9/11

[Thumpalumpacus]

Oh, I've never seen those before. Do you take those to mean the war was officially sold as Christianity vs Islam? I wonder if those DoD breifings are as pervasive as the media outlets? I wonder if similar biblical quotes weren't used in other US war efforts? It wouldn't surprise me, seeing as "Christian" is almost a prerequisite to hold any official position.

Those cover sheets weren't released to the media; they were uncovered in a Vanity Fair article about five or six years ago. The war wasn't sold to the public as a religious war, but rather as a combination of GWoT and Iraq's alleged possession of WMDs -- the public was fed the spectre of a nuclear Iraq arming terrorists. Those cover sheets were for in-house briefing materials and not intended for public consumption at all, as the classification verbiage clearly shows ("top secret") -- almost as if those who saw this as a religious crusade knew that making such attitudes public would certainly call into question their claims vis WMDs and terror links.

As for religious invocations in other wars, in WWII clearly many Americans at the highest level of government and military leadership regarded our war against Germany as a righteous crusade blessed by their god; but to my knowledge, the religious overlay of emotion wasn't echoed in official documentation as was the Iraq invasion.

Other wars, to a greater or lesser extent. WWI was viewed more politically ("make the world safe for democracy" was Wilson's catchphrase). The Spanish-American war was, on the surface, a war against cruel imperialist oppressors, while in reality it was simply a land grab by an upstart Great Power against a tottering empire. The Civil War definitely had religious overtones attached to it, including Lincoln himself invoking his god at times.