"By their works ye shall know them"

Below is the closing para of a pretty detailed article by Garry Wills on the insinuation of faith imperatives and personnel throughout the goverment since '00--healthcare, defense, social services, law enforcement, etc. Why so resistant to the advice of generals and practioners who know better?

The New York Review of Books: A Country Ruled by Faith

"There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude."

Perhaps my favorite part could be titled:


Satan made me screw the pooch in Mogadishu

The deputy undersecretary for defense intelligence, General William (Jerry) Boykin—a man leading the search for bin Laden—made headlines during the Iraq war with a slide- show lecture he gave in churches. He appeared there not in his dress uniform but in combat gear. He asked audiences (this was after the 2000 election and before the 2004 one):

Ask yourself this: why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?... I tell you this morning he's in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this.

Then he asked the congregation who the enemy is. He showed slides of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, and Taliban leaders, asking of each, "Is this man the enemy?" He gave a resounding no to each question, and then revealed the foe's true identity:

The battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it's a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan.... Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.[35]

This was not a momentary lapse on Boykin's part. He has been an active translator of war into religion for many years. After he led the failed "Blackhawk Down" raid on Mogadishu in 1993, he flew over the city taking photographs. When developed, the pictures showed black smears on the landscape. He showed them to his Sunday-school-teaching mother, and she asked, "Don't you know specifically what you were up against?" Only then did he get the full supernatural meaning of the pictures. "It was a demonic presence in that city, and God revealed it to me as the enemy that I was up against in Mogadishu."

He remembered, in this light, the first feeling he had experienced in that non-Christian country: "I could feel the presence of evil.... The demonic presence is real in a place that has rejected God." His task was not simply to defeat an enemy force, but to carry Jesus to the benighted. "It is the principalities of darkness. It is a spiritual enemy that will only be defeated if we come against him in the name of Jesus."[36] The evangelical groups he addressed responded eagerly when he attacked the "godless" courts of his own country. "Don't you worry about what these courts say, our God reigns supreme."[37]

KINDLY MOM: "Don't you know specifically what you were up against?"

LIL JERRY: "I could feel the presence of evil.... The demonic presence is real in a place that has rejected God."

Of course! Better planning, wiser force projection, even plasma forcefields around those men and their equipment would have been no match for His Satanic Majesty's infernal OPFOR. What a relief, Mom. Thank you.