Here & there contributor Nathan Schneider writes for Religion Dispatches about the series of covers on classified Department of Defense intelligence updates from 2003, which show pictures of the Iraq war and quote Bible passages:
Collected by journalist Robert Draper, the documents bear an eerie resemblance to the most troubling propaganda of militant Islamists. They mobilize—in fact, manifestly misuse—passages from the Bible alongside images from the invasion of Iraq at a time when “shock and awe” was still a recent enough memory to seem glorious.
In the accompanying article, Draper focuses on the irresponsibility of a defense secretary willing to risk a backlash, which a Pentagon staffer thought “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib,” in order to tickle his president’s piety bone. But there is another story here as well. The images, and the Biblical passages chosen to emblazon them, are especially indicative of a long and concerted campaign by that administration to use the language of Hebrew and Christian scripture to sacralize a modern war of aggression. Moderate Muslim leaders have gone out of their way to repudiate the theology of violent jihad. Yet Christians and Jews have been remarkably complacent about the ways their traditions have provided the spiritual scaffolding for America’s desert crusade.
Read the full article here.