,
has helped focus U.S. foreign policy on "religious persecution" in
Sudan, Russia and China. According to Newsweek, his co-chair,
right-wing Catholic activist Nina Shea, made "Christian persecution
Washington's hottest topic."
The Bush Administration's Special Envoy to the Sudan, Robert Seiple, is
the former CEO of World Vision, a Christian aid and advocacy
organization. According to John Eibner, chief executive officer of
Christian Solidarity International, "pressure" from Christian groups
played an important role in pushing the U.S. to get involved in Sudan.
But is U.S. Africa policy driven by religious activists, or by the fact
that by the year 2015 some 25 percent of U.S. oil imports will come
from that continent?
Christian evangelicals have also made deep inroads into the American
military.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, currently a deputy undersecretary of defense
for intelligence, argues that the fight in Iraq is between a "Christian
nation" and "Satan," and can only be won "if we come against them in
the name of Jesus."
The Pentagon is a strong supporter of Operation Straight Up (OSU),
which delivers entertainment and sermons to troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan. OSU describes its mission as a "crusade"-an incendiary
word in the Middle East-and distributes a "left behind" video game
where players fight the Antichrist represented by the United Nations.
Former Air Force Academy graduate Mickey Weinstein, who heads up the
Military Freedom Foundation, describes OSU as "the Christian Taliban."
According to a 2006 study for the U.S. War College by Col. William
Millonig, Christian evangelical influence in the armed forces began
during the Vietnam War. He concludes that "conservative Christian and
Republican values have affected the military's decision making and
policy recommendations," warning that "America's strategic thinkers,
both military and civilian, must be aware of this and its potential
implications on policy formulation."
Again, however, are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan driven by a
religious agenda, or the fact that 65 percent of the world's remaining
oil reserves are in the Middle East?
Religion has long played a role in the West's relationship to the rest
of the world, but more as a way to divide populations than convert
them. Ireland and India are cases in point.
England invaded Ireland in 1170, but for the first 439 years it was a
conquest in name only. In 1609, however, James I founded the Plantation
of Ulster, imported 20,000 Protestant settlers, and introduced
religious strife as a political tactic. By favoring Protestants over
the native Catholics in politics and economics-the so-called "Ulster
Privilege-the English pitted both groups against one another.
The tactic was enormously successful, and England used it throughout
its colonial empire. Nowhere were the British so successful in
transplanting the Irish model than in India.
But in India's case it was unnecessary to import a foreign religion.
The colonial authorities had India's Muslim and Sikh minorities to use
as their wedge. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann argues in "Indian
Summer," it was the British who defined India's communities on the
basis of religion: "Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of
their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes
they belonged."
Muslims and Sikhs were favored for the few civil jobs and university
slots open to Indians, a favoritism that generated tensions among the
three communities, just as it had in Northern Ireland. The colonial
regimes exploited everyone in both countries, but for some the burden
was heavier. When communities in both countries fell to fighting over
the few crumbs available to them, the British authorities stepped in to
keep order, sadly shaking their heads about the inability of people in
both countries ever to govern themselves.
While Sir John Davis was describing the Irish as "degenerate" with the
"heart of a beast," Lord Hastings was arguing that "the Hindoo appears
a being nearly limited to animal functions and even in them
indifferentwith no higher intellect than a dog."
Lest one dismiss the above characterizations as typical 19th Century
colonial racism, Winston Churchill once commented, "I hate the Indians.
They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
Churchill's intolerance, however, had a very practical side to it. As
prime minister he once said that he hoped that the tension between
Hindus and Muslims would remain "A bulwark of British rule in India."
The British were not alone in using religion as a tactic to divide and
conquer. The French employed it quite successfully in Lebanon and
Vietnam. In the former, Paris favored Maronite Christians over Muslims
(and Sunni Muslims over Shiite Muslims), and in the latter, Catholics
over Buddhists.
No colonial tactic is successful forever, however, and in the aftermath
of World War II the empires collapsed. But the use of religion as a
device to divide and conquer leaves considerable wreckage in its wake.
The current peace between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster is
holding, but it took countless lives and almost 400 years to achieve.
The partition of India on religious grounds cost more than a million
lives and displaced some 12 million people. Pakistan and India have
fought four wars since 1947, and the last one came distressingly close
to going nuclear.
And tensions between communities in India are still high. The
right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party led nationwide riots over a
16th Century mosque in Ayodhya, and five years ago, 2000 Muslims were
massacred in Gujarat by Hindu extremists.
Exploiting religious differences hardly ended with the demise of the
great colonial empires.
