Religion or Civilization: Why Democrats should support the war in the Middle East.
In 2003, when US marines first invaded Iraq, I looked on with familiar sadness as death and destruction were brought to me live via CNN, Fox Noise, MSNBC and others. At the time I thought the old PBS line “This program is made possible with support from viewers like you,” should be shown as fitting reminder to the American people that each of us were morally responsible for suffering caused by the actions of our military, and that by being apathetic or voting for a hawkish pro-war Republican we were saying that the cause of wrenching Iraq from the hands of a brutal , rogue dictator was worth the price it would be paid in human tragedy; that above the scars of war ten, fifteen, or thirty years from now a beautiful civilization would spring forth once again between the Tigris and Euphrates and that this would be worth the fatherless children, amputated lives, and bitter hatred toward the sources of that anguish. Feeling that such a radical social transformation was not possible I opposed the war with a deep indignance, considering it to be the Vietnam of my generation.
Five and 1/2 years later with extremist violence in Iraq still on-going and U.S. withdrawal sure to leave an explosive power vacuum we must ask ourselves that same moral question that we did in Vietnam. Now that we have come to set the stage for Iraqi westernization, how are we to act if our leaving will eventually mean that over 700,000 people, and a handful of American soldiers in comparison have died as a direct result of our invasion. As Sen. John Kerry so wisely put in his youth ” how do we ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam.” Are we to let so many Iraqis die by our hands in vain? How will history judge us if we do not continue fight this fight, more importantly, what will be our history?
Let us make no mistake, the gauntlet is off and there is no going back. It is not unreasonable to say that the scourge of Islamic extremism is now an ever present danger in every nation on Earth. At the heart of this campaign is dark form of cultural and religious extremism equivalent to the Catholics during the crusades and the National Socialism of the early 20th century. Radical Islam yearns for world domination and the imposition of wacky religious laws that are based on twisted distortions of the Quran. They feed of of the economic stagnation of many Middle Eastern countries to breed hatred toward Israel and the West. We must push forward with all we have or not push at all. The Islamic extremists are right about one thing, there is a conspiracy to secularize the Middle East and to subvert Islamic theocracies, and I think it’s about time all Democrats got on board. Barack Obama and his army of lets-all-just-respect-each other-and-talkocrats need to buck up and defend the fort. If sending in 40000 more US troops into Pakistan and Afghanistan means that we make headway against the rising tide of Islamic Extremism, then I say that this is a moral cause not unlike fighting Hitler during WWII, or with much irony, Catholics during the crusades. While we are there, perhaps we can pass out copies of The Origin of Species.
A friend and fellow Democrat told me something promising today over lunch, he said that when he goes home to visit his cousins in Pakistan, he finds that more and more of the people around him are Atheists. Rejection of religion is the only rational insight to have when you see hoards of barbarians blowing themselves up in the name of some socially reproduced delusion called “god,” or in Arabic “Allah.”
The question one must ask him or herself when considering whether the U.S. involvement is warranted must go beyond pretensions of pacifism, or blind faith in the milk of human kindness. The question is one of a combination of ethical judgment in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, and practical wisdom of Winston Churchill. Bentham argued that “that which is ethical minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure for the largest number of people.” Churchill continuously warned British prime minister Neville Chamberlain of the danger the rise of National Socialism posed to Europe and the world many years before the ruthless Hitler violated the Warsaw pact by annexing Czechoslovakia. If Chamberlain and the isolationist United States had heeded his call for action the world could very well have avoided a long and brutal war which caused human suffering on a truly unimaginable level. Alas, this is the argument for the neoconservative doctrine of pre-emption, a dangerous ideology which must measure the need for intervention with the imagined need for intervention, or the call for war in the name of military-industrial, or other economic reasons.
As this doctrine is dangerous to our democracy, and yet still the threat that militant Islam poses to the world is very real and very frightening, we must point to the larger philosophical driver for the reproduction of militant Islam in the first place- religion. It is without hesitation that all of us, in good conscience and clear thought , cannot deny that at the heart of this conflict is human religiosity and that it should be fitting that the place where the three major world religions were born is also the place that they should die. Now this sounds harsh to the cultural and moral relativist ear of the average Democrat, but we must remain objective and realistic about what drives , and has been the driving factor behind the scourge of war throughout human history. Behind nearly every dark story of the suffering of war is a leader or movement which claims to be divinely ordained. Hitler claimed to have been acting under the authority of an Aryan Jesus, and even visited the head of the Palestinian army before embarking on a brutal campaign of ethnic genocide. Mahmood Amadinejad and his theocratic overlords have repeatedly claimed divine authority in their campaign to engage in a proxy war using the Palestinian PLO and Hamas as fronts. In WW II we had emperor Hirohito of Japan, who claimed divinity by inheritance. In Ireland we have Protestants and Catholics, in the Middle east we have Shia and Sunni. When confronted with proof of evil in tangible human suffering throughout modern history, religion answers back with nothing but dangerous superstition. It is time to wrestle our world from the hands of myths wrought in human fear. Religion is the poison which allows otherwise moral and decent people to be manipulated into purveyors of the inhumane. And if we oppose the war in the Middle East because we are disgusted by the endless parade of human suffering we must also oppose the core ideology which begot its existence. Thus as a Democrats , We should support the war because occupying the middle east, and installing leaders who support our interests will help facilitate the spread of western secularism to the Middle East, which will serve as an antidote to the emergence of dangerous Islamic Theocrats, and Caliphate ideology in the future. In short, the less religion is accepted in the Middle East, the more stable, prosperous, and peaceful it will be.
