The Empire at Dusk

In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation's debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon's biggest cost center: empire. The burden of global hegemony, the commitment to project force across every strategic waterway, air corridor, and land bridge, has exhausted the U.S. military and will be even harder to sustain as budget cuts force strategists and logisticians to do more with less. A national discussion about the logic of maintaining huge forward bases, to say nothing of their financial and human costs, is long overdue.

American relations with the world, and increasingly America's security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation's military leaders, though they can be aggressive and cunning interagency operators, but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low-grade conflict. They have been hiding in plain sight, hyping threats and exaggerating the capabilities and resources of adversaries. They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war, and they did so with the help of a supine or complicit Congress. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into battle 22 times, compared with 14 times during the Cold War. Not once did they appeal to lawmakers for a declaration of war.

The legacy of American militarism is a national security complex that thrives on fraud, falsehood, and deception. In the 1950s, Americans were told the Soviets had not only the means to destroy the United States but the desire to do so. In reality, Moscow lacked the former and so gave little thought to the latter, while Washington squandered billions of dollars on needless weaponry. Time and again, U.S. presidents weaponized their response to challenges overseas to protect them from charges of appeasement from the right. Habitually, their administrations misinterpreted events -- from Russia's Bolshevik revolution to the September 11 attacks -- to disastrous effect. In each case, expert advice was overlooked, ignored, or concealed, while in others, threats were manufactured as chips in petty political wagers. The fraudulent bomber and missile gaps and the Gulf of Tonkin incident did as much to injure U.S. interests overseas as did the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them preemptively.

Only a country so rich in resources and blessed by favorable geography could afford such malfeasance. America has been spared foreign invasion for more than 200 years and it can expect to remain inviolate for centuries to come. Yet each year, it spends enough money on national security to match the economic output of Indonesia -- with money borrowed largely from China, a country with which it is preparing for conflict. It insists on its right to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against such countries as North Korea and Iran -- oafish, bankrupt regimes that seek a complement of atomic bombs because they are surrounded by countries with bunkers full of them. America guarantees its friends and allies a place under its security umbrella even if their interests, particularly in the Middle East, diverge markedly from its own. In Europe, NATO remains a feudal confederation of armed forces with no raison d'être save to lend sanction to America's far-flung military enterprises. In Asia, South Korea, the world's 15th-largest economy, remains critically dependent on U.S. forces as a deterrent against its isolated, impoverished northern neighbor, while Japan wallows in a twilight world of middle-class prosperity and political ennui, content to slowly diminish as an American vassal.

In ancient times, empires exacted tribute from their dependencies. In the age of American hegemony, just the opposite is the case. In return for the global commons, the United States bankrolls a geopolitical welfare state that allows some of its largest beneficiaries to neglect their basic responsibilities as sovereign states and allies. A national debate over the economic and moral costs of this exchange is noteworthy for its absence. Segregated from the military and its burdens, with no reason to fear the consequences of war for themselves or their loved ones, a great majority of Americans are easily manipulated into backing a militarized response to challenges more suited to diplomacy. The purpose of hegemony is to preempt potential threats rather than respond to a clear and present danger. As voters are unlikely to support such a policy on its merits, hegemonists resort to gross exaggerations of speculative rivals, be they Russia and China or geopolitical runts such as North Korea and Iran.

The price of this deception is vast. If the Pentagon were a corporation, it would be the largest in the world as well as the most sloppily run. Its procurement budget, at a staggering $107 billion in 2010, expands even as the number of deployable warplanes, combat ships, and troops diminishes. To entice lawmakers into approving costly weapons programs, the Pentagon dangles the prospect of jobs in the states and districts of key lawmakers, a costly way of manufacturing but an astute political maneuver. Waste, inefficiency, and political patronage, no stranger to military-legislative affairs, get more lavish by the year. In April 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that 95 major Pentagon projects exceeded their original budgets by a total of nearly $300 billion. A year later, it concluded that nothing had changed. In 2009, lawmakers larded the Pentagon's annual budget proposal with nearly $5 billion in programs and weapons it did not request. With arms factories scattered like feeding troughs nationwide, America has become the equivalent of a company town with the Pentagon as primary employer. The making of war, or at least the preparation for it, has become a money center, a business line --- a racket, as Marine general and Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler put it nearly a century ago.