The French continue to exploit religious divisions in Lebanon, and the
U.S. is currently trying to cobble together a Sunni united front to
confront Washington's three opponents in the Middle East: Iran, Syria,
and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Syria is mostly Sunni, but Bashar
al-Assad's regime is dominated by Alawites, a variety of Shiism. Some
60 percent of Lebanon is Shiite.
But Shiites only constitute about 12 percent of Islam, and while
Washington talks of a "Shiia crescent" as if it constituted some kind
of united front, in fact there are enormous differences between Arab
Syria and Lebanon, and non-Arabic speaking Iran.
Islam is a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities-the largest Muslim
country is Indonesia- but that point gets lost in the current culture
war directed at Islam.
Historian Bernard Lewis recently told the Jerusalem Post that Muslims
"seem about to take over Europe" because Europeans have "surrendered"
to Islam in the name of "political correctness" and
"multi-culturalism." Philosopher Francis Fukuyama argues that France's
opposition to the Iraq War was "in part to appease Muslim opinion," and
Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institute claims that European Muslims
"are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab
street."
But as Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University points out, since only
10.25 percent of the Muslim population in Europe can vote, there is
"very little cost" for political parties to ignore the concerns of
Muslim communities.
Researchers Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, who studied France's
Muslims, conclude there is "no such thing as a Muslim community," and
polls found that French Muslims listed "economic inequality" as their
first concern. Foreign policy came in twelfth.
Indeed, as Patrick Weil of the Sorbonne points out, the myth that
Muslims somehow influenced France's foreign policy "is the same
argument as saying the Bush decision to go to Iraq was because of the
Israeli lobby." Muslims did oppose the war, as did most Europeans.
If religion influences foreign policy, it is because it dovetails with
the policies of powerful economic interests, which is not to say that
religion always defers to secular self-interest. Once conjured up, it
can take on a life of its own.
In "Les Blancs," Lorraine Hansberry's edgy play about colonial Kenya,
the play's central character, Tshembe, points out that while concepts
like race and religion are indeed instruments which men use to rule
over one another, those contrivances create their own reality. "Men
invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests," Tshembe tells
a clueless American reporter. "You and I may recognize the fraudulence
of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run
through him because he refuses to become a Moslem or a Christianis
suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to
pretend that it doesn't exist-merely because it is lie."
In the Middle East and Sudan, religion certainly appears to be the
"continuation of politics by other means." Whether it is President
George Bush invoking the threat of a world-wide Muslim Caliphate, or
Pope Benedict XVI warning that Islam promotes violence, religion is
increasingly being used to ramp up the fear factor in international
politics. But as with Europe's great religious wars, in the end
religion in foreign policy is a device that allows the strong to seize
the resources of the weak in the name of a higher power.
[Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a winner of a
Project Censored Award, and did his PhD dissertation on the history of
insurrectionary organizations in Ireland.]
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Our main website: http://www.blythe.org
List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================
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Hash: SHA1
Religion and Foreign Policy: Politics by Other Means
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
[This is a great essay, by someone who clearly knows that religious
strife is often only an allegory used to rile up the cannon fodder to
fight wars for imperialism, or to keep them fighting one another,
as Hallinan says, for "the few crumbs available to them, [and] the
British authorities stepped in to keep order, sadly shaking their heads
about the inability of people... ever to govern themselves." And
meanwhile, most of the world thinks it's all about the Protestants
versus the Catholics. -NY Transfer]
Counterpunch - Oct 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan10022007.html
Religion and Foreign Policy:
Politics by Other Means
By CONN HALLINAN
"Religion, sometimes, is a continuation of politics by other means,"
notes Jon Alterman, director of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies Middle East division, and it was hard to avoid
that thought about last month's conference of Christians United for
Israel (CUFI) in Washington D.C.
There was Gary Bauer, former head of the right-wing evangelical
Christian organization, the Family Research Council, bringing a crowd
of 4,000 conventioneers to their feet with a prayer that "the people of
Israel-even under American pressure-never give up even one centimeter"
of land in the Occupied Territories.
According to the weekly Jewish newspaper, The Forward, a choir struck
up "Blow the Trumpets in Zion, Zion," while delegates "danced between
the rows waving Israeli and American flags; some people wept."
If there was something slightly bizarre about apocalyptic Christians
weeping over the fact that Israel might trade land for peace, there was
nothing fringy about the foreign policy heavy weights CUFI has gathered
under its wing. On hand to address the convention was Senator Joseph
Lieberman, Republican heavy weight Newt Gingrich and the man who will
quite likely to be the next prime minister of Israel, Benjamin
Netanyahu.
