12/29/2007--Generally I would not comment on a comment to this blog, but Craig Unger objected to my comment yesterday concerning his book: The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future ( 2007). Mr. Unger objected to my critiquing his book when, as I admitted, I had not read it. This would be a reasonable objection except that I was not critiquing his book, or at least I didn’t think I was doing so, but the reception of it by the secular left. Maybe Mr. Unger did not link the neocons and the religious right, or religion in general. But that is how his book has been received—and praised. They are all true believers who don’t care about facts.
My point was and is that the neocons as a group are not religious persons. Their ideology is not religious. Religion has enough to apologize for without being blamed for the war in Iraq. It is true that many of President Bush’s allies supported the war, including many on the religious right, but that does not link the neocons, who came up with the idea and pressed it within the Administration, to religious themes.
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>>My point was and is that the neocons as a group are not religious persons.<<
ReplyDeleteTrue, but it does not follow that the two groups
(neocons and religious right) are not linked. Even a modest amount of research shows they are, and intimately so. It's probably true that the neocons are merely manipulation the religious towards their own ends -- after all, this is part of their Straussian tradition -- but that does not let the religious off the hook.