Though the Pentagon did not ask for empire, neither did it shirk from its calling. From 2001 to 2010, the baseline defense budget grew at an inflation-adjusted rate of 6 percent a year, to more than double its pre-September 11 size. Like interlocking threads in a great tapestry, no one really knows where the military's preserve begins and where it ends. Pentagon financial statements have been all but unauditable since 1991, the year it began submitting its accounts to Congress. In an October 2009 report, the Defense Department's Inspector General exposed more than a dozen "significant deficiencies" in Pentagon balance sheets from fiscal years 2004 to 2008. Mining opaque audit trails and murky contracting systems, the report uncovered more than $1 trillion in unsupported account entries. In September 2010, the Senate Finance Committee issued a report that slammed the Pentagon's "total lack of fiscal accountability" for "leaving huge sums of the taxpayers' money vulnerable to fraud and outright theft."

Even as defense officials and warfighters acknowledge that America's adversaries cannot be defeated with armed might alone, the Pentagon still has more lawyers than the State Department does diplomats. Washington's foreign aid budget routinely comes under assault by Congress as overly generous when in fact the United States is among the most miserly of countries when it comes to overseas assistance. The White House has called for 2,200 new Foreign Service officers for the State Department and USAID -- a drop in the bucket given the mismatch between the nation's resources and its commitments overseas. The number of State Department diplomats and support staff is only 10 percent greater than what it was a quarter century ago, when there were 24 fewer countries in the world and U.S. interests were concentrated in Europe and northeast Asia. The Pentagon, in contrast, has 1.5 million active-duty military personnel, an equal number of reservists and National Guardsmen, and 790,000 civilian employees. Moreover, unlike the U.S. military, which bases a fifth of its personnel overseas, nearly three-quarters of America's diplomatic corps are posted abroad. At any one time, a third of U.S.-based Foreign Service jobs are vacant, while 12 percent of the overseas positions, not including those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are unmanned. Foreign language proficiency, a core competency of the service, has languished due to funding gaps. Salaries have been slashed, and stingy retirement benefits have undercut retention rates.

American embassies loom imperiously over the skylines of the world's capital cities, barricaded against terrorist attacks and estranged from their hosts. They engender resentment from without and a siege mentality from within. Thanks to the gutting of State Department and foreign aid budgets by Senator Jesse Helms, followed by the disastrously militant politics of President George W. Bush, America's diplomats and aid workers are undermanned and overwhelmed. Absent an aggressive restructuring of America's civilian aid and diplomatic agencies, their dependence on, and submission to, the military will only intensify. An early draft of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's long-term threat assessment, put its civilian counterparts on notice. A key provision that demanded the Pentagon's "unprecedented say over U.S. security assistance programs" was softened to the wordy but more diplomatic: "Years of war have proven how important it is for America's civilian agencies to possess the resources and authorities needed to operate alongside the U.S. Armed Forces during complex contingencies at home and abroad." In other words, civilians must be harnessed in the service of military objectives in unstable regions or post-conflict areas, rather than focus on their core mission of nurturing U.S. diplomatic interests and reducing poverty. Or, as a source close to the QDR drafting process put it, "It is clear from the deleted parts that what DOD is saying about security assistance is: ‘We want in on the whole shebang.'"

