Bush, Democrats, & Iraq : Flushing Our Future Down The Toilet

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 6:15 AM on May 24, 2007.

I don't get mad easily.

I'm mad now. Not on my behalf but on behalf of all human life, and all the wonderful, beautiful life of all sorts on the planet, Earth, we call home.

We've been betrayed.

But, the "Clash Of Civilizations" is neither inevitable nor natural. It's being manufactured. This post concerns political elements on the American side of the equation who are pushing, hard, for apocalyptic war in the Middle East.

Why have the Democrats been, so far, unable to exert sufficient force to begin a US withdrawal from Iraq ? Well, the last year has seen the rise of a powerful new lobbying group, uniting far right apocalyptic American Christians with moderate American Jews.....

Crooks and Liars has the skinny on Keith's latest broadside, in which Olberman accuses President Bush, and the Democrats as well, of betraying the interests of American voters. Betrayal from George W. Bush is expected, but the Democrats have much to answer for, and their spinelessness may have terrible historic consequences :

As the circles of fighting in the Mideast, now expanding into Lebannon and Gaza, widen and intensify, we're seeing the implementation of a plan cooked up in deepest hell, a vision for maximal war in the Middle East that's been hatched by neoconservatives and apocalyptic Christians.

BACKGROUND

On July 19, 2006, at a CUFI sponsored Washington DC event called "A Night to Honor Israel", with GOP Party head Ken Mehlman and US GOP Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum ( President George W. Bush sent recorded greetings to the event ) , Pastor John Hagee declared :

"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation [...] and [the] Second Coming of Christ."

Hagee's beliefs are actually part of mainstream Christian Zionist thought, which tends to hold that, after Christians are "Raptured" bodily up to heaven, most Jews ( 2/3 to be precise ) will die in a subsequent terrible conflict centered around Israel.

[ see: Israel, the US, and the Christian Right: The Menage a Trois From Hell, What Secret "Other Matters" Did McCain Discuss With "Apocalypse Now" Hagee ?, Holy Warriors Set Sights on Iran, Christian Zionism all juiced up, GOP House Minority Whip Roy Blunt To Help Nuclear War Advocate

As the Mideast spirals towards maximal war, positive visions for the future are being precluded and rendered impossible, and all the heroic efforts on the part of environmentalists to draw attention to the rapidly heating globe and global biosphere may be soon rendered pointless, for global war will preclude the sort of cooperative effort that could salvage a future for all that lives on the Earth.

Action to really address Global Warming ? Dealing with any number of lesser but still major pressing US and World problems ?

Newsflash - with the Democratic capitulation to George Bush's insane war-lust, we might as hold in our minds what's necessary, what needs to be done to insure a viable future for coming generations and for all life on Earth, while imagining a giant flushing sound :

That's the sound of the people we trusted, the people we struggled, sweated, labored, and strove to elect last November 2006, the sound of many of those Democrats newly elected simply flushing our future, our children's future, and even the future of the World....

Down the political toilet.

More war in the Mideast = not dealing with the REAL problems.

It's betrayal of of our future.

Here's Olberman:

when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness–your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs–you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don't give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands. How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.

The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions - Stop The War - have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you... for a handful of magic beans.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't watch the minutia of events and tactics swirling around each particular bill to hit the floors of the US Senate and House of Representatives...

But, I can provide one major piece, missing from progressive political dialog, on why the Democrats caved and

And, I'm dubious this will hit the rec. list today, with some heavy-hitter posts by the worthy Greg Palast and John Conyers, and one grandstanding post, from Michael Lerner, purporting to explain the recent Democratic Party capitulation to George W. Bush insane plans for expanded war in the Middle East.

Bush's "surge" is en route to building up official US troop strength in Iraq to 200,000, meanwhile there may be 100,000 private soldiers in the Iraqi war theater as well.

The goal is still IRAN.

Sound nuts ?

It is nuts.

Why is this happening ?

