American Empire and the War against Evil

Rosemary Radford Ruether

[3-18-04]

Rosemary Radford Ruether is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at Pacific School of Religion, and the author of many important books in feminist theology and social analysis, including Sexism and God-Talk; WomenChurch; Women and Redemption: A Theological History; and Gaia and God: Ecofeminist Theology and Earth Healing.

She delivered this address on the occasion of her receiving the Catholic Peace Ministry's Bishop Dingman Peace Award on March 6, 2004, in Ankeny, Iowa.

We are posting this talk here with the very kind permission of Dr. Ruether, and the help of Brian Terrell, Executive Director of the Catholic Peace Ministry, Des Moines, IA.  Thanks also to the Rev. Bill LeMosy, who first sent us her paper.

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Goodness and greatness: the American ideology

The United States has emerged as the greatest superpower in human history. Its political, economic, military and cultural power reaches more parts of the entire globe than any previous empire. The Roman empire, the Chinese empire, the Islamic empire at their heights of power were parochial compared to the global reach of the United States. The critical question that confronts U.S. Americans and the peoples of the rest of the nations of the planet is how benign or destructive is this massive American power.

The United States has long entertained a sense of itself as unique and divinely chosen to be a model for the rest of the world. Our Puritan ancestors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony spoke of their settlement as a "City on a Hill" called to be a beacon of light for all humanity. Nineteenth century U.S. expansionists claimed we had a "manifest destiny" to spread across the continent and into the Caribbean and Pacific islands, exhibiting to the world the superiority of our civic virtue and democratic institutions.

This ideology of American goodness and greatness, however, has generally been countered by voices of prophetic critique who pointed out our glaring failures and called us to repentance and renewed fidelity to the principles of "liberty and justice for all" as the heart of our civic creed. John Winthrop in 1630 warned that we could become cursed rather than blessed if we "played falsely with our God" and failed to exemplify the virtues to which we pretended. Martin Luther King confronted us with the sorry history of slavery and racism and exhorted us to realize an American Dream betrayed to our African American populace.

The new empire

Having first emancipated itself from the British empire in the late eighteenth century, the United States began to follow in the footsteps of that empire in the nineteenth century. With the Monroe Doctrine we staked our claims to rival British power in the Americas. After buying up or conquering French and Mexican territories within the continental U.S., we put our feet on the path of empire with the Spanish-American war in 1898. Repeated military interventions in Caribbean and Central American nations, such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua in the first half of the twentieth century, showed our determination to prevent any independent path of political or economic development in what we defined as our "backyard." In the second half of the twentieth century this interventionism would become global, with major wars and coups in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile and elsewhere, wrapped in the flag of anti-Communism.

The end of the Second World War saw the collapse of the colonial empires of Britain, Holland and France, as these nations were forced to rebuild national economies shattered by the war. The United States, as the nation whose own national economy had been unscathed by the war, emerged as the defender of the Western capitalist world against the rival Communist bloc. This rivalry was defined not simply as political and economic, but as ideological and even theological. The term "godless Communism" turned this power struggle into a crusade of good against evil, God against Godlessness. U.S. America defined itself as God's representative to defend a divinely blessed "American way of life" and to extend it to the rest of the world against its diabolical enemies.

From the fifties through the eighties this American hegemonic power was seen as relatively benign by our European allies and by those elites around the world who benefitted from our power. Deep anti-Americanism surfaced among those who aspired to "national liberation" from the American-led neocolonialism. But efforts to shake free of this power and to foster alternative paths to development were undermined and defeated by a combination of economic strangulation through the world financial institutions, embargo by the United States and either direct or surrogate military intervention.

All of these methods were brought to bear to destroy the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980's, crushing the bold experiments in popular education and health and a mixed democratic socialist model of society, rendering this tiny nation more impoverished than before. As one American supporter of the Revolution put it to me in Managua, "they had to destroy the threat of a good example," i.e. the danger than an alternative way of development through democratic socialism might actually work to improve people's lives.

Although the Soviet Union was defined as our bete noir, its military power, economic aid and ideological influence operated to create a certain global balance of power in the '60s to the '80s. The U. S. developed strategies of multilateral cooperation with our allies, collaboration in international treaties and forms of assistance designed to show that the capitalist mode of development was superior to that of socialism, even while doing everything possible to prevent actual successes of the socialist path. In the late '80s, however, it became evident that the Soviet Union was about to collapse and break up into its constituent nations. The USSR was economically exhausted by a $300 billion military budget that rivaled that of the U.S., but constituted 12% of their GNP, in contrast to 6% of the GNP of the USA. It could no longer hold together an alliance and form of government that had become distasteful to most of its people.

