ACTUALLY, THE ORDERED PORTIONS DON'T REQUIRE OUR RULE:

Exceptionalism: America’s right to rule and order the world (John Pilger, 10 August 2009, Online Opinion)

The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war (which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of food, known as “agripower” (which receives $157 billion a year in government subsidies).

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good ... We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that “everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but “US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all”. It is as if “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening ... You have to hand it to America ... masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British “influence”, albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land “where miracles happen”. Justin Webb, until recently the BBC’s man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the “city on the hill”.

You have to love the gnostic bit, where only folks like Harold Pinter and John Pilger can really see that what seems like an unprecedented era of liberalization and economic growth has secretly been a tyranny.

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Political Theology: Religion and U.S. foreign policy in the first phase of the Cold War: a review of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment by William Inboden (Joseph Loconte, August 10, 2009, Books & Culture)

Renewed debate over the direction of U.S. foreign policy has focused on several contending schools of political thought: Wilsonian idealists, Kissinger realists, liberal interventionists, and the neo-conservatives. Though the debate is important in that it takes big ideas seriously, there is a hollow quality to much of it: a remarkable inattention to the role of religious belief in the formation and execution of public policy.

This problem has become institutionalized in our foreign policy enclaves. In college classrooms, textbooks such as American Foreign Policy Since World War II somehow manage to discuss the Cold War without mentioning the stark religious divide between atheistic communism and the American democratic creed. Henry Kissinger, the quintessential Cold War realist, produced an 800-page tome, Diplomacy, that fails to reference religion in its index. The U.S. State Department still functions largely as though the First Amendment precluded the promotion of America's greatest contribution to democratic government, namely, freedom of conscience and religion. It's as if the great forces moving the hearts of men and nations were indifferent to their deepest appetites and aspirations.

With the publication of William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment, the conventional, secular approach to political science and public policy seems conspicuously deficient. We learn, for example, that in early 1951 the State Department held a two-day conference with Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and other national figures to help the United States develop an "ideological offensive against international communism." This was the era of the Truman doctrine, the U.S. policy to contain Soviet communism, and the administration understood that a political theology defined the conflict between the two superpowers. That meant the government needed all hands on deck—yes, even the hands of ministers and theologians, of whatever faith. "I share your apprehension over the threat to Christian civilization," Truman wrote to Pope Pius XII in an effort to court domestic Catholic support for his policies. "All who cherish Christian and democratic institutions should unite against the common enemy. That enemy is the Soviet Union, which would substitute the Marxist doctrine of atheistic communism for Revelation." The president went on to describe his Marshall Plan, the U.S. program to rescue postwar Europe from economic ruin, in frankly religious terms. [...]

In Religion and American Foreign Policy, we are reminded that the political leaders who took America into a long, costly, and ultimately successful struggle against the Soviet Union did not do so primarily because of "power politics." They did so because they feared, quite reasonably, that the triumph of atheistic communism would mean the wreckage not only of human rights but also of human souls. "Without this theological context," Inboden writes, "the Cold War cannot be understood."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2009 7:14 PM