LONDON, 8 December 2004 — The West may find that the struggle against Muslim extremism is an inescapable challenge of the 21st century, extending far more widely than the present engagement with a few thousand fanatics. Most of us wish to explore every avenue of accommodation before reconciling ourselves to armed conflict. Yet we now face another four years at the mercy of a US president who perceives his own God as foremost among White House advisers and regards the contest with Islam as already begun.
The last British prime minister before Tony Blair to perceive himself in a special relationship with the Almighty was Gladstone. Yet, oddly enough, Gladstone strongly resisted Gen. Charles Gordon’s attempts to force Christian Britain into military confrontation with Islam, in the Sudan in 1884. British foes of the Mahdi used many of the same arguments for deposing him as were deployed by Bush and Blair against Saddam Hussein: Shocking tyrant; unspeakably brutal to his own people; threat to the stability of the region. Yet Gladstone rejected calls for intervention until Gordon, by calculated self-immolation in Khartoum, excited British public opinion to such a pitch that the prime minister felt compelled to act. A relief force was belatedly dispatched up the Nile, which failed to reach Gordon in time, and withdrew amid much public anger at home. This might be described as Gladstone’s first Gulf war. Its anticlimactic conclusion provoked bitter criticism, for the failure to finish the job and depose the Mahdi.
The Mahdi died, of course, leaving his Sudanese empire in the hands of a successor, the Khalifa. The British launched their second Gulf war against Sudan in 1898, in a spirit of unfinished business not dissimilar from that which prevailed in the 2003 White House. Kitchener duly disposed of the Khalifa and his Dervish followers at the battle of Omdurman, with an application of firepower ruthless enough to delight Donald Rumsfeld. The British thereafter ran the Sudan for half a century. Their benign stewardship became the best excuse for an imperialist adventure that otherwise possessed no justification whatever.
Interestingly, while the British felt pleased with themselves for having squashed Mahdism, they did not represent Omdurman as a triumph for Christianity. It was perceived simply as a victory for the Union Flag. Some of us would feel more comfortable today if American and allied foreign policy could be discussed solely in temporal terms, without bringing God into the deal at all. One of the more grotesque landmarks of the Bush presidency was established this time last year, when the Los Angeles Times revealed that a top general was touring Christian fundamentalist churches assuring congregations that he knew “our side” would prevail in the struggle with Muslim extremism “because our God is a real God” and the other side’s is a phony.
Now, every army has its share of lunatics. The litmus test is how their political masters treat them. The world waited in vain for Rumsfeld to sack this grotesque Strangelovian, whose words seemed to undermine every possibility of constructive engagement with Islam. It never happened, of course. I was in Washington while the little drama was being played out. A defense academic said to me sardonically: “This administration will never sack a general for saying things that every senior figure in the Cabinet believes,” and so it proved.
Bob Woodward vividly records in his book Plan of Attack an exchange with Bush, in which he asked whether the president had discussed the Iraq invasion with his father before making the decision to act. No, said Bush. He preferred to consult his “higher father”. Many of us at the mercy of America’s president, which means most of the world, tremble in the face of this sort of thing. Even in the darkest days of 1940, Churchill never seriously invoked the deity, though he had vastly better reason to do so than either Bush or Blair. Nor did Margaret Thatcher.
Today, the distortion of biblical teaching by American Christian fundamentalists, almost all allies of Bush, to support Israeli imperialist claims on the West Bank, significantly increases the difficulties of achieving a settlement in the Middle East. The political leverage exerted by the fundamentalists in the US against any surrender of biblical territory to Muslims is likely to grow greater, not less. Most of us recognize that constructive action to rescue the Palestinians would do far more for the West’s long-term security than the draconian anti-terrorist legislation introduced by Bush and now by Blair. Yet no prominent Western statesman dares publicly to question the role that American hijackers of God’s name play in making the world more dangerous.
I am not making a case for the appeasement of the West’s Islamic critics and enemies, but merely for policies likely to diminish the fertility of terrorist recruiting prairies, based upon treating their religion with common respect. Christian Crusaders were a menace to international peace in the 12th and 13th centuries, Christian missionaries in the 19th.
God spare us from assertively Christian — or Muslim or Jewish — national leaders in the 21st, if that request is not blasphemous.
— Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.
