US Is No Longer Just a Nation, It Is a Religion
George Monbiot

LONDON, 30 July 2003 — The US believes it has a holy
mission to rid the world of darkness and cast out its
demons. “The death of Uday and Qusay,” the commander of the
ground forces in Iraq told reporters on Wednesday, “is
definitely going to be a turning point for the resistance.”
Well, it was a turning point, but unfortunately not of the
kind he envisaged. On the day he made his announcement,
Iraqi insurgents killed one US soldier and wounded six
others. On the following day, they killed another three;
over the weekend they assassinated five and injured seven.
Sunday they slaughtered one more and wounded three. This
has been the worst week for US soldiers in Iraq since
George Bush declared that the war there was over.

Few people believe that the resistance in that country is
being coordinated by Saddam Hussein and his noxious family,
or that it will come to an end when those people are
killed. But the few appear to include the military and
civilian command of the United States armed forces. For the
hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions
made by those with access to intelligence have proved less
reliable than the predictions made by those without. And,
for the hundredth time, the inaccuracy of the official
forecasts has been blamed on “intelligence failures”.

The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really
expected to believe that the members of the US security
services are the only people who cannot see that many
Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the US Army as fervently
as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein? What is
lacking in the Pentagon and the White House is not
intelligence (or not, at any rate, of the kind we are
considering here), but receptivity. Theirs is not a failure
of information, but a failure of ideology.

To understand why this failure persists, we must first
grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print.
The United States is no longer just a nation. It is now a
religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its
people not only from their dictator, their oil and their
sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush
told his troops on the day he announced victory: “Wherever
you go, you carry a message of hope — a message that is
ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘To the captives, “come out,” and to those in darkness, “be
free”.”’

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial
combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no
longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons.
The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay
Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little
horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were
opponents from a different realm was transmitted
nonetheless.

Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high
priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might
resist through their own free will; if they refuse to
convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise
as the former dictator of Iraq.

As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen
People, published last year, the founding fathers of the
US, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that
they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson
argued that the Great Seal of the United States should
depict the Israelites, “led by a cloud by day and a pillar
of fire by night”. George Washington claimed, in his
inaugural address, that every step toward independence was
“distinguished by some token of providential agency”.
Longley argues that the formation of the American identity
was part of a process of “supersession”.

The Roman Catholic Church claimed that it had supplanted
the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by
God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of
breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the
beloved of God. The American revolutionaries believed that
the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: The
Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine
duty to deliver the world to God’s dominion. Six weeks ago,
as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush
recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson’s. “America,” he
quoted, “has a spiritual energy in her which no other
nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind.”
Gradually this notion of election has been conflated with
another, still more dangerous idea. It is not just that the
Americans are God’s chosen people; America itself is now
perceived as a divine project. In his farewell presidential
address, Ronald Reagan spoke of his country as a “shining
city on a hill”, a reference to the Sermon on the Mount.
But what Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem,
but the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan’s account,
was God’s kingdom to be found in the United States of
America, but the kingdom of hell could also now be located
on earth: The “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, against
which His holy warriors were pitched.

So those who question George Bush’s foreign policy are no
longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or
“anti-Americans”. Those foreign states which seek to change
this policy are wasting their time: You can negotiate with
politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has
a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: “to defend
... the hopes of all mankind”, and woe betide those who
hope for something other than the American way of life.

The dangers of national divinity scarcely require
explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like
George Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to
“liberate” Asia and extend the realm of its divine
imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki
predicted: “light the darkness of the entire world”. Those
who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to
engineer a hell.

George Monbiot’s books Poisoned Arrows and No Man’s Land
are republished this week by Green Books.





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