[A-List] UK state: Max Hastings on foreign policy

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Save us from the politicians who have God on their side

These American hijackers have made the world a more dangerous place

Max Hastings
Monday December 6, 2004
The Guardian

A week in the United States, such as I have just spent, is enough to make
anybody feel a trifle fed up with God, or rather with the relentless
invocation of the deity by American politicians, led by their president. No
public occasion would be complete without the blessing of the Almighty being
besought for whatever endeavour tops the agenda, most prominently the war in
Iraq. The appeal to faith, seldom mere ritual, is usually founded upon
conviction.

There is an attractive rationalist case for insisting that candidates for
election anywhere in the world are required to sign a declaration
forswearing religious affiliation. Had this been done in Ireland a couple of
generations ago, think what we would have been spared.

Few modern political careers are compatible with religious principle.
Government by atheists would relieve us of the irksome moral conceit that
impels George Bush and Tony Blair to do deplorable things while remaining
convinced that slots are kept open for them in heaven.

Even among the enemies of democracy, at the extreme end of the scale it is
easier to deal with the IRA, whose ambitions are political, than Osama bin
Laden, with whom there can be no negotiation, only global submission to
Islam.

I am not in the least anti-religious. If pressed I would describe myself as
a social Anglican. Yet I find myself increasingly eager to be governed by
politicians who profess no pretensions to a hot line to a higher power.

The west may find that the struggle against militant Islam is an inescapable
challenge of the 21st century, extending far more widely than the present
engagement with a few thousand fanatics. Most of us wish to explore every
avenue of accommodation before reconciling ourselves to armed conflict. Yet
we now face another four years at the mercy of a US president who perceives
his own God as foremost among White House advisers and regards the contest
with Islam as already begun.

The last British prime minister before Blair to perceive himself in a
special relationship with the Almighty was Gladstone. Yet, oddly enough,
Gladstone strongly resisted General Charles Gordon's attempts to force
Christian Britain into military confrontation with Islam, in the Sudan in
1884.

British foes of the Mahdi used many of the same arguments for deposing him
as were deployed by Bush and Blair against Saddam Hussein: shocking tyrant;
unspeakably brutal to his own people; threat to the stability of the region.
Yet Gladstone rejected calls for intervention until Gordon, by calculated
self-immolation in Khartoum, excited British public opinion to such a pitch
that the prime minister felt compelled to act.

A relief force was belatedly dispatched up the Nile, which failed to reach
Gordon in time, and withdrew amid much public anger at home. This might be
described as Gladstone's first Gulf war. Its anticlimactic conclusion
provoked bitter criticism, for the failure to finish the job and depose the
Mahdi.

The Mahdi died, of course, leaving his Sudanese empire in the hands of a
successor, the Khalifa. The British launched their second Gulf war against
Sudan in 1898, in a spirit of unfinished business not dissimilar from that
which prevailed in the 2003 White House. Kitchener duly disposed of the
Khalifa and his Dervish followers at the battle of Omdurman, with an
application of firepower ruthless enough to delight Donald Rumsfeld.

The British thereafter ran the Sudan for half a century. Their benign
stewardship became the best excuse for an imperialist adventure that
otherwise possessed no justification whatsoever. Interestingly, while the
British felt pleased with themselves for having squashed Mahdism, they did
not represent Omdurman as a triumph for Christianity. It was perceived
simply as a victory for the Union flag.

Some of us would feel more comfortable today if American and allied foreign
policy could be discussed solely in temporal terms, without bringing God
into the deal at all. One of the more grotesque landmarks of the Bush
presidency was established this time last year, when the Los Angeles Times
revealed that a top general was touring Christian fundamentalist churches
assuring congregations that he knew "our side" would prevail in the struggle
with Muslim extremism "because our God is a real God" and the other side's
is a phoney.

Now, every army has its share of lunatics. The litmus test is how their
political masters treat them. The world waited in vain for Rumsfeld to sack
this grotesque Strangelovian, whose words seemed to undermine every
possibility of constructive engagement with Islam.

It never happened, of course. I was in Washington while the little drama was
being played out. A defence academic said to me sardonically: "This
administration will never sack a general for saying things that every senior
figure in the cabinet believes," and so it proved.

Bob Woodward vividly records in his book Plan of Attack an exchange with
Bush, in which he asked whether the president had discussed the Iraq
invasion with his father before making the decision to act. No, said Bush.
He preferred to consult his "higher father".

Many of us at the mercy of America's president, which means most of the
world, tremble in the face of this sort of thing. Even in the darkest days
of 1940, Churchill never seriously invoked the deity, though he had vastly
better reason to do so than either Bush or Blair. Nor did Margaret Thatcher.

Today, the distortion of biblical teaching by American Christian
fundamentalists, almost all allies of Bush, to support Israeli imperialist
claims on the West Bank, significantly increases the difficulties of
achieving a settlement in the Middle East. The political leverage exerted by
the fundamentalists in the US against any surrender of biblical territory to
Muslims is likely to grow greater, not less.

Most of us recognise that constructive action to rescue the Palestinians
would do far more for the west's long-term security than the draconian
anti-terrorist legislation introduced by Bush and now by Blair. Yet no
prominent western statesman dares publicly to question the role that God's
American hijackers play in making the world more dangerous.

I am not making a case for the appeasement of the west's Islamic critics and
enemies, but merely for policies likely to diminish the fertility of
terrorist recruiting prairies, based upon treating their religion with
common respect. Christian Crusaders were a menace to international peace in
the 12th and 13th centuries, Christian missionaries in the 19th. God spare
us from assertively Christian - or Muslim or Jewish - national leaders in
the 21st, if that request is not blasphemous.