Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention
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Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention

Rosemary Durward, Lee Marsden, Lee Marsden

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Religion, Conflict and Military Intervention

Rosemary Durward, Lee Marsden, Lee Marsden

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About This Book

For many years religion has been the neglected component of international relations and yet in an age of globalization and terrorism, religious identity has become increasingly important in the lives of people in the West as well as the developing world. The secularization thesis has been overtaken by an increased desire to understand how religious actors contribute to both conflict and the resolution of conflict. This volume brings an exciting new perspective with fresh ideas and analyses of the events shaping conflict and conflict resolution today. The book uniquely combines chapters highlighting Christian and Islamist theological approaches to understanding and interpreting conflict, as well as case studies on the role of religion in US foreign policy and the Iraq war, with religious perspectives on building peace once conflicts are resolved. The volume provides an ideal starting point for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the religious character of conflict in the twenty-first century and how such conflict could be resolved.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317067382

Chapter 1
Introduction

Rosemary Durward and Lee Marsden
For many years religion has been the neglected component of international relations, and yet in an age of globalisation and terror, religious identity has become an increasingly important influence upon the lives of those in the west and in the developing world. The secularisation thesis has been overtaken by a desire to understand how religious actors contribute to both conflict and the resolution of conflict. The initial shock of terrorism ‘going global’ on 11 September 2001 was followed by the steady realisation that its declared motivator, religion, was actually a familiar feature of conflict. It was a significant dynamic in the Balkans that had occupied Western military resources in the immediate post-Cold War period, as well as in many Cold War regional conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Further, there was a surprising religious dimension evident in the response to terrorism. In the United States, President George Bush’s policy and rhetoric used religious language that resonated with a religious American public, despite the United States constitution separating church and state.
The language of reconciliation used by President Barack Obama is also influenced by his Christian faith. There is no doubt, however, that Obama rejects any inference that policy can be formulated on the strength of what a church believes. Rather, he seeks policies that meet the criteria of ‘reasonableness’, to the ordinary citizen. There are many who anticipate a radical change in the role religion plays in conflict with the election of Barack Obama as President. Writing in Foreign Affairs on ‘Renewing American Leadership’, Obama wrote:
In the Islamic world and beyond, combating the terrorists’ prophets of fear will require more than lectures on democracy. We need to deepen our knowledge of the circumstances and beliefs that underpin extremism. A crucial debate is occurring within Islam. Some believe in a future of peace, tolerance, development, and democratization. Others embrace a rigid and violent intolerance of personal liberty and the world at large. To empower forces of moderation, America must make every effort to export opportunity – access to education and health care, trade and investment – and provide the kind of steady support for political reformers and civil society that enabled our victory in the Cold War. Our beliefs rest on hope; the extremists’ rest on fear. That is why we can – and will – win this struggle. (Obama 2007)
Obama’s thesis suggests that religious fundamentalism is caused by social deprivation and lack of political representation, placing the blame firmly on indigenous factors. Obama’s strategy requires long-term patience and investment, and if successful, it promises to make recourse to military intervention less likely. In Iraq, American troops are withdrawing, leaving policing the conflict to the Iraqi government and its security forces. In Afghanistan, the battle against the Taliban by NATO and the US continues. In both cases, Obama’s emphasis on a long-term peaceful solution through opportunity is a consequence of the partial failure of military intervention to stabilise Afghanistan and Iraq.
Religion can be a contributing factor in conflict or an inhibitor, and occasionally both at the same time. It has the potential to complicate military intervention or facilitate its success. There are people with no religious faith who use religion for political ends. There are others who see their faith and political action as coterminous and yet more who view religion (a human construct) and faith (God given) as distinct, preferring private faith to be uncorrupted by politics. This book is about conflict, religion and military intervention which, despite their many problems, continue to feature in the lives of individuals and communities world-wide. The idea for the book developed from a conference held in November 2007, entitled ‘Engaging with Religion for Building Peace: The Experience of Afghanistan and Iraq’. The conference was at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, responsible for training British and Overseas Officer Cadets to be commissioned as officers into their respective armies, including the armies of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Twenty-four Officer Cadets commissioned into the British Army since December 2001 have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as of 30 June 2009. The total death toll of servicemen and women is over 1,200 in Afghanistan (Afghanistan 2009), and in excess of 4,600 in Iraq (Iraq 2009). Estimates vary of the total count of Iraqi and Afghan civilian deaths following military intervention. The Iraq Body Count estimate in April 2009 was somewhere between 92,000 and 100,000 (Radio Free Iraq 2009). Taking an aggregate of estimates from a variety of monitoring agencies, including Human Rights Watch, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM), civilian deaths in Afghanistan directly attributable to the conflict are estimated to be between 7,500 and 10,500 as well as indirectly, between a further 3,000 to 20,000.
The context for this book is the religious dimension of violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. As this introductory chapter is being written, news is breaking that the decomposed bodies of two men, Jason Creswell from Aberdeen and Jason Swindlehurst from Lancashire have been handed in to the Iraqi authorities. They were security guards for GardaWorld, a Canadian security company. They had been guarding another captive, Peter Moore, a computer consultant, along with two guards Alan and Alec. They were training Iraqi civil servants at a Finance Ministry building when their compound was stormed by 40 gunmen on 29 May 2007. This is both tragic and poignant: the planned keynote speaker at the Sandhurst conference, Canon Andrew White, Anglican vicar of Baghdad, withdrew at the final hour because of signs that there might be the possibility of productive negotiations with the kidnappers enabling their release. Efforts were made by the British Foreign Office to handle this case in a low key manner, and no doubt there will be questions asked about their strategy. It will add to the litany of questions about the legality of military intervention in Iraq, the reliability of intelligence and the competence of the intelligence community, the wisdom of military intervention, and whether enough or too little force was used. But the starting point to any response, as Obama indicates, must be to try to understand the religious motivations behind this kind of violence.
The assumption behind this book is that the religious dimension of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq has been underestimated. Religion defines the perpetrators of terrorist violence, and it influences the politico-strategic response, as well as tactics and outcomes from military intervention. The book seeks to respond to and develop Obama’s thesis that more knowledge is needed about the circumstances of terrorism and the terrorists’ religious beliefs and indeed the religious beliefs of states involved in conflict and military intervention. It does so by interpreting knowledge, not only in its epistemological sense, but ontologically, proposing that solutions will be found in a deeper level of engagement between faiths and new ways of thinking about conflict and its resolution in the policy arena. The book explores four main areas: religion and conflict; religious influences on military intervention; the need to disentangle religion from politics; and, religion and its relationship to conflict resolution. This approach highlights the importance of engaging with religious thinkers on their own terms, as theologians, for whom religion gives a different perspective on reality.

