Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (20 page)

This debate over who actually represented God’s will was one that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama studiously sought to avoid. Engagement in such a debate would implicitly suggest that a religious war was under way. Instead, U.S. officials resolutely and repeatedly insisted that the United States was not at war with Islam per se. Still, Washington’s repeated denials notwithstanding, among some considerable number of Muslims the suspicion persisted.

Not without reason: appearing with some frequency, inflammatory events—in 2010, the hullaballoo over the “Ground Zero Mosque” in lower Manhattan; in 2011, the promotion of “International Burn a Koran Day” by the pastor of a Gainesville-based Christian church; in 2012, the circulation of an American-produced video slandering the Prophet Muhammad—reinforced such suspicions. However earnestly U.S. officials dismissed such controversies as the work of a few fanatics, reality proved more complicated—and more troubling.

Consider the case of Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, an eleventh-century Christian crusader reborn as a twenty-first-century American warrior.

While still on active duty in 2002, this highly decorated army officer spoke in uniform at a series of some thirty church gatherings during which he offered his own take on President Bush’s famous rhetorical question “Why do they hate us?” General Boykin’s perspective differed markedly from the position taken by his commander in chief: “The answer to that is because we’re a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” On another such occasion, the general recalled an encounter with a Somali warlord who claimed to enjoy Allah’s protection. The warlord was deluding himself, Boykin told his coreligionists, and was sure to get his comeuppance. “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” As a Christian nation, the general insisted, the United States would succeed in overcoming its adversaries only if “we come against them in the name of Jesus.”
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As far as Boykin was concerned, the war on terrorism was indeed a religious war; to pretend otherwise was foolhardy.

When Boykin’s remarks caught the attention of the press, denunciations rained down from on high, as the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon hastened to disassociate themselves from the general’s statements. Yet subsequent indicators suggested that, however crudely, Boykin was expressing views shared by more than a few of his fellow citizens.

One such indicator came immediately: despite the furor, the general kept his very important Pentagon job as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, suggesting that the Bush administration considered his transgression minor. While he may have spoken out of turn, for a senior U.S. military officer to demean Islam did not evidently rise to the level of fireable offense.
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A second indicator came in the wake of Boykin’s eventual retirement from active duty. In 2012, the influential Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington hired him to serve as its executive vice president. Devoted to “advancing faith, family, and freedom,” the council professes an emphatically Christian outlook. The FRC is not a fringe organization. It falls well within the conservative mainstream, much as, say, the American Civil Liberties Union falls within the left-liberal mainstream. Its events routinely attract Republican Party heavyweights. In Washington circles, it wields real clout.

Those who brought Boykin on board as the FRC’s chief operating officer obviously found nothing offensive in the former general’s pronounced views on Islam. In all likelihood, by hiring him, the council meant to send a signal: on matters where its new COO claimed expertise—above all, on how to prosecute the war on terrorism—the FRC was not going to pull any punches. Imagine the NAACP electing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as its national president, and you get the idea. Spit-in-your-eye political incorrectness had become a virtue.

In a broader sense, the organization’s embrace of General Boykin makes it impossible to write off manifestations of Islamophobia as tomfoolery perpetrated by a maniacal fringe. As with the supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the early days of the Cold War, those who express hostility toward Islam, whether through words or actions, dare to convey openly attitudes that others in far greater numbers quietly nurture. To put it another way, what Americans in the 1950s knew as McCarthyism has reappeared as what we might call Boykinism, with the FRC as its main institutional base.

Historians differ passionately over whether McCarthyism represented a perversion of anticommunism or its truest expression. Similarly, present-day observers may disagree as to whether Boykinism represents a somewhat fervent or utterly demented response to the Islamist threat. Yet this much is inarguable: just as the junior senator from Wisconsin in his heyday embodied a nontrivial strain of American politics so, too, does the former special ops warrior turned “ordained minister with a passion for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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Notably, as Boykinism’s leading exponent, the former general espouses views that bear a striking resemblance to those favored by the late senator. Like McCarthy, Boykin believes that while enemies beyond America’s gates pose great dangers, the enemy within poses a still greater threat. “I’ve studied Marxist insurgency,” he declared in a 2010 video. “It was part of my training. And the things I know that have been done in every Marxist insurgency are being done in America today.” Comparing the United States as governed by Barack Obama to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Boykin charged that under the guise of health-care reform the Obama administration was secretly organizing a “constabulary force that will control the population in America.” Designed to be larger than the United States military, it was to function just as Hitler’s brownshirts had in Germany.
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This vast totalitarian conspiracy was, of course, unfolding while innocent and unsuspecting Americans slumbered.

The evidence Boykin offered to support his charge was on a par with the evidence Senator McCarthy offered to support his claim to “have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people … known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party.” That is to say, no proof at all. Yet as in the 1950s, the absence of hard evidence only served to confirm the conspiracy’s nefarious existence.

In Joe McCarthy’s day, how many Americans endorsed his conspiratorial view of world and national politics? It’s difficult to know for sure, but enough in Wisconsin to secure his reelection in 1952, by a comfortable majority of 54 to 46 percent. More important, enough to strike fear into the hearts of politicians who quaked at the thought of McCarthy fingering them for being “soft on communism.”

