Rumsfeld, the mouthpiece of God?

Did you know that GQ publishes political pieces?  I didn’t, until I read about Robert Draper’s article in a Frank Rich op-ed in the New York Times.  Draper published an officially approved biography of George W. Bush in 2007, but in this piece we get a scathing review of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, based on interviews with Bush loyalists.  What I found especially interesting, though, is the slideshow GQ provides.  As Rich reports:

Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

If you go to the the GQ story, you’ll find a link to the slide show below the first page of the article. I know there’s a lot of people who will agree with Rich, alarmed by the prominence of conservative Christian evangelicals in the US armed forces.  See, for example, Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, Chris Hedges’s American Fascists, Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, or American Armageddon by Craig Unger.  The creepiness argument crudely summarized: The Fascist Family Kingdom Coming to Make a Theocracy of America and Drag Us All to Armageddon.  It’s not just left-leaning folks that are upset. Beliefnet’s Stephen Waldman, writing for the Wall Street Journal online, saw this use of Bible verses as more evidence that the Bush administration believed, to Waldman’s dismay, that God sanctioned policies that many Americans found abhorrent.

Let’s take a step back for a moment, though. The Bible, like so many other canonical works, has long been used as a fount of aphorisms.  Quotes are lifted out of context, but the phrases take on new meanings, and come to live a life of their own.  We see such, usually from the King James Version, on cheesy posters of misty scenes (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”—which is actually the opposite of the psalmist’s message, you don’t look to the hills and their idols, you look to YHVH), flowery embroidery (“The things which are impossible with men are possible with God”), or the string of lawn signs I see in one neighborhood on my way to work, all warning drivers they may be on the road to hell. And we can see these verses as part of general habit of placing pithy statements from widely known authoritative texts in reports (or articles, or theses, or books) to give them more heft, more legitimacy, and to spark a connection to the reader.

So, one could ask, what’s the big deal?  For those who opposed the Bush-Cheney-Rove regime, anything Rumsfeld might have put on these covers, including nothing, would have been occasion for criticism.  If we deplore a set of policies (and I did so deplore many of the foreign and domestic policies accompanying the Global War on Terror), the policymakers will never be able to dress it up to our satisfaction.

Still, it’s hard to ignore their triteness, and I’m not so much creeped out by the covers as I am angered by the intellectual and religious shallowness they reveal—a shallowness the Bush administration, and apparently many of its supporters, treated as a virtue.

A Pentagon senior intelligence officer and Christian, Major General Glen Shaffer, picked out the verses.  On the first GQ slide you’ll see armed soldiers, presumably praying.  The Bible verse is Isaiah 6:8, “Here I am Lord, send me.”  The sentiment of this clear enough—the soldiers are servants, willingly submitting to undertake an arduous task.  Take the analogy another step, and we get to what Waldman and others find so disagreeable.  They are undertaking the task on behalf of God, not the state.  We could take it one more step and come to the grotesque sense that President Bush is the stand-in for the Lord, though it would be a bit outrageous to believe that the President ever would have made such a claim.

It’s unfortunate that General Shaffer and his approving readers like President Bush didn’t bother at least a little with context.  Thus ironies abound in Shaffer’s selections.  The Isaiah verse is from a book chock full of criticism of the moral decay of God’s chosen people, and predictions of disaster that will result (see Richard Rubenstein’s fascinating exploration of Isaiah in Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah).

The next slide is a scene atop an aircraft carrier, with lines from Psalm 139: “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me, O LORD.”  The psalm ends with lines (verses 21-24) that seem contradictory to us today, but it’s a contradiction that I think encapsulated the Bush approach:

Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;  Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me; And lead me in the everlasting way.

Hatred and piety can sit comfortably with one another, and if God is on your side, then it’s not surprising that vindictiveness was the M.O. of the Bush response to political opposition.

Shaffer dips again into Isaiah (5:28) in the third slide, using Isaiah’s description of Assyrian imperial invaders (or whomever God would “whistle for” to punish decadent Judah) to describe US armed forces.  In the fourth, Shaffer juxtaposed a picture of a US tank with lines from Ephesians 6, “Therefore put on the whole armor of God. . .”  This is just too silly for comment.

The rest of the covers are equally cavalier, sophomoric uses of the Bible to suggest a providential role for the US military, and its Commander-in-Chief.  I realize there are people who do believe that the US is (or can be, or should be) a vehicle of God’s will in the world.  But when it comes to foreign policy attitudes, I'm not sure a whole lot of Americans back this or that foreign policy based on a providentialist ideology. A Pew report a few years ago assessed a series of surveys on US values and attitudes related to international affairs, and one conclusion is that “while Americans are clearly nationalistic and quite religious, there is little evidence that either their patriotism or their faith drives public support for the more activist and unilateralist U.S. foreign policy that has fueled anti-Americanism in recent years.” The question remains, though, if it wasn’t jingoism or religious arrogance that led so many Americans to back Bush’s War on Terror, what did? The fear following 9/11, and the politicians and pundits that stoked it?  That’s too simple.  Whatever the reasons, these covers, with a dash of the Bible, didn't demonstrate our leaders' insight, but rather a whopping blindspot.