Religion and Conflict

The next two chapters highlight the plurality of belief in both Christianity and Islam in relation to war, influenced as much by context as by religious experience, belief and tradition. This pluralism challenges the claims of particular religions or religious sects to be the absolute arbiter of truth, with peaceful outcomes a product of the capacity of truth claims to be able to enter into dialogue with each other. Chapter 2 by Kunal Mukherjee, ‘Islamism and Neo-Fundamentalism’, explores the belief systems of Islamists. He provides an overview of Islamism by looking at it in a historical and then in a more contemporary context. The first half of the chapter examines some of the terms used in the existing body of scholarly literature, fundamentalism, integrisme and jihadism, and the problems associated with the use of such terms. It considers the historical background of Islamism and pays attention to the three phases of revivalism, reformism and radicalism. The second section then considers Islamism in a more contemporary context and in the shape of neo-fundamentalism, a term coined by French scholar Olivier Roy in his Globalised Islam. In the final section, there is an important discussion of how contemporary Islamism differs from the earlier period. Critically, the chapter highlights how Islamic fundamentalism is a cyclical phenomenon which occurs as a response to an acute period of social crisis, with the scope and intensity of the fundamentalist reaction ranging from spiritual reawakening to revolutionary violence. Mukherjee finds that this phenomenon is dependent on the pervasiveness of the crisis environment.
It is a point of coincidence and interest that Bin Laden’s orchestrated terrorist attack on the United States World Trade Centre and Pentagon took place in 2001, at the start of the second millennium, a year of symbolic value for Christians marking the birth of Jesus – a prophet for Muslims; for Christians, the Son of God. It would be easy to assume that secularism in Europe and the United States, as well as the libertarian life-style of its citizens, means that the Christian tradition that took root in Europe in the early fourth century no longer influences decision-making on issues of conflict and military intervention. In Chapter 3, on ‘God, the State and War’, Rosemary Durward explores Christian attitudes to conflict and war, demonstrating a much more complex relationship between Christian faith and defence decision-making. The chapter reveals pluralism within Christianity, with differing interpretations of scripture, revelation and tradition leading to a variety of conclusions about the ethics of war. She argues that between different Christian traditions there is an opportunity for dialogue and to re-think the dualist paradigm that has dominated Christian thinking about the world and international relations discourse. With particular reference to Karl Barth’s theology, Durward identifies the possibility of reshaping the whole Western philosophical and conceptual framework within which military power is exercised and reconciliation is sought. Taken together, these opening chapters show that in Islamic and Christian communities, there is an onus on members to mediate responsibly between their tradition, teaching and practice.