Well, I'll give you three reasons

-George W. Bush probably holds religious beliefs, and those are likely inclined towards the apocalyptic end of the spectrum

-A politically and media connected faction tied to the Israeli far right wants maximal war in the Middle East: the "Neocons"

-That faction has forged an alliance with a major American evangelical right faction that wants maximal war in the Middle East because they think that will bring on the "Apocalypse" : the "Apocalypticons"

In short, my claim is that a major factor driving the US political dynamic in regard to US Mideast policy has been ignored by the progressive and anti-war political community, and that oversight may prove deadly. I hope it's not too late. I've been shouting, but maybe I haven't been shouting loudly enough.

Let's look into the heart of the matter:

Last February, in early 2007, a rising star of the hard apocalyptic Christian right addressed a substantial fraction of the US Senate and Congress, in a keynote address at AIPAC's yearly conference in Washington DC.

Sara Posner and Max Blumenthal wrote about the conference at the time, and Posner attended and wrote about it ( I would have but couldn't afford the trip ).

I've written extensively about John Hagee too, but Sara Posner does it marvelously as well, and she gets paid a little for it too and thus her prose is a bit more worked over than mine. Wrote Posner, in The Goy Who Cried Wolf:

Delegates at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference were treated to an air-brushed John Hagee last night, primed with his most innocuous talking points and stripped of his most outlandish Armageddon rhetoric. Hagee, the founder of the America's leading Christian Zionist lobby, Christians United for Israel, left his clumsy exegeses of Biblical prophecy back home in San Antonio. He is well-versed in bringing an audience of several thousand people to its feet, and he knew he didn't need his slide show of mushroom clouds and world-ending wars to work this crowd....

In anticipation of Hagee's appearance at AIPAC's conference, there has been much discussion about whether Hagee is actually an anti-Semite who blames Jews for the Holocaust yet anticipates their conversion at the Second Coming -- and another debate over whether it's actually good for Israel or the world's Jews when groups like AIPAC ally themselves with him. But judging from the crowd's reaction, and that of delegates I spoke with afterwards, none of that mattered. Like other Jewish leaders I've talked to about Hagee, the attitude is simply that Israel has very few friends, and it needs all the friends it can get. If Hagee is willing to mobilize hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of conservative Christians to the cause, then they're willing to overlook his eagerness for the Second Coming (when we'll all become Christians), because it's just a silly fantasy that won't come to pass, anyway....

Whether Hagee is good for Israel is beside the point. The real problem is that he represents a catastrophe for the United States and its standing in the world -- not because he might love the Jews too much, or might in fact secretly hate them, but because he is leading a growing political movement completely lacking in a substantive understanding of world affairs. At a time when the Middle East faces seemingly intractable conflicts with dire geopolitical consequences, the notion that Hagee -- whose status is only elevated by invitations like AIPAC's -- is leading a political movement based on nothing more than a supposedly literal reading of his Bible only reinforces the view that the United States is being led by messianic forces at odds with world peace and stability. Young Americans should have a deeper understanding of Middle East politics in order to fully participate in civic discourse as American troops are fighting a seemingly unending war. But Hagee worries not about troop deployments, instead focusing on teaching the Bible in public schools. While religious fundamentalism is causing untold bloodshed around the world, Hagee frets about secularists who are "destroying America."

When he does speak to actual Middle East politics, it's only to encourage the further destabilization of the region. Hagee has been agitating for a war with Iran for well over a year now, certainly not a single-handed effort on his part, nor one for which he would deserve sole blame should it happen. But if it does happen (and some think it already has begun), Hagee most certainly should be blamed for something else: convincing his minions that war is not only palatable, but required by God.

Hagee's speech, laced with charged comparisons of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to men like Pharaoh, Haman, and Hilter, as well as countless Churchillian references, brought the crowd to its feet. "He's A-OK," said one AIPAC delegate who had never heard of Hagee before, adding that he wanted to get one of Hagee's DVDs for his grandchildren to watch. "I love him," enthused another delegate, a woman who had already learned of CUFI through conservative talk radio and had donated money to the cause. "Who else cares about Israel?"