Such is the state of disequilibrium between America's civilian and military resources as it enters the post, post-Cold War world. The years that followed the end of the Soviet era were but a prelude to what will be a far more enduring shift in the topography of geopolitical affairs. For the first time in two decades, U.S. hegemony will demand a price. The transaction Washington has kept with its allies -- generous subsidies in exchange for "full spectrum" control -- will be subject to competing claims. In theory at least, this should bid up the value of nonmilitary methods of protecting U.S. interests overseas. The aforementioned QDR, however, suggests otherwise. It makes numerous and repeated references to the centrality of "access," a catchword for the U.S. military's ability to operate unimpeded anywhere in the world. It identifies as a new and enduring threat "states armed with advanced anti-access capabilities and/or nuclear weapons," a veiled reference to the evolution of China as a regional power and the kind of peer competitor that Washington has made a policy of preempting. The looming rivalry between Beijing and Washington has already replaced Islamic extremism as the main preoccupation of U.S. security planners, the same way al Qaeda filled the void left by the departed Soviet Union on the Pentagon's revolving rotisserie of existential threats. Just as Washington militarized the Cold War and its response to the September 11 attacks, so too is it militarizing its relations with China.

In 2001, the Defense Department produced a study called "Asia 2025," which identified China as a "persistent competitor of the United States," bent on "foreign military adventurism." A U.S. base realignment plan made public in 2004 called for a new chain of bases to be erected in Central Asia and the Middle East, in part to box in China. A 2008 deal between the United States and India that would allow New Delhi to greatly expand its nuclear weapons capability was established very much with China, their mutual rival, in mind. At the same time, the Pentagon is well into a multiyear effort to transform its military base on Guam into its primary hub for operations in the Pacific. While the QDR drily refers to "the Guam buildup" as a means to "deter and defeat" regional aggressors, John Pike of the Washington, D.C. based Globalsecurity.org has speculated that the Pentagon wants to "run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015."

In March 2011, Inside the Navy reported how the U.S. government was deep in the planning stages of a major military buildup in Asia. In response, China is expanding its fleet of diesel-powered subs at a base on Hainan Island and is developing the capacity to attack and destroy satellites as well as aircraft carriers. It has also laid a provocative marker down on a cluster of islands in the South China Sea that are the subject of a simmering territorial row between it and Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan, and Indonesia. In 2010, Beijing identified the South China Sea as a "core interest," a term it previously applied only to Tibet and Taiwan, a move that was seized upon in Washington as a de facto declaration of sovereignty over the region and an augur of Chinese bullying to come. If a Sino-American war is inevitable, it is now generally assumed that a hotly contested South China Sea may be its epicenter.

There is nothing inevitable about an American war with China, however, and even Chinese security planners believe the U.S.-Chinese rivalry will be economic, rather than military, in character. There is, however, an emerging rhythm to Sino-U.S. affairs: The Pentagon, still clinging to the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, reflexively interprets an emerging regional power or political movement as a strategic threat. It gathers allies and punishes neutrals in an undeclared policy to isolate it. Defense analysts exaggerate the threat's military might while discounting the historical factors that inform and motivate it. Politicians in Washington convene hearings and, briefed as to the nation's ill-preparedness, demand an immediate military buildup. Pundits condemn the commander in chief for being soft on America's adversaries even as diplomats and intelligence experts overseas assure the White House that the danger is largely in the minds of those peddling it back home. Such admonitions, however, are obscured or ignored in what is now a key election-year issue. Surveillance is met with countersurveillance. Heightened alert status provokes the same. An incident occurs, either by accident or by design.

It is war.

Backward, Christian Soldiers

Late last summer, Mikey Weinstein broke up a fight between Crystal and Ginger, the guard dogs trained to protect him and his family from a violent reckoning with Christian zealots. For the 55-year-old civil rights activist committed to ridding the US military of religious intolerance, it was a refreshingly secular and evenly matched bout. Weinstein is, after all, famously combative, both pugnacious and profane, with the bearing and sensibility of a mastiff. In the end he prevailed and peace was restored, though at the price of some bad scratches on his arms and a hole in his right hand where a well-aimed canine had struck home.

Only wags and heretics would suggest that such a stigmata-like wound places Weinstein in the company of another Jewish prophet who spoke truth to the legions of an imperial power. At the very least, however, his journey from corporate lawyer to patriarch of a tribe of persecuted minorities is worthy of an Old Testament morality play. For the past half-decade, the Air Force Academy alum has labored to reverse the currents of Pentecostalism that course through the US military in general and the Air Force in particular.