Religious Influences on Military Intervention

Setting aside Bin Laden and the Taliban whose actions prompted the intervention in Afghanistan, a feature of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq was the lack of attention to the significance of religious leaders in the aftermath of military intervention. This had serious consequences for the stabilisation task. One casualty was the head of the Al-Khoei Foundation, Abdul Majid al-Khoei. Al Khoei was assassinated in April 2003 in Najaf near the Imam Ali Shrine. His family had enormous influence over the Shia community, with his father, Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, spiritual leader of the Shia, having opposed Ayatollah Khomeini’s establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The safety of the son, who had returned from exile, should have been a priority given his moderating influence on the Shia community and his unifying role.
This error may have been because little thought was put into planning for occupation generally. Additionally, planners might have underestimated the positive effects religious leaders could have on faith communities because they believed Al Qaeda’s claim to speak for all Muslims. The fact that church and state are separated in much of the West will have probably played a part in influencing the mindset. This book, on the contrary, finds the origins of early complacency to lie more deeply: in the seductiveness of secularism as a belief system in Europe; and, conversely, in the influence, in the US, of a relatively small but powerful right-wing evangelical lobby that saw invasion as an opportunity to export their values.
Secularism is an ideal that is cherished in Western political culture, particularly amongst Europe’s intellectuals, influenced by Gibbon’s historical judgement that the decline of the Roman world lay in ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’ (Grayling 2008: 17). For Gibbon, religion must be treated as a phenomenon of human experience. On this basis, first there was ignorant religion, and then there was secular Enlightenment, the product of which was intellectual and political freedom and human rights. Islam does not accept a distinction between politics and religion. On this basis, Islam has been perceived by many Western political commentators to need similar enlightenment. The corollary to this reasoning is that, in historical terms, the West is at a much further stage in its intellectual, scientific and political progression but we suggest this argument is flawed.
The modern construction of the history of progress from religious ignorance to secular enlightenment and its causal link to terrorism by the unenlightened, neglects the possibility that Islamism is a response to the worldwide process that is ongoing and in constant flux, of freeing meaning and ideas from an ideological straitjacket. On that basis, it is not enlightenment within Islam that needs to be kick-started, nor freedom that needs to be exported, but freedom and dignity within the Islamic world that needs to be secured. Whether it is the Taliban, Al Qaeda or disparate Islamist militia speaking, the message is usually directed against modernising forces within Islam, as well as the United States and other Western forces that are alleged to be occupying Muslim lands. Local causes feature too, so that Islamist motivations are linked to specific and local political events to cause violence.
Rebecca Glazier in Chapter 4, ‘Religiously Motivated Political Violence in Iraq’, identifies religious nationalists, radical jihadists and sectarian combatants as sources of religious violence supported by outsiders coming into Iraq to support their causes. Glazier pays special attention to the role of providential belief in motivating jihad and martyrdom by suicide bombing. Amongst a range of responses, she highlights the possibility of shaping the context for intervention, so that jihadist belief ceases to have resonance. The issue of resonance relates to the conduct of intervention forces. But the current phase of Islamic radicalism is also rooted in the historic legacy of cultural insensitivity and violence towards Muslims leading to a sense of overwhelming humiliation by the West. It would be easy to tap into a narrative that shows Islam to be subordinated to a Judeo-Christian world, a feeling intensified by United States support for Israel. There is, for example, a Palestinian diaspora brought about by a lost war in 1948 and Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Terrorism against Israelis by Hamas and the building of a wall by Israel ostensibly for its own security, nevertheless, reinforces a sense that security is divisible and selective. The Biblical narrative of the ‘promised land’ for the Jewish people and the location of sacred Muslim places in Jerusalem adds another layer of complication to attempts at a political solution to Israeli-Palestinian and wider Israeli-Arab relations.