Sara Posner, without drawing a black underliner beneath the point, raised the key aspect of Hagee's new organization, CUFI, that American political progressives must grasp:

John Hagee is now well along the road to mobilizing some 20-60 million Americans who believe, to some degree, in apocalyptic Christian Zionism to work together in a massive national lobbying movement to pressure American politicians towards policies likely to provoke maximal war ( AKA "apocalyptic war" ) in the Middle East.

Those who claim the American Christian right is washed up or not worth paying attention to anymore are unwitting accomplices to John Hagee's project of launching the next World War.

Hagee appears to have allies in the US political establishment, in the US Congress and Senate, and he may have allies in the US military establishment as well. Christian right ideology has become heavily embedded in the US military. Fortunately, George W. Bush's new pick for the head of CENTCOM has suggested he'd quit rather than launch an attack on Iran. But, what if Bush pushes, he quits, and Bush appoints someone more pliable or eager ?

Here's a story from the Jewish Forward that prefigures some national media coverage you can expect, soon, on that issue. It's about Christian-right historical revisionism attacking church-state separation that's embedded in Army JROTC curriculum put out by the US Department of Defense, from TRADOC ( I'll give you one guess as to who one of the "researchers" cited in that story is ).

This subject is no joke, and it's time for Americans who do not yearn or apocalypse and for WW4 to get up to speed on the political elements and political alliances that are rapidly pushing us there.

I care about the world. This morning, it's spring, the sun is shining in my window, the world seems a beautiful place.

It is a beautiful place. Let's keep it that way.

*********

RESOURCES

Here are a number of stories on apocalyptic Christian Zionism

An Editorial Note:

That leading US politicians now happily appear at public events with, cheer on, and consent to share the stage with a man who advocates a fringe conspiracy theory some would call anti-Semitic and urges a "preemptive" use of nuclear weapons in order to cause widespread nuclear war indicates the extent to which US political and religious culture has lurched far right, towards what some call an "apocalyptic death cult", over the past four decades since the era in which Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign devastated Barry Goldwater's presidential hopes by airing just one time a 30 second TV commercial, the "Daisy" ad, that effectively tarred Goldwater as eager for nuclear war. Now, for Republican politicians wooing a key bloc of evangelical GOP voters, public expressions of nuclear blood lust are no longer stigmatized or politically toxic ; they are an asset.

Friends Of Israel and AIPAC Envision "Israel's Final Holocaust" and "Jew Toast"

TTA contributor Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst for Political Research Associates, provides some background on the recent history of "New World Order" conspiracism among John Hagee's fellow Christian Zionists such as Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson in The Age Old Conspiracy

Previous installments in an ongoing series, by Bruce Wilson, on John Hagee and Christian Zionism:

"Pro Israel" Christian Leader Blames Jews For The Holocaust

"Be Jewish In Five Easy Days", The Twelve Tribes Of Hagee

AIPAC Event Helps Mainstream Allegations Of "Satanic Liberal Jewish Conspiracy"

Holocaust For Zion : CUFI's Christian Zionism Made Simple

GOP House Minority Whip Roy Blunt To Help Nuclear War Advocate

What Secret "Other Matters" Did McCain Discuss With "Apocalypse Now" Hagee ?

Dick Armey Denies Bush Administration Trying To Provoke "End Times"

recent stories from other authors:

Frank Cocozzelli: Donohue Softpeddles Hagee's Catholic Bashing

Max Blumenthal : AIPAC Cheers an Anti-Semitic Holocaust Revisionist (and Abe Foxman Approves)

Sarah Posner: The Goy Who Cried Wolf: The Israel lobby gives America's leading Christian right warmonger a warm welcome

Max Blumenthal : Israel, the US, and the Christian Right: The Menage a Trois From Hell

Bill Berkowitz:Holy Warriors Set Sights on Iran

Esther Kaplan : Christian Zionism all juiced up

Richard Bartholomew : Armey: Bush Believes in Tribulation, but not Trying to Make it Happen

Tagged as: iraq, israel, democrats, hagee, cufi

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.