COMMENTARY: `War on Terror’ Brings an Iraq More Hospitable to Islamic Fundamentalism

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The president has told us over and over again that the goal in the so-called “war on terror” is to bring freedom to foreigners. Once free, however, what do these foreigners want to do? To cut the heads off Christians, that’s what. Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity, […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The president has told us over and over again that the goal in the so-called “war on terror” is to bring freedom to foreigners.

Once free, however, what do these foreigners want to do? To cut the heads off Christians, that’s what.


Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity, barely escaped with his head March 27 after Afghan authorities reluctantly forfeited their freedom to execute him for apostasy. The episode was yet another rude awakening for the right-wingers of America who were under the mistaken impression that Bush was one of them.

Members of the Christian Right had apparently assumed that preventing this sort of behavior was the goal of the so-called “war on terror” _ terror being the emotion evoked by the prospect of having one’s head separated from one’s shoulders.

When Islamic extremists in Iraq do this, the Bush administration promises to hunt them down and kill them. But when Islamic extremists in Afghanistan proposed a variation on the theme, the first reaction of the Bush administration was, as it usually is, to blame the media.

At a press conference on March 21, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns showed the usual irritation at being forced by reporters to address yet another foreign-policy screw-up. Pressed to denounce the idea of a Christian being thrown to the lions, Burns could do no better than to suggest that “this is a case that is not under the competence of the United States. It’s under the competence of the Afghan authorities.”

Though this was a fairly standard diplomatic response, the Christian Right went nuts. The White House was flooded with phone calls, faxes and e-mails. Bush got the message and presumably began the chain of events that led to Rahman’s release.

But what about the next convert? Paul Marshall of the Center for Religious Freedom in Washington has traveled around the Muslim world studying the question of religious freedom. There’s not much of it, he says. Worse, people regularly get thrown in jail just for bringing up the notion.

“The editor of an Afghan magazine last May published some articles asking questions about Islam such as `Is it truly Islamic to have the death penalty for, say, adultery and apostasy?”’ Marshall told me. “He was then charged with blasphemy and given a two-year prison sentence. The prosecution wanted to give him the death penalty.”


Meanwhile in the other country granted freedom by the United States, Iraq, the Christians are free to run for their lives.

“Nobody knows exactly how many have left, but there has been a large exodus of Christians from Iraq,” Marshall said.

Like Afghanistan, Iraq has a so-called “repugnancy clause” in its constitution, a clause stating that nothing in the constitution can be seen to contradict Islamic law.

But why should American tax dollars be used to force Christians to live under shariah? The Christian-in-chief apparently didn’t think of that when he was planning the Iraq war. Bush has incurred 20,000 casualties and will spend perhaps half a trillion dollars to put into power a regime that is by any measure more hospitable to Islamic fundamentalism than the regime it replaced.

Many observers have put forth their theories of what went wrong. Let me offer mine. It is based on something Americans understand even better than they understand freedom _ computers.

After Sept. 11, Bush had a software problem. But instead of changing the software, he decided to change the hardware.


Look at the Iraqi government’s helicopter force, for example. Helicopters are indispensable in suppressing insurgencies in a country like Iraq. That’s why Saddam Hussein had a big fleet of excellent, sturdy Soviet-built copters.

That hardware _ along with the regime it supported _ was swept away in the U.S.-led invasion. And now, according to news reports, we are outfitting the Iraqis with a force of American-built helicopters. Guess who’s flying them? You got it. The same pilots who flew the Russian choppers.

We switched the hardware when the problem was in the software. After Sept. 11, it should have been obvious to any thinking person that the militant strain of Islam practiced by Osama bin Laden was the equivalent of a computer virus. And it should also have been obvious that that virus originated not in Iraq but in Saudi Arabia.

“The Saudis are operating all around the world displacing local forms of Islam,” Marshall said. Those local forms were mainly benign, the “religion of peace” Bush loves to talk about.

But the Wahhabi strain exported by the Saudis is a religion of war.

“The United States government does not seem to be sufficiently aware of the dangers of the Saudis exporting their own version of Islam around the world,” Marshall said.

But why isn’t the government aware? Conspiracy theories abound concerning our puzzling Mideast policy. It was the oil interests. It was the Israeli lobby. And so on.


As a longtime observer of politics, however, I have to note that conspiracy theories usually arise when a politician has done something so counter-productive that it seems to defy explanation.

But there’s always that most obvious of explanations: stupidity. In the spirit of Christian charity, that’s the explanation I endorse.

MO JL END MULSHINE

(Paul Mulshine is a columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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