The force behind CUFI, Texas Pastor John Hagee, counts President George
Bush, Republican Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, and the
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee among his supporters, as well
as a number of Democratic legislators, including U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel
of New York.
Hagee's organization-active in all 50 states-is currently pressuring
Congress to confront Hezbollah in Lebanon, increase aid to Israel, and
toughen sanctions on Iran, although the Texas minister himself doesn't
think Teheran will respond to anything but war: "It is time for America
to adopt Senator Lieberman's words and consider a military pre-emptive
strike against Iran." Hagee also advocates attacking Syria and the
Palestinians.
Lieberman and Hagee are not the only ones talking about attacking Iran
these days. President Bush recently told the American Legion
convention, "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations
everywherewe will confront this danger before it is too late. According
to an "informal poll" taken by ex-Middle East CIA field officer, Robert
Baer, "The feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps" within six months. The Sunday Times reported Sept. 2 "The
Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1200
targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranian military capacity
in three days."
Are Christian evangelicals, in what is arguably the most religious
administration in U.S. history, driving the Bush Administration's
agenda in the Middle East and Africa? Or is the religious content of
U.S. foreign policy "politics by other means"? Is the current culture
war against Islam by people like historian Bernard Lewis, philosopher
Francis Fukuyama and Pope Benedict XVI, a return to the religious mania
of the First Crusade, or does it have more in common with TV
evangelists whose concerns are the contents of their parishioner's
wallets rather than the state of their souls?
Certainly the Bush Administration has appointed religious activists to
key policy positions. Long-time religious activist and neo-conservative
Elliot Abrams, former chair of U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom,
has helped focus U.S. foreign policy on "religious persecution" in
Sudan, Russia and China. According to Newsweek, his co-chair,
right-wing Catholic activist Nina Shea, made "Christian persecution
Washington's hottest topic."
The Bush Administration's Special Envoy to the Sudan, Robert Seiple, is
the former CEO of World Vision, a Christian aid and advocacy
organization. According to John Eibner, chief executive officer of
Christian Solidarity International, "pressure" from Christian groups
played an important role in pushing the U.S. to get involved in Sudan.
But is U.S. Africa policy driven by religious activists, or by the fact
that by the year 2015 some 25 percent of U.S. oil imports will come
from that continent?
Christian evangelicals have also made deep inroads into the American
military.
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, currently a deputy undersecretary of defense
for intelligence, argues that the fight in Iraq is between a "Christian
nation" and "Satan," and can only be won "if we come against them in
the name of Jesus."
The Pentagon is a strong supporter of Operation Straight Up (OSU),
which delivers entertainment and sermons to troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan. OSU describes its mission as a "crusade"-an incendiary
word in the Middle East-and distributes a "left behind" video game
where players fight the Antichrist represented by the United Nations.
Former Air Force Academy graduate Mickey Weinstein, who heads up the
Military Freedom Foundation, describes OSU as "the Christian Taliban."
According to a 2006 study for the U.S. War College by Col. William
Millonig, Christian evangelical influence in the armed forces began
during the Vietnam War. He concludes that "conservative Christian and
Republican values have affected the military's decision making and
policy recommendations," warning that "America's strategic thinkers,
both military and civilian, must be aware of this and its potential
implications on policy formulation."
Again, however, are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan driven by a
religious agenda, or the fact that 65 percent of the world's remaining
oil reserves are in the Middle East?
Religion has long played a role in the West's relationship to the rest
of the world, but more as a way to divide populations than convert
them. Ireland and India are cases in point.
England invaded Ireland in 1170, but for the first 439 years it was a
conquest in name only. In 1609, however, James I founded the Plantation
of Ulster, imported 20,000 Protestant settlers, and introduced
religious strife as a political tactic. By favoring Protestants over
the native Catholics in politics and economics-the so-called "Ulster
Privilege-the English pitted both groups against one another.
The tactic was enormously successful, and England used it throughout
its colonial empire. Nowhere were the British so successful in
transplanting the Irish model than in India.
But in India's case it was unnecessary to import a foreign religion.
The colonial authorities had India's Muslim and Sikh minorities to use
as their wedge. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann argues in "Indian
Summer," it was the British who defined India's communities on the
basis of religion: "Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of
their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes
they belonged."
Muslims and Sikhs were favored for the few civil jobs and university
slots open to Indians, a favoritism that generated tensions among the
three communities, just as it had in Northern Ireland. The colonial
regimes exploited everyone in both countries, but for some the burden
was heavier. When communities in both countries fell to fighting over
the few crumbs available to them, the British authorities stepped in to
keep order, sadly shaking their heads about the inability of people in
both countries ever to govern themselves.
