George W. Bush's Iraq war will be America's first religious war, one inspired by groups of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neoconservatives, a coalition whose zeal for war is as great as that of the original crusaders.

The origin of the crusades was a 1095 meeting in Autun, France, where 36 bishops made the first vows to "go to Jerusalem." Four years later, the crusaders took Jerusalem, only to see it recaptured by Saladin. The First Crusade launched centuries of war between crusaders and indigenous peoples from North Africa to Russia.

Today, the idea is to "go to Baghdad," but is rooted in a the same desire: to serve Jerusalem (Israel) and remake the Middle East. Like the crusaders, the new coalition represents the wedding of religious zeal and military power, always a fatal connection.

A central difference with the crusades is that Bush's war will be waged over opposition from organized religion. For weeks now, mainstream church leaders in America and abroad have been speaking out against war with a unity they seldom show.

Church opposition has made the crusade harder for Bush and Tony Blair, his comrade in arms. Blair's efforts to paint the war as a high moral cause was directly refuted a few days ago in an unusual joint statement by the heads of the Anglican and Catholic churches in England. Blair's assertions, said the two church leaders, "lacked moral legitimacy."

The British churchmen are part of a wide church movement against this war. Pope John Paul II has spoken out, as have leaders of most Protestant churches. The National Council of Churches, America's leading ecumenical agency representing 36 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches with 50 million adherents, opposes war, as does the World Council of Churches, the body grouping national church councils in 100 nations.

Asked why the pope opposed war, John Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, replied, "because he does not think this would be a just war. Both because the relationship between the good to be achieved and the harm that would be done is not there, and also because the imminence of the threat posed by Iraq is not at present convincing."

Yet both Blair and Bush paint their war in religious terms. In his State of the Union message, Bush, a "born-again" Methodist, told soldiers facing war to put faith in "the loving God." Bush's invocation of God to justify war was protested by Jim Winkler, head of the United Methodist Church, and led to a dispute between the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold, and the former President Bush, an Episcopalian, who objected to Griswold's remarks about his son's "reprehensible rhetoric" about war.

Unlike Europe and the Middle East, America does not wage religious wars. Founded by immigrants escaping religious conflict, our forebears wrote a Constitution separating church and state. Americans go to war over peace and security, not over God.

Bush's war has nothing to do with peace and security. It is the brainchild of a handful of neoconservatives in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle above all, who have argued for years that Iraq was the main threat to Israel. Feith and Perle have advised Israel's right-wing Likud Party and both have opposed U.S. Middle East peace initiatives, including those of President Bush I. 

The Pentagon's zeal for war comes from these civilian neoconservatives, not from the military. This was well described by Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Bush's special envoy to the Middle East. "All the generals see this (Iraq) the same way," said Zinni, "and all those that never fired a shot in anger are really hell-bent to go to war."

The Pentagon neocons are joined by Elliot Abrams at the White House and David Wurmser at the State Department. Their influence reaches deeply into the neocon media through such outlets as Fox News, the Weekly Standard and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and into Congress, where the influence of television evangelicals such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell is strong. 

"Neoconservative" is an unfamiliar term in the West. Writer Sidney Blumenthal defines them as "second-generation Jews torn between cultures." Sociologist David Riesman calls them New York provincials "whose knowledge of American history is slim and who see only each other." They are far from the Jewish mainstream.

With Bush, the extremists have found their Richard I, to lead a 21st century crusade against infidels. The Sept. 11 attacks gave them the chance they had sought for a decade, though no credible connection between Iraq and Sept. 11 has been made.

To study the crusades is to see how illusory were the triumphs. In his history of the First Crusade, Steven Runciman wrote words that every Bush fundamentalist should memorize:

"Faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding."

Source: San Diego Union-Tribune