April 29, 2003 - America is fighting a war with the Moslem world. If you doubt that then you understand neither the history nor the nature of the two trunks growing from the Jewish religious root. There are two active campaigns in this war, both not yet completed, and both far from that state when America can proclaim victory. Nor is it a war that can be won in a matter of weeks, or months, or even years if it can be won at all. President Bush unknowingly spoke the truth in his impolitic proclamation of a Crusade. The War on Terrorism has become a war between Christianity and Islam and the War in Afghanistan and the Second Iraqi War are just the opening episodes of a long running drama.

From the 10th to the dawn of the 14th Century Christian Europe was obsessed with defeating the Egyptians and Turks and recovering Jerusalem from the clutches of the Islamic kingdoms. For more than two hundred years the Middle-East was the scene of combat of varying intensity pitting the two most powerful inheritors of the Judaic tradition against one another. Crusader kingdoms rose and fell. Military victory, a fickle jade, favored first one contestant and then the other but at the end of the day Jerusalem remained in Moslem control from 1300 until 1967.

The Second Iraqi war is winding down to a series of ambushes. Just three more Americans were added to the death count this weekend. American patrols on Afghanistan’s plain are taking casualties as the resurgent Taliban strikes swiftly and then fades into the hills. The Defense Department announces that an Iraqi democracy that results in a sectarian theocracy will not be tolerated demonstrating its misunderestimation of the religious tradition in which even the most secular modernists hold that the state is answerable only to God. On that proposition Sunni and Shia and the fundamental Islamist of both septs agree.

It is surprising that Secretary Rumsfeld and his Defense Department do not grasp that concept. As Islam is divided into two major branches so too is Christianity. One stream is the Catholic-Orthodox tradition; the other is the Protestant tradition. As Islam has produced a militant Islamist minority, drawing from both major sects seeking to impose its own version of theocratic morality on its population by dominating government; so too has Christianity produced its Fundamentalist minority, seeking to impose its own brand of morality by influencing and directing government. It is not an accident that Franklin Graham preaches a Good Friday sermon in the Pentagon and stands poised to lead a evangelical invasion to “relieve” Iraq. Nor is it an accident that the misnamed Secretary of Defense has replaced the Secretary of State as America’s foreign policy voice.

Twelve years of warfare has toppled a secular Islamic regime and out of the chaos Iraqis will learn that American imposed freedom extends only so far. Americans may learn that the democracy that American arms have imposed leads to a nightmare – an Iraqi one Nation Under God, and that it answers to an Islamist God.