Bush's Holy War

Sigh. It’s not enough that the Bush administration lied to us to take us to war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and was not a threat to us (and tortured people in order to get them to say that Saddam was involved in 9/11), but now we find out that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s intelligence briefings to Bush had cover sheets that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.

Click here to see examples of other cover sheets.

Jon Soltz, who served as a Captain in Operation Iraqi Freedom, explains why this is problematic:

..in the opening days of the war in Iraq, even the flimsy intelligence took a backseat to the idea that this was a Biblical fight between the forces of good (those who worship the God of the Old and New Testaments) against those who worship the God that is chronicled in the Koran.

It doesn't just offend me as a Jew that I was apparently fighting for the New Testament in the eyes of the Bush Administration. And it doesn't just offend me as an American that they thought it proper to engage our troops in what they obviously saw as a religious crusade.

As someone who still has friends over in Iraq and Afghanistan, it boils my blood to think that insurgents and terrorists now have something else to show around as "proof" that America is "fighting a war on Islam." Rumsfeld and those at the Pentagon (as well as the White House) had to know that there was a possibility that these would come out, and only exacerbate the religious and cultural misunderstandings about the United States in the region. And yet, they didn't care.