How many Americans endorse Boykin’s comparably inflammatory views of both Islam and American politics? Again, it’s difficult to tell, but enough to persuade the FRC’s funders and supporters to hire him, confident that doing so would burnish rather than tarnish the organization’s brand. Certainly, adding Boykin’s name to the list of officers did not damage its convening power. The council’s 2012 “Values Voter Summit,” held just weeks after he took the council’s reins, featured luminaries such as Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, former Republican senator Rick Santorum, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Representative Michele Bachmann—along with Jerry Boykin himself, who opined on “Israel, Iran, and the Future of Western Civilization.”
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When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney huddled with a group of prominent “social conservatives,” the delegation included Boykin.
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Did their appearance at the FRC’s podium signify that these Republican heavyweights subscribed to Boykinism’s essential tenets? Did his tête-à-tête with Boykin mean that Romney himself was an Islamophobe? Not any more than those who exploited the McCarthyite moment to their own political advantage—Richard Nixon, for example—necessarily agreed with all of the senator’s reckless accusations. Yet the presence of leading Republicans on an FRC program alongside the general and Romney’s willingness to consult him certainly suggested that they found nothing especially objectionable in his worldview, that he was, in fact, their kind of guy.

Where comparisons between McCarthyism and Boykinism break down is in assessing their impact. McCarthyism wreaked havoc mostly on the home front, instigating witch hunts, destroying careers, and trampling on civil liberties, while imparting to American politics even more of a circus atmosphere than usual. In terms of foreign policy, the effect of McCarthyism, if anything, was only to cement an already established anticommunist consensus. The senator’s antics didn’t create enemies abroad; McCarthyism merely affirmed that communists were indeed the enemy, while jacking up the political price of daring to think otherwise.

Boykinism, in contrast, makes its impact felt abroad, rather than at home. Unlike McCarthyism, it doesn’t strike fear in the hearts of incumbents seeking reelection. Attracting General Boykin’s endorsement or provoking his ire hasn’t determined the outcome of any election and is unlikely to do so. Yet in its various manifestations Boykinism provides some of the kindling that sustains anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world.

Doggedly sticking to their script, American presidents and secretaries of state may praise Islam as a religion of peace and even tout past U.S. military actions ostensibly undertaken on behalf of Muslims. Yet with their credibility among Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the Islamic world about nil, these officials are wasting their breath. The Boykinism that some Americans profess confirms what many Muslims are already primed to believe, namely, that American values and Islamic values are irreconcilable. Certainly, that describes General Boykin’s own view, one with which, according to polling data, nearly half of all Americans concur.
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When it comes to providing an ideological justification for U.S. policy, in other words, the pivot from communism to Islamism that occurred between 1989 and 2001 has yielded at best problematic results. No longer a source of internal solidarity as during the Cold War, religion has become an impediment, notably complicating any action involving the use of U.S. military power.

Recall that during the Cold War, ideology—rough agreement on the meaning of freedom, including religious freedom—had made it possible to create such useful fictions as the West and the Free World. Among inhabitants of these culturally heterogeneous realms, religion had become a private matter, not a hot-button political issue. It was, therefore, irrelevant to the question of whether Western Europeans, Japanese, and South Koreans were willing to permit U.S. military garrisons in their midst. Since the end of the Cold War, by contrast, the presence of U.S. forces among the peoples of the Islamic world has served chiefly as a reminder of religion-centered ideological dissonance—sharp disagreement over what freedom should permit and religious duty entail. In simplest terms, many Muslims resent occupation by armed infidels.

Resolving that disagreement—and by extension repairing America’s negative image in the Islamic world—poses monumental challenges. An obvious first step might be to stop engaging in behavior that Muslims find offensive, like stationing infidels in their midst. Yet for members of a national security elite committed to the proposition that positioning American troops on foreign soil solves problems, acknowledging that such deployments may actually exacerbate them requires stores of honesty and self-awareness they do not possess. It’s like asking a boxing fan to acknowledge that the “sweet science” is no science at all but an artifact of primordial savagery.

The substantial numbers of vocal Americans who do not themselves buy the ideological argument deployed to justify U.S. intervention in the Islamic world—that our conception of freedom (including religious freedom) is ultimately compatible with theirs—encourage Muslims to reach precisely the same conclusion. In that regard, the supporters of Jerry Boykin and the supporters of Osama bin Laden are of a like mind. Together, they ensure that further reliance on armed force as the favorite tool in the toolbox of U.S. policy will only compound the errors that contributed to 9/11 itself and have marred the post-9/11 era.

GEOGRAPHY: INVENTING THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST

During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States twice intervened in ongoing European wars, dispatching its citizen-soldiers to prevent Germany from dominating that continent. Today, with war in Europe all but unimaginable, the United States acquiesces in a defanged Germany moving inexorably toward a first-among-equals position within the European Union.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States twice sent its citizen-soldiers to fight in East Asia, first to prevent a communist takeover of South Korea and subsequently to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Neither of these wars proved popular. So beginning in the 1970s, the United States opted to accommodate rather than oppose the major East Asian communist power, the People’s Republic of China. At least for a time, this proved very popular indeed with many American entrepreneurs and most American consumers.

Beginning in 1980, however, Washington’s decades-long preoccupation with Europe and East Asia began to give way. With the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in January of that year, the Persian Gulf took its place alongside the Fulda Gap and the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a place that mattered. Imperceptibly at first, but then with increasing speed over the course of the next decade, the U.S. strategic center of gravity shifted away from the twin poles of Western Europe and East Asia and toward the Greater Middle East (GME).

Religion and culture rather than traditional geopolitics determine the GME’s boundaries. The region is nothing if not expansive. Extending from western Africa to the southern Philippines, it stretches across eleven time zones and encompasses several dozen countries, each containing a Muslim majority or a large (and invariably restive) Muslim minority.