Hair of the dog
It turns out that American foreign policy isn’t too religious, it’s not religious enough. So says the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
American foreign policy is handicapped by a narrow, ill-informed and “uncompromising Western secularism” that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures and fails to encourage religious groups that promote peace and human rights, according to a two-year study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The council’s 32-member task force, which included former government officials and scholars representing all major faiths, delivered its report to the White House on Tuesday. The report warns of a serious “capabilities gap” and recommends that President Obama make religion “an integral part of our foreign policy.”
Yeah great – then we can have the Christian nukes to go with the Islamic nukes and the Hindu nukes and the Jewish nukes. Coolerino.
“It’s a hot topic,” said Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement in Arlington County and a Council on Foreign Relations member. “It’s the elephant in the room. You’re taught not to talk about religion and politics, but the bummer is that it’s at the nexus of national security. The truth is the academy has been run by secular fundamentalists for a long time, people who believe religion is not a legitimate component of realpolitik.” The Chicago Council’s task force was led by R. Scott Appleby of the University of Notre Dame and Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. “Religion,” the task force says, “is pivotal to the fate” of such nations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, all vital to U.S. national and global security.
Well yes, religion is ‘pivotal to the fate’ of all those nations because the leadership of those nations takes religion far too seriously. It’s not obvious that the best way to deal with that is to emulate it – or to listen to advice from people who equate secularism with fundamentalism.
Whenever I look at a British newspaper these days I see ads for the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and this always reminds me how
concerned they were for Haiti in the days
when they attended the Prayer Breakfast,
organized by Papa Doc Duvalier’s sponsors, The Family.
(By the way, Spanish PM Zapatero attended it this year even though everyone knows he’s an atheist!)
“The council’s 32-member task force, which included former government officials and scholars representing all major faiths”
So they got a bunch of religious obsessives together and, after much deliberation, they concluded that religion is the answer?
If the task force has been made up of farmers they’d have concluded that foreign policy should focus more on agriculture.
Yup. Trouble is, it sounds as if this group has weight with Obama.
The thing that gets me though – is that US foreign policy as-it-has-gone-wrong has been anything but secular.
Blatant self promotion ahead:
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2010/02/25/what-happens-when-thinking-tanks-think-tanks/
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen…
All countries that vast numbers of people have left to go to more secular societies. With the exception of India (which is an exceptional society for all sorts of reasons) each one is a living, wheezing, bleeding advertisement for the pernicious effects of religious politics.
Funny – must be my tin ear playing up again – but advocating the deployment of religion in realpolitik sounds like the cynical act of a machiavelli rather than the kind of inclusive cuddliness we know all faiths to be at heart.
I guess they missed the part where George bush admitted that god told him to attack Iraq.
Never mind Tony Blair…
Sorry i keep forgetting that the decade began on 20Jan2009.
Idiots!