The need for a new enemy

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. hegemonic militarism faced a crisis of legitimacy. Without Communism as its enemy, its vast military budget and role as policeman of the world was in danger of losing its rationale. Many Americans began to speak of a "peace dividend," anticipating a scaling back of the huge Cold War military budget by half. They hoped to free large sums to rebuild the infrastructure of U.S. society, such as roads, bridges, to refund schools and to rethink matters such as national health care insurance. Alarmed by such talk the Pentagon began to cast its eyes across the globe for new enemies. It defined a military strategy as one that must be ready to fight "two wars at once," and lumped together remaining pockets of communism with militant Muslim nations as the enemies. In a precursor of George W. Bush's "axis of evil," it listed Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Iraq and Iran as the evil enemies that we must be ready to fight.

A new alliance of the Christian Right, with its wars on gays, feminists and reproductive rights, with National Security and free trade neoconservatives that believed in American military and economic supremacy, had emerged in the Reagan years. This alliance seemed to be somewhat in retreat in the 1990s with the victory of Bill Clinton, who sought to capture a middle ground of American politics that included moderate concern for social welfare at home and humanitarian international alliances abroad. But the weakness of this centrist vision, as well as his personal peccadilloes, laid the ground for a new victory of the Christian fundamentalist-national security state alliance with the non-election of George W. Bush in 2000.

The hard-right ideologues of this Bush "team," such as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, had already laid the ideological ground in the mid-90's for a different vision of the American future. With no international rival for hegemonic power, they believed the way was clear for the United States to seize control of the whole world, eliminating not only any actual rivals but any potential rivals to American power. This new imperial dream would demand, not a scaling down, but a vast increase of the American military budget, dwarfing the military budgets of the rest of the nations of the world. America was to have absolute military predominance, both to intervene militarily in any nation that threatened the U.S., even before any attack had actually been mounted, and also to defend itself against any missiles that might be directed at our national territory.

But the authors of this strategy of American imperial expansion feared that Americans lacked the will for such adventures. In a 2000 document on the "New American century" the authors opined that we needed a "New Pearl Harbor" - that is, an attack by an outside force that would generate a paroxysm of fear and hatred and thus create the national will for such a military expansion, a prediction that would eerily come true on September 11, 2001. Several critics, including process theologian David Ray Griffin, in his recently published book, The Near Pearl Harbor: Troubling Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, have accumulated evidence to support the thesis that the Bush administration had considerable advance information on the coming attack on September 11 and decided to facilitate its happening in order to create the desired crisis. Whether this intentional complicity is true or not, there is no doubt that the Bush administration has profited enormously by cloaking its imperialist aggression in the guise of a war on "terrorism" on behalf of American security.

In the 1990s such plans for greatly expanded American empire were contradicted by new efforts to withdraw from international engagement. Neo-conservatives believed that with absolute military predominance, U.S. collaboration in multilateral alliances to curb civil wars abroad, heal diseases and preventing environmental degradation, could be discarded as not serving our "national interest." In his campaign for the presidency George W. Bush disparaged U.S. involvement in "nation building" and pledged to withdraw from such engagements. There was also a concerted attack on "big government," both Federal government projects that nationalized funding and standards of social welfare and also the United Nations as a potential "world government" that might lessen absolute U.S. sovereignty. Any kind of international law against violations of human rights that might possibly be applied to U.S. personnel or its allies, such as Israel's Sharon or Chile's Pinochet, was seen as an intolerable affront to our national autonomy.

9/11 and George W. Bush's new enemy

When George W. Bush came to power in 2000, he quickly showed his alignment with this program of unilateral and militarist American power. In rapid succession he curbed U.S. contributions to international family planning, rejected American participation in the Kyoto climate treaty, dismantled international arms control treaties, and rejected the jurisdiction of the World Court for any crimes that might involve the United States. But this policy direction gained a new rationale with the terrorist attacks on the two major symbols of American military and economic power, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Tragic as this attack was for its victims, it was a bonanza for the Bush administration. 9/11 gave the Bush administration the new global enemy it needed to justify its global imperial strategy. "Terrorism" became the new incarnation of evil. The fight against terrorism was defined, not as a collaborative effort to defend all victimized people against non-state violence, but rather as a world war without end to be fought with the armaments of the most advanced military technology, including nuclear weapons. This was to be directed, not only against the small enclaves of terrorists, but against the nations that "harbored them." But such armaments of all-out war, designed to combat other nation-states, are a questionable tool for catching "terrorists" who are by definition, stateless, who slip across borders and may gather in Northern Germany and London, more likely than in Baghdad. After two and a half years of the "war against terrorism" there is little evidence that such groups have been diminished, but rather that we are creating the incitement for new recruits.

