Saturday February 14, 2004 by Bjørn Stærk

For someone supposedly so important to US foreign policy since Reagan as the "neo-conservatives", you'd think someone would have written about them in Norway before May 2003 or so. That's curiously not the case. Some may fit that into their conspiracy theories as evidence of how good this cabal is at hiding its power. The rest of us may take it as a clue that something is fishy with the whole "neo-cons rule America" meme. But the idea hasn't reached zenith yet. It seems like only yesterday our more well-read journalists began to mention the "influential neo-conservatives in Washington", a year or so after the word became popular in the US. Now academics are incorporating the supposed power of neo-cons into their political theories. Here's a depressing piece in that category, by professor of theology Helge S. Kvanvig. It's about .. oh dear .. Christian zionists and their hold on the neo-cons. And yes, it is physically impossible to write about neo-cons without mentioning Bush and Reagan's use of the word "evil":

Reagan's speech about the Soviet Union as an "Evil empire", and Bush's referring to certain countries, most of them Muslim, as the "Axis of Evil", carries both religious and political meanings, which is common for American neo-conservative Christianity. It is well known that Reagan had and Bush has close contact with this part of American Christianity. It's further known that especially after Begin became prime minister in 1977, there has been close cooperation between neo-conservative Christians with strong sympathies for Israel and the Israeli governments of Begin, Netanyahu and Sharon. This forms a basic dilemma for Bush's policies on Palestine. The "road map to peace" promises a Palestinian state in precisely the core area of the Biblical Israel which God according to Christian zionists have promised the Jews. This has created intense opposition to such peace plans, not least after September 11 2001 and the war on terror, which has given Christian zionists new inspiration in the US and Europe. This is also true for many conservative and fundamentalists Christians in Norway.

This is followed by a look at the Biblical background for Christian zionism, and the implications of the birth of modern Israel for their worldview. Kvanvig concludes:

[The Christian zionists] must find room for both a Biblical Israel now, and for future dreams of God's intervention in history, where a Greater Israel will play a central role. But disturbingly, such a solution puts the Palestinians in the role the Jews had to suffer in during parts their history.

Which may or may not be true - for that particular kind of Christian zionists. These people exist, usually in evangelical or conservative Christian communities with a millennarian focus. To these people, we live in the End Times, and God's prophecies for the Jews are about to be fulfilled. Unfortunately for the Arabs these prophecies tend to involve an expansion of Israel to include large parts of the Middle East - a Greater Israel. Then there are various beasts arising and angels speaking and seals broken, and horns and lots of blood. Nations rise, fall, more horns, a quarter of the world is eaten by the Marshmallow Man, etc. I have some experience with this worldview. 15 years ago I didn't think the world would exist today. But the relevance to the "neo-conservatives" and Bush's Middle East policies is .. what? I was waiting for Kvanvig to get to that part, but I suppose he feels comfortable taking for granted that there is such a connection. Everyone else cuts corners, so why should he have to back his claims with arguments? "Neo-conservatives" are like one of those blank pieces in Scrabble. If there's a hole in your argument, (say you believe Bush is a millennarian Christian zionist but you don't actually know anything about Bush), simply throw in a reference to neo-cons, and everyone takes it for granted that you know what you're talking about. Well I don't take that for granted, and I've never heard a supposed "neo-conservative" talk like a Christian millennarian, or even use Biblical arguments for their Middle East policies. I have heard them talk about the failure of Arab culture to produce a political ideology that doesn't involve hand-chopping, head-chopping, torture, and/or suicide. I've heard them talk about the importance of supporting the only liberal democracy in the Middle East against the above-mentioned ideologies. I suppose they could be quoting Daniel or Revelations behind closed doors, but that would surprise me. "Neo-conservatism" is a distraction anyway. There aren't all that many neo-cons in the Bush administration, and the worldview behind the war on terror is only historically related to neo-conservatism. It has grown far beyond its origin, and isn't even particularly right-wing. This isn't controversial. But it took us one and a half year of hard work to import the word "neo-conservative" into Norway. We worked damn hard for that word, and we're not letting it go now just because it doesn't mean anything.