berkshireeagle, In addition to the noxious views on Islam that ought to get him bounced out of his job posthaste, General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for intelligence, has a novel take on the 2000 presidential election. He has often told the evangelical Christian audiences he regularly addresses that it was the hand of God that put George W. Bush in the White House. Since Al Gore got more votes, General Boykin points out, how else to explain it?
It's a stretch to think of the peculiarities of the Electoral College as divinely inspired — not to mention the Supreme Court's “we're all for it, but not this time” musings on federalism — and it is an even greater stretch to imagine this blithering cartoon of a military officer in charge of the operation to capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The Pentagon's intelligence chief must coordinate with Afghans, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Indonesians and other Muslims as he works to locate and destroy Islamist terrorist organizations. So what are General Boykin's stated beliefs about the religion of the Muslim officials he must deal with?
“I knew that my God was bigger than his God,” General Boykin told a church group about his battle with a Somali (Muslim) warlord. “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” Even aside from the “size counts among deities” argument, the general doesn't even know what he's talking about. Islam prohibits graven images. Central to its founding was a rejection of idol worship.
The God of Islam is not merely small and totemic, in the general's misbegotten view, but Allah is downright satanic. General Boykin sees the world war on terrorism as “a spiritual battle,” in which “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.” The United States, therefore, “a Christian nation,” must “come against” Islamist terrorists “in the name of Jesus.”
In a world where most Muslims see the U.S. battle against terrorism in general and the invasion of Iraq in particular as a dark plot against Islam, General Boykin's medieval-crusader-like maunderings do American great harm in the world. Last week, after President Bush rightly chastised — to his face — Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad for his anti-Semitic screed of the week before, Mr. Mahathir deflected a reporter's question on the subject by bringing up General Boykin and his “bias against Muslims.”
Nor, by the evidence, is General Boykin even minimally competent to perform useful intelligence evaluations. Remarkably, he ascribed a black mark on some developed pictures he took from a helicopter in Somalia as a manifestation of evil from the “principalities of darkness.”
Perhaps because it erroneously considers the evangelical vote next year more important to the nation than either Muslim opinion or intelligence-gathering competence, the Bush administration is standing by General Boykin and accepting a lame “apology” to “those who have been offended.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers said simply that General Boykin broke no rules, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that, by gum, this was all a question of free speech. None of this inspires confidence in an administration that either values political expediency above all else or, worse, shares the general's views.