While Sir John Davis was describing the Irish as "degenerate" with the
"heart of a beast," Lord Hastings was arguing that "the Hindoo appears
a being nearly limited to animal functions and even in them
indifferentwith no higher intellect than a dog."
Lest one dismiss the above characterizations as typical 19th Century
colonial racism, Winston Churchill once commented, "I hate the Indians.
They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
Churchill's intolerance, however, had a very practical side to it. As
prime minister he once said that he hoped that the tension between
Hindus and Muslims would remain "A bulwark of British rule in India."
The British were not alone in using religion as a tactic to divide and
conquer. The French employed it quite successfully in Lebanon and
Vietnam. In the former, Paris favored Maronite Christians over Muslims
(and Sunni Muslims over Shiite Muslims), and in the latter, Catholics
over Buddhists.
No colonial tactic is successful forever, however, and in the aftermath
of World War II the empires collapsed. But the use of religion as a
device to divide and conquer leaves considerable wreckage in its wake.
The current peace between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster is
holding, but it took countless lives and almost 400 years to achieve.
The partition of India on religious grounds cost more than a million
lives and displaced some 12 million people. Pakistan and India have
fought four wars since 1947, and the last one came distressingly close
to going nuclear.
And tensions between communities in India are still high. The
right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party led nationwide riots over a
16th Century mosque in Ayodhya, and five years ago, 2000 Muslims were
massacred in Gujarat by Hindu extremists.
Exploiting religious differences hardly ended with the demise of the
great colonial empires.
The French continue to exploit religious divisions in Lebanon, and the
U.S. is currently trying to cobble together a Sunni united front to
confront Washington's three opponents in the Middle East: Iran, Syria,
and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Syria is mostly Sunni, but Bashar
al-Assad's regime is dominated by Alawites, a variety of Shiism. Some
60 percent of Lebanon is Shiite.
But Shiites only constitute about 12 percent of Islam, and while
Washington talks of a "Shiia crescent" as if it constituted some kind
of united front, in fact there are enormous differences between Arab
Syria and Lebanon, and non-Arabic speaking Iran.
Islam is a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities-the largest Muslim
country is Indonesia- but that point gets lost in the current culture
war directed at Islam.
Historian Bernard Lewis recently told the Jerusalem Post that Muslims
"seem about to take over Europe" because Europeans have "surrendered"
to Islam in the name of "political correctness" and
"multi-culturalism." Philosopher Francis Fukuyama argues that France's
opposition to the Iraq War was "in part to appease Muslim opinion," and
Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institute claims that European Muslims
"are becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab
street."
But as Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University points out, since only
10.25 percent of the Muslim population in Europe can vote, there is
"very little cost" for political parties to ignore the concerns of
Muslim communities.
Researchers Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, who studied France's
Muslims, conclude there is "no such thing as a Muslim community," and
polls found that French Muslims listed "economic inequality" as their
first concern. Foreign policy came in twelfth.
Indeed, as Patrick Weil of the Sorbonne points out, the myth that
Muslims somehow influenced France's foreign policy "is the same
argument as saying the Bush decision to go to Iraq was because of the
Israeli lobby." Muslims did oppose the war, as did most Europeans.
If religion influences foreign policy, it is because it dovetails with
the policies of powerful economic interests, which is not to say that
religion always defers to secular self-interest. Once conjured up, it
can take on a life of its own.
In "Les Blancs," Lorraine Hansberry's edgy play about colonial Kenya,
the play's central character, Tshembe, points out that while concepts
like race and religion are indeed instruments which men use to rule
over one another, those contrivances create their own reality. "Men
invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests," Tshembe tells
a clueless American reporter. "You and I may recognize the fraudulence
of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run
through him because he refuses to become a Moslem or a Christianis
suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to
pretend that it doesn't exist-merely because it is lie."
In the Middle East and Sudan, religion certainly appears to be the
"continuation of politics by other means." Whether it is President
George Bush invoking the threat of a world-wide Muslim Caliphate, or
Pope Benedict XVI warning that Islam promotes violence, religion is
increasingly being used to ramp up the fear factor in international
politics. But as with Europe's great religious wars, in the end
religion in foreign policy is a device that allows the strong to seize
the resources of the weak in the name of a higher power.
[Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a winner of a
Project Censored Award, and did his PhD dissertation on the history of
insurrectionary organizations in Ireland.]
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Our main website: http://www.blythe.org
List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================
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