Designating its global imperial strategy as a war against terrorism assured the Bush regime of both a bipartisan consensus and popular support, while denouncing any critics of these policies as incipient traitors and collaborators with "terrorists." With such a war against terrorism projected as virtually endless, the far right ideologues sought to make their power permanent and irreversible in the United States and across the world. Thus it is no surprise that, having pushed over the Taliban regime that supported the Al Queda network in Afghanistan (without apprehending its leaders), the Bush administration quickly set its sights on what had already been defined as its larger goal, namely, Iraq.

Iraq was the major target for U.S. supremacists for two reasons, for its vast supplies of oil and because it represents unfinished business from the Gulf War of 1990. This is not a matter of a father-son psychological rivalry between Bush senior and Bush junior. Rather Iraq represented a challenge to the imperial hegemony of the U.S., and its client state, Israel, over the Middle East. Even though his fabled "weapons-of-mass-destruction" have become elusive and very likely did not exist at the time of our invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein represented at his heights of power in the 1980's an aspiration to leadership in the Arab world.

Though this country was deeply weakened and impoverished under international sanctions in the 1990s, Hussein continued to thumb his nose at American demands for control. To smash his remaining power and to reshape this nation to our imperial demands became a main aim of both ideological and military-economic U.S. supremacists. Although the conquest of Iraq was a relative push-over, and the hunt for its fugitive leader finally netted him from an underground hiding place eight months later, Iraq today shows little evidence of becoming that show-place of American benevolence that we promised. Basic services of electricity, water, gas and phone service still mysteriously fail to be adequately restored, even in the capital city, much less throughout the country. Rather the occupying American army in its endless search for dissidents, in house to house searches that invariably kill and injure passers-by as much or more than activists, shows itself mainly adept at hardening the anger and hostility of ordinary Iraqis at our continued presence.

Yet the designs of world hegemonic power that underlie this crusade against Iraq are, more than ever, clothed in the vestments of absolute moral righteousness. Saddam Hussein was depicted as a diabolic plotter who threatened the national security of the United States and the whole world. Even though his military budget was a pittance compared with the United States (in 2001 it was $1.4 billion, compared to the almost $500 billion that funds the American military machine), his weapons were depicted as threatening to overwhelm those of the United States.

His evil treatment of his own people and that of his neighbors are undoubtedly worthy of criticism, but the rhetoric used to denounce these evils conceals the fact that many of these crimes were committed when he was an ally of the United States and with the connivance of the very critics who now attack him. In the 1980s John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney were shaking Saddam Hussein's hand and promising him our everlasting support. In the 1900s when we decided to depose him he became the global Devil. The plans for war against Iraq were depicted as one more episode in an apocalyptic drama of good against evil, the angels of Light against the forces of Darkness, America, God's chosen people, against God's enemies.

Two rhetorics: apocalyptic and free-market

Juan Stam, a Puerto Rican pastor and theologian, has analyzed George Bush's religious rhetoric and found that it weaves together two types of language. One of these is the language of apocalyptic warfare, the war of good against evil, which absolutizes the US as good against our enemies as the epitome of evil. The second language is messianism. America in general and George Bush in particular are depicted as messianic agents of God in combating evil and establishing good throughout the world.

This language was exemplified at its extreme in speeches made by General William Boykin, a conservative Christian charged with the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In speeches to his religious constituency Boykin declared that America is an object of hate by other nations because we are uniquely a "Christian nation." He went on to claim that our "spiritual enemy can only be conquered when we confront them in the name of God." Muslims, by contrast, he believes worship an "idol" and not the true God. Boykin then opined that God had put George Bush in the White House at this time. "We are an army of God raised up for such a time as this." In effect George Bush is God's elect Messiah put in power to lead the apocalyptic warfare of God's angels against the demonic power in the last days. Although the Pentagon distanced itself from Boykin's rhetoric, it did nothing to actually counteract it.

