Osama bin Laden was right

[tangaroa]

During the Iraq war, the cover sheets of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's intelligence memos for George W. Bush prominently displayed religious and militant quotes from the Bible. Original reporting by GQ Magazine.

• Problem 1: We had a sitting U.S. President and a Secretary of Defense who did not see a huge church-and-state problem with this and put a stop to it.
• Problem 2: This never got leaked to the press during the Bush Administration. Secrecy should not have been an issue since there is nothing on the covers worth classifying except for the classification tags themselves, and they can be removed from a copy. It is more likely that people were too afraid of political retaliation against their careers to do anything about it.
• Problem 3: This is bad bad bad for that part of the War On Terror™ which is the effort to persuade people not to become terrorists and blow up foreigners for Allah.

If this looks like the sort of thing that The Terrorists™ would do, it is! America's leaders were presenting the Iraq war to themselves as a Christian holy war, just like those people with the rifles and long beards present their desire to kill people who aren't like them as an Islamic holy war.

More importantly, America's leaders were presenting the Iraq war to themselves as a Christian holy war, just like those people with the rifles and long beards say the Iraq war is.

As Goering explained the art of war propaganda at Nuremberg, "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." In today's situation the "country" is the set of people who identify themselves as Muslims, and the terrorist message is that Islam is under attack by Christian Crusaders led by the United States of America. That was the core of Osama bin Laden's anti-American message. Now there is documentary evidence of it.

So this story is not only an insight into the strange mind of Bush the Lesser. It is yet another error in judgment by the Bush Administration, an error which supports one of bin Laden's outlandish, ridiculous slanders against the United States. That slander is not looking as outlandish or ridiculous as it used to. It is good that Bush's party was thrown out of power and President Obama has been sending conciliatory messages to the world's Muslim people. Otherwise, this could be worse.

---

Related: "our [US] military is actively proselytizing Muslims in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been since the so-called war on terror began."

---

Not Quite Related: During a recent tour of the United States, Presidents Asif Zardari of Pakistan and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan spent time on television's Meet the Press. That link is not an accurate transcript of their interviews, but it is hilarious.

---

Totally Unrelated: We received a request for another community to advertise here. This community does not have an advertising policy (or any policy yet besides don't offend me, which posting ads will) but since it was a polite request and I have a liberal friend with the interest, I'll post the ad myself. transhumanists is a community for people who are interested in how humanity can be augmented by technology. The things that Steve Mann has done are fairly interesting, and a quick web search returns information on the subject from Reason Magazine and Religion News Service.