Democrats have too long straddled the fence on this all-too-important issue, we have walked softly and now it is time to show those lunatics just how big our stick really is. Barack Obama should follow the advice of his Pentagon advisors and send in more ground support. And you, as a Democrat, and especially as an Athiest or Agnostic Democrat should stand in full support, sad that while we are temporarily increasing human misery, in the end it will serve as a great first step toward a New World Order in which religion will be considered as quaint as burning witches. Over and Out.
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St. John's College Democrats 
October 8, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Let’s do a bit of editing on your last paragraph:
“Muslims have too long straddled the fence on this all-too-important issue, we have walked softly and now it is time to show those lunatics just how big our stick really is. Osama bin Laden should follow the advice of his Al Qaeda advisors and send in more ground support. And you, as a Muslim, and especially as an Sunni or Shia Muslim should stand in full support, sad that while we are temporarily increasing human misery, in the end it will serve as a great first step toward a New World Order in which imperialism will be considered as quaint as burning witches.”
Do you see how absurd this sounds?
October 8, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I do see how absurd that sounds, but this madlibs version of my paragraph distorts or hides my central thesis, which is that religion, and in particular fundamentalist religion has been and will continue to be a facilitator of war and global political instability. Thus it is absolutely crucial in order to avoid this that we promote secularism and teach middle eastern children to reject Islam,Christianity and Judaism and to embrace rational approaches to morality,human empathy,national identity etc.. In order for this long process to occur we must continue to systematically occupy ,colonize and re-educate much of the middle east. We are at war not over religion, but over the END OF RELIGION.
The difference between say Militant Atheism as facilitated through the Democratic Party and Militant Islam as facilitated through parties such as Al-Qaeda is that one is clearly congruent with the progression of human knowledge, the institution of a one-world government,and the promise of world peace while the other rejects rational utilitarian ethics, sexual equality, global democracy, practical justice, freedom of speech, etc..
They are not equivalent paragraphs because they are not equivalent groups.One is clearly superior as a philosophy congruent with the end of the nation-state and the realization of global peace. The other is fundamentally resistant to global democracy and global peace. I realize that saying something is “superior” leaves a bad taste in your relativist mouth, but I didn’t write this to be popular among my colleagues, I wrote this because in my analysis it is crucial to making the dream of peace in the middle east a reality.
October 10, 2009 at 9:10 am
The Crusades were against this same foe.
And if you think they are equivalent, look at what each has become since then!
Susan Peterson
October 10, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Stalker…
October 10, 2009 at 4:46 pm
In a 2002 study, 59% of Americans said that religion played a “very important role in their lives.” So if indeed “we are at war not over religion, but over the END OF RELIGION,” maybe we should send in some “ground support” against our own country! Interesting that you should view the U.S., a country where 26% of the population self-identifies as evangelical Christians, as the great crusading force to end religion.
And for the record, it might help your credibility if you retook 4th grade and learned to spell words like “divinity”, “emperor”, and “Winston Churchill”.
October 11, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Those would be good points if they were taken within their intended meaning.What I meant by “the end of religion, is that the occupation of the middle east will have a “secularizing” effect on Islam, that is that the fundamentalist-theocratic component will be squashed by the democratic-capitalist component because as many before have said “jihad is bad for business.” If you look at the history of capitalist democracies you’ll notice a trend of the increased sublimation of religion-based ethics into secular ethics which emphasize rational, empathetic approaches to solving complex moral problems. While my hope is that people would be more inclined to reject religion as a whole, the reality is that religion will probably never die as a phenomenon of the human psyche, but is usually transformed into less dangerous vague expressions of personal spirituality which are less amenable to dangerous fundamentalism. (The danger of which I think I satisfactorily presented in the editorial.)
Your argument suggesting that we send “ground troops into our own country,” really reduces to absurdity. Besides a handful of abortion clinic bombers, some christian scientist Luddites who let their children die in agony, Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians do not pose an immediate threat to our country and its allies. They pose a threat to the soundness of our educational system certainly, but all in all they are relatively harmless. I laugh at them to keep from crying that it is 2009 and people are still gathering around the shaman and celebrating the father of the universe.
To your poll.First of all any poll which has at its question “what role does religion play in your life” with some sort of Likert Scale like, not important, somewhat important, important, very important, does not measure human religiosity. I am a secular humanist, religion plays an extremely important role in “my life.” Religion is an inescapable theme in modern existence, it affects everyone, and thus is very important.
