The War in Iraq: Was it partly a Holy Crusade?Follow

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer’s staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—“would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

The Scripture-adorned cover sheets illustrate one specific complaint I heard again and again: that Rumsfeld’s tactics—such as playing a religious angle with the president—often ran counter to sound decision-making and could, occasionally, compromise the administration’s best interests. In the case of the sheets, publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef’s style—“Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way,” Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings—but it was decidedly Bush’s style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible. No matter that, if leaked, the images would reinforce impressions that the administration was embarking on a religious war and could escalate tensions with the Muslim world. The sheets were not Rumsfeld’s direct invention—and he could thus distance himself from them, should that prove necessary.

Still, the sheer cunning of pairing unsentimental intelligence with religious righteousness bore the signature of one man: Donald Rumsfeld. And as historians slog through the smoke and mirrors of his tenure, they may find that Rumsfeld’s most enduring legacy will be the damage he did to Bush’s.

Tell that to a Muslim.

Let's draw a distinction.

A crusade is a popular movement with religious motivations and usually with a violent, militaristic bent. A jihad, as understood by modern radical Muslim fundamentalists, is violent and religiously motivated, but it isn't a popular movement. Muslim fundamentalists form an incredibly small minority of the greater Muslim population. The "justification" for their craziness stems from the fact that around the early eighties, they reinterpreted the concept of jihad to include individual acts of terrorism.

If tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan decided to cross the Atlantic and invade New York, you'd have a basis for comparison with a crusade. Instead, some crazy people hijacked a bunch of planes to make a dramatic statement against a culture they believed was the Great Satan. Calling that a crusade does an immense injustice to the term "crusade".

For the same reason, calling the Iraq War a crusade is quite ludicrously inaccurate. The invasion of Iraq was a totally modern war that was given a religious slant due to the fact that Bush was a fundamentalist born-again Christian and his targets were Sunni Muslims. They didn't invade Iraq because the Bible demanded it, they used Biblical imagery to justify their otherwise totally secular invasion to the masses of religiously-minded people who voted for them.

Edited, May 18th 2009 11:48am by zepoodle

I think the term is moot. We refer to the 'crusades' because that is what was believe at that time, much as fundamental Muslims use 'jihad'. Surely all acts carried out in religious belief are interpretations from the written or spoken, sometimes twisted by religious leaders for their own means?

Can you do injustice to the crusades? It's all relative, if you spoke to the Moors of the time I'm sure they'd tell you that the injustice was done to them.

I've never heard of people with TS clearances or even TS/SCI getting paper handouts, that seems a little far fetched.