[Mb-civic] Facing Faith as Politics - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Facing Faith as Politics

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, January 15, 2006; B07

Religious politics makes even stranger bedfellows than the ordinary kind.

Praising the Almighty for striking down Israel's Ariel Sharon (or anyone 
else) expresses a particularly odious fanaticism. American evangelist 
Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both deserve 
condemnation for the warped sense of religion and the indecency each 
showed in attributing political motives to his own vengeful version of God.

Important differences separate these two opportunistic zealots. 
Robertson is primarily a danger to himself, a clownish performer who has 
stayed on stage far too long and is self-destructing. More power to him 
in that endeavor, and may Robertson also help discredit the Israeli 
extremists who have bizarrely climbed under his ideological blankets.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is rapidly becoming an ever-clearer 
danger to global stability -- intent on taking Jews and other infidels 
with him in a holy nuclear cloud on Judgment Day. This leader is not 
playing at being nuts. This leader is nuts, by every observable rational 
measure.

U.S. policymakers take a meager solace from Ahmadinejad's erratic 
behavior and pronouncements. Some see signs that he may soon plunge Iran 
into its equivalent of a Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong's top-down 
tumult absorbed China's energies for a decade and more, and that nation 
emerged to swing hard away from policies of global insurrection and Marxism.

Ahmadinejad's international miscalculations suggest that he may well be 
capable of such self-defeating behavior at home as well. The Iranians 
vindicated the Bush administration's adroit shift to nonconfrontational 
diplomacy last week by alienating Europe, Russia and the United Nations' 
International Atomic Energy Agency in a single stroke.

The Iranians unilaterally ended international negotiations over the 
country's reprocessing capabilities by breaking the IAEA's seals at 
three Iranian nuclear facilities and resuming uranium enrichment. 
Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran is five to 10 years away 
from making a bomb.

That estimate may allow Washington space to follow a strategy of giving 
Ahmadinejad enough rope to hang himself: Denounce him, get the U.N. 
Security Council to hash over Iran's nuclear perfidies, but avoid an 
all-out economic or military confrontation that would endanger European 
and Russian solidarity. And avoid steps that would enable the Iranian 
president to cement over

the cracks that his radical moves and philosophy will create in Iran's 
restive population.

This is probably the least risky strategy available to Washington in the 
short term. But it must be coupled with an understanding that the forces 
that drive Iran's religious politics are much broader than Ahmadinejad 
and Iran's more conservative ayatollahs, who by now must be regretting 
their role in having brought this firebrand to power.

Diplomacy, which is designed to take the blood lust and irrational 
behavior out of politics, is not likely to provide a lasting strategy 
for countering the politics of zealotry that the era of globalization 
has brought forth.

Religion has become a primary force of backlash against economic and 
political change in many parts of the world. The fact that Robertson, a 
leading figure in the religious right in this country, found himself 
cheek-by-rhetorical-jowl the other day with the Iranian rabble-rouser in 
calling for divine punishment for Sharon suggests that the United States 
is not exempt from such backlash.

Religion, at times a source of social advancement, today rushes in to 
fill the vacuum left in societies when traditional political 
institutions and authorities cannot explain, moderate or contain the 
identity-smashing changes of the global communications and technology 
revolutions. In these cases, religion becomes politics.

Reaction is what propels Robertson, the Shiite visionary Ahmadinejad, 
the Sunni Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia and countless other sects together 
in a broad historical sense.

They and their devout followers fight back in their own ways against the 
spreading vulgarization and secularization of societies that seem 
tempted to dispense with religion altogether. These are by and large 
counterrevolutionary movements, out of step with a secularizing march by 
history that many of them would destroy rather than accept.

That is why diplomacy's ability to contain the Iranian zealots and their 
nuclear ambitions is likely to be limited in reach and duration. 
Americans -- especially politicians, policymakers and journalists -- 
need to put aside their constitutionally endowed reluctance to recognize 
and discuss the role that religion plays in politics and civic life at 
large.

It is not enough to say that religion and politics should not mix and 
leave it at that. As a nation, we need broad global strategies that 
explicitly take into account religion's changing role around the world 
and the great potential for harm as well as for good that those changes 
offer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301699.html
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