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Behemoth: the influence of the US administration''s religious right is spurring the world''s most powerful nation to increasingly destructive and contradictory actions.

Article Excerpt
In the Jewish eschatology--of Babylonian origin--Behemoth and Leviathan designate two monsters ... Both are monsters of the Chaos.

It was Hobbes who made both the Leviathan and the Behemoth popular. His Leviathan is the analysis of a state, that is a political system of coercion in which vestiges of the rule of law and of individual rights are still preserved. His Behemoth ... discussing the English civil war of the seventeenth century, depicts a non-state, a chaos, a situation of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy.

Franz Neumann, Behemoth, p. xii

The illegal invasion of Iraq by George Bush and his twenty-first century crusaders draws the world into a vortex of unknown proportions. The invasion is certainly reckless and callous towards the peoples of Iraq. It is the action of cowboys, a vigilante gang on a world scale. But the situation is much more complex and disturbing than that posed by a straightforward lawless invasion of a nation-state by the world's only super-power. The `war' is an aspect of the emergence of a society of a new type: global society. And unlike modern conflicts between sovereign nation-states, this war is rife with universalistic cultural and religious undertones. It is a new social phenomenon with explosive possibilities. While no one can convincingly predict the outcome, there is good reason to believe that over time it will stun the world.

The framing of the war by religious preoccupations is ironic given that Saddam leads a fiercely secular government in Iraq. And the undoubted interest of the United States in Iraqi oil is eminently material and profane. But Saddam's secularity has been overwhelmed by the events of September 11 where religiously inspired terrorists symbolically launched the era of global terror. However implausible it may be, now he is associated in the minds of the US administration with religiously informed terrorist networks. These are in turn associated...

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