I would supplement Stam's analysis by suggesting that the Bush administration actually alternates between two different rhetorics, designed to appeal to two different audiences. One is the religious rhetoric of apocalyptic messianism designed to appeal to the religious right supporters of the regime. The other is a co-optation of liberal progressive language that speaks of American invading Afghanistan and then Iraq to "liberate" their people from oppressive tyrants, to bring them freedom, democracy and, of course, the American way of life, namely the free market. For Americans affronted by the first rhetoric, it is hoped that they will be reassured that our true intentions are expressed by the second kind of language.

What we have here is a fallacious, but long standing ploy in American political language; namely, the equation of political freedom with a neoliberal ideology of the "free market." But the free market has nothing to do with social and political freedom and flourishes quite well in dictatorships of the right or left. Basically what neoliberals mean by the free market is the right of mega-corporations to batter down any restrictions on their right to monopolize the markets of the world, preventing small nations from protecting their national production, and subsidizing health care, education and basic commodities for the poorer classes. What our presence in Iraq means economically is a wholesale sell-out of Iraqi resources to favored American corporations, such as Halliburton. This is veiled behind arguments that such corporations are simply the best and most efficient to do the "job" of rebuilding Iraq, although the exact nature of such "rebuilding" Iraq is yet to become clear. So far it seems to have little to do with actually making daily life more livable for Iraqis.

The new American empire: a challenge to the churches ...

What are we to say about the emergence of America as a superpower in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Is it a force primarily for human good or for evil? It is my belief that the direction charted by the Bush administration to direct American power toward global empire is a disaster both for the world and for the American people itself. It means dismantling many of the fragile structures of international cooperation designed to curb militarism and to foster social welfare, environmental health and peace. It has further enflamed hatred in general and against the United States in particular, both in the Islamic world and much of the "third world," and also antagonized many in Europe who have come to see the United States as a kind of "rogue nation." In a poll taken in the European Economic Union nations in December, 2003, Europeans declared that Israel and the United States were the primary threats to world peace.

This imperial agenda is also further distorting the U.S. economy, delaying any reinvestment in needed infrastructure, education, health and social welfare. The whole world, and finally ourselves, will be impoverished, both morally and economically, by this wrong-headed drive for imperial power. Above all, it must be questioned for its idolatrous moral absolutism, for its claims to represent good against evil, God against the Devil, resisting any self-critique of its own power. Not only critics from the Muslim and the third worlds, but also our European allies are deeply offended by this rhetoric and direction of American power.

The Christian churches have a responsibility here to challenge the misuse of religious language for imperial power. To posit the United States as the representative of absolute moral righteousness against absolute evil violates the basic principles of Christian theology which understands that all humans are flawed and all are in need of divine grace and self-critical repentance. To speak of any nation and its leader as Messianic is the opposite of Christian faith in Jesus Christ as crucified Lord who unmasks the power of empires and stands with the poor of the world. Christian churches and theologians have failed to do their theological work in protecting the authentic vision of Christian faith and challenging its counterfeits.

Ideally Christian churches should make such a critique of the misuse of religious language in concert with Jewish and Muslim colleagues who also have a stake in questioning such abuse of religion. This language not only falsifies Christianity, but it seeks to split Christians and Jews from Muslims, who are being set up as the demonic adversaries of this messianic crusade. Christians, Jews and Muslims need to stand together to make clear that the word Allah is the word for God in the Arabic language shared by all Arabic speaking peoples, Christians, Jews and Muslims. The three peoples of the Abrahamic faith share a common faith in the same God. If there is an idol to be denounced, it is the idolatrous appropriation of language for God into the socialization of oppressive military and economic power.

Christians and all people of faith and good will also need to stand together to unmask the misuse of liberal and liberationist language about "freedom," "democracy" and "liberation" to cover up blatant invasions and occupations of other countries in order to control their economic resources. The basic religious and ethical stances of Biblical faith, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims, is to stand with the oppressed and impoverished peoples of the world against every empire. The American empire, no less than the Roman empire, needs to be challenged by a religious vision that calls for "good news to the poor, the liberation of the captives, the setting at liberty of those who are oppressed."

... and a challenge to American values

Finally and most basically the American people themselves must challenge a domestic and foreign policy that guts our own traditions of democracy, human rights, and prophetic self-critique. We need a new generation of prophets to arise to denounce the misuse of American might for blatant power-mongering and self-enrichment of the super rich. Even more, we need new prophets who will redefine how America can become, once again, one nation among others in a world community that seeks "liberty and justice for all."

For this citation of Winthrop, as well as the general inspiration of this article, see Tom Barry, "El complejo de poder: se acabo 'el gringo bueno'" in Envio: Revista Mensual de la Universidad Centroamericana, November, 2002 (Num. 248), 45-50.

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