So too, does the existence of Israeli religious extremism amongst a minority, which has obstructed attempts at peace. This extremism is in contradiction to most of the ancient Rabbinic literature on war, which urges the dissociation of Jews from any aspect of war-making. Rabbinic tradition identified laws relating to war through classifying each war by whether it was commanded or obligatory, permitted or contrary to divine law. According to Mishnah writing in the second century, the battles for self-defence recorded in the first five books of the Bible were ‘obligatory’, while the wars fought by King David to expand his territory were merely ‘permitted’ (Wilkes 2003: 11). George Wilkes interprets these delineations as, ‘progressive limits to religious sanctions for subsequent military engagement rather than to expose a broad Biblical mandate for further wars’. The bulk of Rabbinic literature also treats the distinctions as a basis for considering justifiable military conduct. Rabbinic tradition recognises something like the Semitic herem or ban, an ordained slaughter of men, women and children without mercy. But from the Mishnah onwards, it dealt with the ban or herem as exceptions, no longer relevant, because the peoples concerned had intermarried to the point where they were no longer distinguishable. Even the ban on the Canaanites, according to Rabbinic interpretation, was preceded by peace negotiations, a practice identified with all of the wars of the biblical patriarchs (Deuteronomy 20:10; Wilkes 2003: 11). This is a long way away from the position of Israeli extremists who have sought to compare Arabs with the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8–16; Deuteronomy 25:17–19) and the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 20: 16–18) to whom no mercy is shown.
Another rallying point for Muslims against Western encroachment was the welcome given by Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, to American troops when a coalition force expelled Iraq from Kuwait at the beginning of 1991. Al Qaeda’s argument has been that the West has attempted to weaken Muslims by a policy of ‘divide and conquer’. Historical events, such as the Crusades, have also had the power to unify Muslims although there are a great many myths surrounding this period of Muslim-Christian history and deconstructing them is part of a strategy to overcome parochialism and reinforce the sense of a common history. The common assumption that Muslims were passive victims of Christian aggression needs to be set in the context of the gradual retreat of Christian Europe against Muslim advance between 600 and 1400 Common Era (CE). In battling for Jerusalem during the Crusades, there was viciousness on both sides.
Muslim military conquest of Europe, followed by a degree of cultural osmosis, is deemed to have occurred from c.630 CE onwards, as Arabs moved from Mesopotamia past Jerusalem to Asia Minor and North Africa in just over 100 years. By 711 CE Arabs had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain, and by 732 CE they were in Poitiers. Pushed back to the Pyrenees, they remained on the Iberian Peninsula until 1492. In the wake of military success, Muslim Arabs introduced academic developments, advancing the study of philosophy, mathematics, physics and astrology. They brought military prowess fighting on horseback, and adopting new navigation techniques. A great many of the skills brought by Muslim Arabs made the Italian city states extraordinarily prosperous. One mark of the cross-cultural exchange between Christian Europeans and Muslim Arabs in the early second millennium was the invention to something similar to the modern travellers cheque. This was instituted by the Knights Templar, a twelfth century religious and military order established and campaigning in the Holy Land, and thought to have been adopted from Muslim practice. The Templars would exchange the goods of Christian pilgrims for an encoded document determining its holders right to those goods to avoid the vagaries of banditry along the Pilgrim’s Way. In return, Muslim military intervention in Europe was often welcomed by the indigenous population as preferable to rule by church authorities who, owning 25 per cent of the land, were growing rich at the expense of the majority. Relative freedom of religion, as defined by early Muslim warlords (c.63...

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