The poll is not measuring what it claims to be measuring, which is human religiosity. Analyze your secondary sources a bit more closely.
And as for your comment about how a religious populace could not possibly be behind the “great crusading force to end religion.” Well why not. Soldiers do not need to know precisely what it is that they are accomplishing. Our own legislative and executive branches could indeed be ignorant of the effects of our occupation.World changing events are rarely conscious. Historians looking back on the events of the 21st century might indeed point to the continued occupation of the Middle East as a critical point in which world opinions about the dangers of religion were recognized. It is unfortunate that usually by the time we recognize the danger of some trend in human consciousness that it is too late. Never before has the danger posed to the world by organized religion been so great,and so clearly demonstrated in the history of our species and yet an arrogant clinging to the feel-good delusions provided by the major world religions prevents us from seeing this. Religion is dangerous because it prevents the religious from seeing that religion is dangerous.
And as for your Ad Hominem attacks on my spelling, you would do well to establish credibility if you remained focused on the arguments and not on silly distractions.
I hope this finds you well. Understand that I write not out of despise or condescension toward religion but concern for the future of my species and the promise of peace in the Middle East. Religion represents the human person’s search for meaning and truth and as such is a noble pursuit, but it’s benefits must be weighed with its costs. If there were a plague that threatened to kill millions of people in the coming century would you fight research into the vaccine?
October 12, 2009 at 6:16 am
I know that the idea of sending ground troops against our own country is absurd. It was a sarcastic comment meant to illustrate the absurdity of the oversimplification you seem to be implicitly making: that religion is equivalent to instability and violence. And the exact statistics aren’t really important, are they? I was only trying to reinforce what I’m sure you already knew; i.e., that our own country is highly religious.
Highly religious and yet, as you just pointed out, not largely violent or dangerous. Doesn’t this suggest that maybe the problem lies not solely with religion itself, but with a number of social and economic factors also unique to the Middle East? A century of Western corporations exploiting its oil reserves; the Western colonization of Palestine driving hundreds of thousands of citizens from their homes and, as refugees, into neighboring countries; two major wars in Iraq leading to unquantifiable destruction. Things like these, even independent of religion, can make an area pretty fucked up (and most of these factors were caused by the same thinking you’re using now: “We know how to do it right, so we’ll show them.”) Maybe instead of fantasizing about the destruction of religion as a Great Noble Goal to Fix Those Darn Arabs Once And For All, we should step back and use our so-advanced liberal secular Western minds to realize the complexity of reality.
I know that your intentions are good. The “condescension” that you’ve tried to avoid, however, has slipped subconsciously into your entire attitude. Your basic idea that We need to fix Them, after all, wouldn’t make much sense unless We are fundamentally better than Them, no? Maybe it’s time that the advanced, intelligent, liberal, secular West takes its head out of its ass and respects the fact that other races are composed of (un)intelligent human beings just like us, and learn the lesson that 400 years of colonialism should have taught us: imposing your ideology and economic dominance over others may make you rich, but it’s gonna lead to a lot of early deaths for both sides.
(On a side note, I’m sorry to hear that correct use of the English language, the lingua franca of the secular West, has become a “silly distraction.”)
October 12, 2009 at 3:15 pm
You’re absolutely right about my failure to include the complexities which have precipitated the rise of Islamic fascism in many parts of the Middle East. You’re absolutely right that colonialism, the Western subversion of Islamic governments, Israeli encroachment upon Palestinian land, poverty, and the lack of schools. But if these ingredients were eggs, sugar, salt, and chocolate in the cake of Islamic Fascism, Religion would surely be the flour. You can substitute eggs, sugar, salt, and chocolate, but you need flour to bake a cake.
There is an enlightenment brewing in the middle east. The young men and women of Iran are tired of being told that they are children, who should be proud to have vicious hateful mullahs as their paternalistic fathers. Women are tired of being harassed and raped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They have seen bogus elections, hypocrisy, and vicious lies about the holocaust, and their sentiment is ripe for the rejection of illegitimate authorities of all types, including objective morality. This included in a dictatorship whose policy is derived from a book which breeds longing for the end of the world, which teaches murder is justifiable in the name of an anthropomorphically derived supernatural entity.
Fuck your intellectually fashionable pretensions of anti-colonialism, whether we created our own enemy or not is irrelevant to the fact that he has us in his sights, right now, as we speak.
Actually.. the U.S. is actually a quite dangerous society in terms of internal crime. And a Correlational but not necessarily causal look at highly atheistic societies shows a decline in violent crime as belief in god decreases.Yes, reality is much more complex and dynamic than loosely correlating the massive domains of religion and crime. The question remains to be answered: what are the reasons that violent crime is so much more prevalent, in the U.S., a country where something like 25 percent of the people believe that a 1st century radical Semite will be popping his strangely Anglo head out of an ethereal cumulonimbus sometime in the next 50 years, that violent crime is so high while largely atheistic societies of Northern Europe are not nearly as violent?