Today Steven Benen has a link to GQ magazine, where Robert Draper, the author of the Bush-endorsed biography Dead Certain, has a long article on Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense during the Bush Administration. Frank Rich's column discusses that article in The New York Times today, as well. According to Rich, "Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers." I haven't read Draper's article yet; I'm printing it out to read later because I have more manual labor planned for this afternoon. However, I have looked at the selection of "cover sheets" that Rumsfeld and his department prepared for President Bush daily. These cover sheets "were approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself" (Rich, NYT, May 16, 2009).
Frank Rich calls these "triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations" creepy. A Christian would (or should) call them blasphemous. The Department of Defense used scripture from the letters of St. Paul and St. Peter, which were meant to encourage early Christians in their daily living in a highly militarized culture opposed to the teachings of Christ ("love your enemies," "Do good to those who hate you"), to promote war. Sure, Paul used military metaphors because these were metaphors his Greek audience would understand:
Put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, 6:13-17, NIV)
Rumsfeld and his department took these scriptures entirely out of context to manipulate those for whom they were intended, specifically a president of the United States who called himself a "born-again believer." St. Paul was not telling his readers to arm themselves literally with weapons. As he wrote just previous to the scripture quoted above, the war he foresaw was not one "against flesh and blood" but against evil. Christian faith, Paul said, was the weapon against evil. In addition, these words come at the very end of a letter in which Paul had more specifically described how those Ephesians should live: husbands and wives loving one another, masters and slaves treating one another well, fathers being kind to their children, people speaking truthfully to their neighbors and not allowing the sun to go down on their anger. "Live a life of love," Paul exhorted those early Christians, "as just Christ loved us" (Ephesians 5:1).
Any true Christian would be appalled to see those words accompanying a picture of an army tank bathed by the glow of a desert sunset. Any Muslim who saw that picture accompanied by those words would have every right to conclude that the U.S. government was engaged in a "holy" war against Muslims. Above a slide of Saddam Hussein, these words are quoted from I Peter 2:15: "It is God's will that by doing good you will silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." I am disgusted that these words were used to promote war. Sure, Saddam Hussein was an evil man who tortured and massacred his own people. But St. Peter's words were meant to encourage followers to live justly and righteously in a very repressive society. St. Peter was encouraging those early Christians to persuade by actions acted out of love and faith, not anger and retribution.
The more that is revealed of our government's actions in the "war on terror," the more appalled I am at how much of those actions are diametrically opposed to all I have believed about the values of our country and about the religious values with which I was reared (steeped and marinated).
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