One general's jihad
AT A TIME when one violent attack after another points up the failure of US military intelligence in Iraq to gather information about the shadowy forces mounting the assaults, the Defense Department should at least make sure that its top intelligence officer can work well with officials from Iraq and neighboring countries. But the deputy undersecretary for intelligence is Lieutenant General William Boykin, who has made a practice of slandering the Islamic faith.
At his press conference Tuesday, President Bush belatedly distanced himself from the general's remarks. This at least is an improvement on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's feckless reaction, "We're a free people." But Bush would do better to fire Boykin and deprive anti-American propagandists in the Muslim world of this poster child of American prejudice against their religion.
Boykin has appeared in his Army uniform before Christian evangelical groups and told them that while fighting in Somalia he knew he would capture a Muslim opponent because "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol."
In fact, a rejection of idols is a central tenet of Islam. Boykin made a mockery of the admirable efforts Bush made immediately after 9/11 to demonstrate that his administration understood that Osama bin Laden represented a terrorist group, not Islam in general.
Recently, Bush's own Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World said that "hostility toward America has reached shocking levels." According to the group, "Arabs and Muslims respond in anger to what they perceive as US denigration of their societies and cultures." That was before disclosure of Boykin's remarks.
Boykin regularly describes the enemy the United States faces not as Saddam diehards or Al Qaeda terrorists but as "Satan." It was, in his view, an act of God that made George Bush president, not the workings of the Electoral College and a friendly Supreme Court.
Quite aside from the diplomatic problems Boykin causes, he should be disqualified as an intelligence officer on the grounds of his peculiar fantasizing about 9/11. "I believe there were at least two more airplanes," he has said, "that were headed for major installations in this country. I believe that there was one headed for the White House, and there was one headed for the Capitol, but they were thwarted by the hand of God."
The general is free to express whatever skewed or intolerant opinions he wants. But when he says them publicly, in uniform, he should not expect to continue in a position that requires an acceptance of the basic validity of one of the world's major religions. The Pentagon must have a better candidate for intelligence chief than Boykin.
