something to ponder on a sunday morning...

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http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4607
Foreign Policy in Focus
October 3, 2007

The Religion of Divide and Conquer

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.'

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
heavyweight 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 W. George Bush, Republican presidential
hopeful Senator John McCain, and the American Israel
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 Tehran 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. 'Iran's actions threaten the
security of nations everywhere,' President Bush
recently told the American Legion convention, 'we 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 Times of London reported on September 2 that  'the
Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes
against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate
the Iranians' 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 simply '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? Religion in High Places

Certainly the Bush administration has appointed
religious activists to key policy positions. Long-time
religious activist and neo-conservative Elliott Abrams,
former chair of the 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.

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.'

The United States is not unique in using religion not
simply to save souls but to achieve certain strategic
goals. For instance, U.S. military strategy has
revolved around the attempt to secure access to energy
sources in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa. The
administration and its religious allies have played the
religious card alongside traditional military tactics
to achieve this national security goal. Divide First,
Convert Later

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
against the majority Hindu. 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 mere animal functions and even in them
indifferent…with 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.' Not Just the British

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, Hindu extremists massacred 2000 Muslims in
Gujarat.

Exploiting religious differences hardly ended with the
demise of the great colonial empires. The French
continue to exploit religious divisions in Lebanon, and
the United States 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. Targeting Islam

Islam is a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities, a
point that gets lost in the current culture war.
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% 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. But so did most
Europeans. The Grab

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
Christian…is 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 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, religion in foreign policy in the
end is a device that allows the strong to seize the
resources of the weak in the name of a higher power.

___________________

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus
(www.fpif.org) columnist. For more articles in FPIF's
Religion and Foreign Policy focus, please visit
http://www.fpif.org/fpifinfo/4590.

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