Last week or so I alleged that the U.S.’s broadly named war on terror is a religious war, and I want to clarify.
Our declared war on terror is not just a fight with extremist muslims–it’s with anyone who might in some way threaten our way of life. A noble cause, I guess, but the killing that has ensued, and decimation of American civil liberties that followed sort of erode the nobility a bit.

I agree with stopping terrorists. Let me get that right out there. I believe we have the right and duty to protect our citizens. But not from pretend attacks or attacks that are not physically threatening. Anyone who hurts, maims, or kills other people because of some twisted interpretation of what god is and what it wants from them is an insane, horrible animal and I don’t think it’s wrong to stop them using any means necessary. (This applies to extreme, violent Muslim extremists who want to kill people and identically to people and governments who engage in genocide of “sectarian” others just because those people worship in a different way [e.g., Bosnia, Armenia, Rwanda, and Christian Nazi Germany). People who kill other people for their beliefs rather than their actions are bad people. And that’s where we get in trouble in the whole war on terror thing, and where some argue the U.S. government is acting like a terrorist. We’re bombing people who believe something different than we do, particularly Iraqis who want us out of their country.)

This war on terror, when it protects real Americans from real physical harm, is a justified, acceptable use of power. But when this war’s broad scope reaches beyond people who represent imminent harm to Americans to people who want us to leave them alone, it is a religious war, just as every other war fought in the name of a god has been. We are killing people who worship a different idea than we do. Our god, in this war, just happens to be Democracy (and demogoguery).
Our so-called war on terror is a religious war in that we are killing people during our demand that they believe what we believe. Just because we believe in democracy does not make it inherently right or supreme, and the rhetoric surrounding our insistence that everyone in the world worship our idea of democracy is, to me, the same as killing people to believe in our god.

(That doesn’t mean Russia needs to murder people in Georgia just to show us that they resent our heavy-handed “support” of democracy. And it doesn’t mean we can’t think democracy is the absolute best system going. I think it is. But I wouldn’t foster a civil war so that the like-minded could stay in power against national dissent just to get them to agree with me.)
The war on terror is much bigger than the world versus violent extremists (including 44 groups from half the major religions in various countries around the world we’ve declared terrorist organizations). This sweeping and cleverly encompassing war on terror deifies The Oval Office, because in declaring an undefined and interminable war, it gives Presidential powers an exponential boost. In time of war our President reigns supreme. And it’s smacking an awful lot of the divine right of kings, wherein, to modify a line from Real Genius, “it goes from God to Cheney to me.” The powers this Administration has grabbed for itself are Constitution-rending and society-threatening. The balance of powers on which our government functions has been eroded to the point that we have one branch of government and a bunch of bicameral and judicial ants scurrying around trying to build one iota of check-and-balance authority. We have allowed one part of our government to hijack the whole country for the belief that one President should get to do whatever he wants since we are, according to him, at war with ideas. That is a kind of deification that seeks to make worship of The White House into a religion to rival the six major world religions. And The National Standard, a politically conservative publication, made the point years ago that the right-wing of this country would be horrified if they stopped to think that all the powers Bush has decreed for himself could be transferred to President Hillary Clinton (this was well before the primaries began).

That’s what I meant by saying, as it is currently, broadly defined, the war on terror is a religious war. We’re killing some people who are terrorists, we’re killing LOTS people who live near terrorists, and we’re killing people because they don’t believe in democracy at the behest of our self-deified Leader.

Thank goodness it’s almost election time, and we can elect a President instead of a God.