[NYTr] Still Neo-Conned, Religious Right Pushes War on Iraq

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Talk2Action - Sep 24, 2007
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/9/24/131326/285

Religious Right Still Neo-Conned

by Bill Berkowitz

Neoconservatives selling Iraq War to 'values voters'

In the late 1960s and early '70s, then U.S. President Richard Nixon
appealed to the country's "Silent Majority" to oppose growing
anti-Vietnam War sentiment in the United States.

A decade later, President Ronald Reagan had the Rev. Jerry Falwell's
"Moral Majority" working by his side in support of Reagan's
low-intensity warfare in Central America, and contra movements in
Africa.

During the run-up to, and period following the 1994 Republican
revolution that gave that conservative party control of Congress for
the first time in decades, the high-profile Georgia legislator Newt
Gingrich's band had the Rev. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed's Christian
Coalition stirring the conservative grassroots into action against the
Bill Clinton administration.

Now, in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, Gary
Bauer, a former Reagan administration official and longtime
conservative activist, is heading up a new organization aimed at
countering liberal groups like MoveOn.org, and supporting President
Bush's global "war on terror". Welcome aboard the 'Forgotten Americans
Coalition'

The "Forgotten Americans Coalition" is composed of a number of veteran
conservative leaders, including the American Family Association's Dr.
Don Wildmon, Christian Broadcasting Network's Robertson, the Free
Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich, and Tim LaHaye, the co-author of
the wildly popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels, and his
wife, Beverly, the founder of Concerned Women for America.

Just prior to the testimony before Congress of General David Petraeus
and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the situation in Iraq, the Forgotten
Americans Coalition (FAC) issued a Declaration "warning Americans of
the catastrophic consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq."

"Many of the [44] signers -- who lead organizations with millions of
members -- are usually associated with issues like abortion, marriage
and the family. Still, they feel compelled to speak out against a
cut-and-run strategy being pushed by isolationists inside and beyond
the confines of Congress," Gary Bauer said in a FAC press release.

Don Feder, a conservative columnist and a member of the FAC steering
committee observed: "By signing this declaration, religious
conservatives are saying: 'Yes, we care about marriage, the family and
the unborn. But we also care about national security, the morale of our
servicemen and women and the war on terrorism.' The left, which thinks
neo-cons are the only ones on the right opposing an Iraq withdrawal,
had better think again."


'Beltway paper tiger'?

But critics like Fred Clarkson, co-founder of TalkToAction, says the
coalition appears to be "a classic inside the beltway paper tiger".

"It doesn't exist except to issue 'messages' to true believers and to
make it appear in the media that there is more support for a failed
foreign policy than really exists," he said. "It smacks of a
desperation move to shore up support even among religious
conservatives, whose support for the war seems to be melting faster
than the polar ice cap."

Rob Boston, the assistant director of communications for the civil
liberties watchdog group Americans United for the Separation of Church
and State, agreed that the Forgotten Americans Coalition could be "just
another Astroturf [rather than grassroots]organization."

"But if we assume this is a serious effort it appears to be an attempt
to create a 'public relations surge' among the far right to match the
military one."

Although support for the Iraq war has pretty much disintegrated among
the general population, "many religious right leaders have not
wavered," Boston pointed out.

"Bauer, for example, was among a coterie of religious right leaders who
met with Bush at the White House Feb. 1 for an update on the war. Bauer
and his allies tend to view the war through a sectarian lens with the
U.S. leading the way against 'islamo-fascism.' It's a type of new
crusade," Boston added.

FAC's 'Declaration'

The declaration, entitled, "The Tragic Consequences of a U.S.
Withdrawal From Iraq", is FAC's first public project. It says in part
that "The Iraq war must be seen in the broader context of
Islamo-fascism's war on America and Western Civilization... If we pull
out now, or announce a timetable for withdrawal, the region will be
destabilised and Israel further endangered. Iran and Syria, two legs of
the axis of evil, will become far more powerful..."

"It took 20 years to recover from the demoralising experience of our
failure in Vietnam," the document reads. "How will we convince young
Americans to enlist in the next effort to combat terrorism, if -- by
withdrawing now -- we tacitly admit that more than 3,600 of our service
men and women died in vain?"

"The coalition's declaration shows us how closely top religious right
leaders have hitched their wagon to the star of neoconservative
militarism," Clarkson observed. "These leaders have made it clear, like
Bush, that there is no going back. They are also at considerable pains
to try to show that the religious right's concern about domestic
culture has anything to do with an unjustifiable war on the other side
of the world."

In a column dated Sep. 14, Bauer wrote that "what's most striking"
about FAC "is the involvement of dozens of religious and family values
leaders. Historically, values organizations have been reluctant to
engage in foreign policy. But six years into a struggle that has
reshaped understandings of the relationship between war and duty, our
unique coalition reaffirms a fundamental insight: Victory is a values
issue. We believe defeat at the hands of an ideology that worships
death would be immoral."

Reading straight out of the Bush administration playbook, Bauer added:
"Values voters also recognise that the battle against Islamic
extremism, with Iraq as its central front, and their decades-long
battle against materialism and cultural relativism are in fact two
fronts in the same war for our survival...In a very real sense, victory
in Iraq is inextricably linked not only with victory in the larger war
on terror but also with our ability to protect our cherished values at
home."

But in Clarkson's view, "The cold war conservatives had an identity
crisis when the cold war ended. But thanks to the neoconservative
program, framed by Samuel Huntington's clash of civilisations thesis,
cold war ideology is being revived in the form of anti-Islamism, and
these leaders of the religious right are completely on board."

Americans United's Rob Boston also connected the founding of FAC to the
2008 presidential election. "Gary Bauer undoubtedly also wants to use
the war on terror to energise the far-right base in advance of the 2008
election. They need some new issues. You can only pass so many
constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in the states, and
the immigrant-bashing is getting a little tiresome," he noted.