It is an asymmetrical struggle, an endless round of Whac-a-Mole with a network of fundamentalist groups that would otherwise level the wall separating church and state with the help of supine, if not complicit, Pentagon top brass. In the battle over the meaning and implications of the First Amendment, Weinstein has staked himself at the fault line between the free-exercise clause and the establishment clause, which simultaneously preclude Congress from legislating a state religion and guarantee freedom of worship.

“The free-exercise clause does not trump the establishment clause,” Weinstein says from the living room of his home, a tastefully designed adobe ranch house in Albuquerque. “Our Bill of Rights was specifically created not for the convenience of the majority but to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. From that perspective it is absolutely imperative.”

Since he established his watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in 2005, Weinstein has built a client base of more than 20,000 mostly Catholic and Protestant—as well as Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, atheist, and gay and lesbian—members of the military. For them, Weinstein and MRFF are the only recourse for servicemen and -women who have been either punished for their faith or subjected to fundamentalist proselytizing in violation of military guidelines.

Consider, for example, the ferocity with which Weinstein and his undermanned crew of mostly volunteer staff reacted to the Air Force Academy’s recent invitation to Marine Lt. Clebe McClary, a controversial evangelical Christian, to speak at a prayer luncheon. In a January 22 letter to the academy, MRFF argued that McClary’s “intense, unreasoned and psychotic demonstration of unilateral and distorted Christian doctrine” would define the luncheon as “a revival meeting with the purpose of proselytizing and achieving Christian supremacy.” Weinstein then worked the media, landing notices about MRFF’s complaints in the Washington Post, The Raw Story and DailyKos. He urged groups such as the ACLU and Veterans for Common Sense to pile on and, on January 31, after the academy refused to budge, he filed a formal complaint in federal court demanding that the academy cancel its luncheon “on the grounds that it is a blatant violation of the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights as guaranteed by the First Amendment.” (As The Nation went to press, a federal district court was set to hear MRFF’s request.)

A similar MRFF onslaught in October compelled its superintendent to release the classified results of a survey that revealed only partial success in its efforts to enhance religious tolerance. It was an important, albeit tactical, concession in what the Pentagon clearly regards as a war of attrition. One of Weinstein’s most recent cases concerns a Christian group at the Colorado Springs–based Air Force Academy that allegedly promotes fealty to God over temporal authority, disempowers women and encourages its members to intermarry. The academy leadership, Weinstein insists, has all but ignored the group and has stonewalled his demands for an investigation.

“They let Mikey throw blows, and they hope one day he’ll get tired and go away, but someone’s gotta be out there,” says Joe Wilson, the former US ambassador and an MRFF board director who famously confronted the national security establishment himself during the Iraq War. “There’s a need to take it to them, knock them back on their heels. Otherwise you lose.”

Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman said the Defense Department “places a high value on the rights of military members to observe the tenets of their respective religions and does not endorse any one religion or religious organization.” Under its equal opportunity policy, the spokesman said, of 1.4 million active-duty members of the US military, only fifteen filed formal complaints related to religious harassment and proselytizing in 2009.

The Christianizing of the armed forces, Weinstein believes, has implications for national security as well as for civil rights. In addition to ingrained anti-Semitism, his work reveals a simmering Islamophobia in the ranks that, when flushed to the surface by media exposure, has been leveraged by jihadi groups overseas for propaganda purposes.

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Leading the Pentecostalist charge is a constellation of different groups, none more prominent than Military Ministry, an affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ, a global outreach network with an estimated annual budget of nearly $500 billion, raised largely from individual donors and congregations, according to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Military Ministry maintains branch offices at the nation’s main Army bases, as well as overseas initiatives like Bible-study programs globally. The group’s mission statement, according to its website, is “To Win, Build, and Send in the power of the Holy Spirit and to establish movements of spiritual multiplication in the worldwide military community.” In a 2005 newsletter, Military Ministry’s executive director, retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, said the group “must pursue our…means for transforming the nation—through the military. And the military may be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure.”

Military Ministry is particularly well represented at basic training installations like Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the Army’s largest boot camp. According to MRFF researcher Chris Rodda, the group instructs recruits through Bible-study programs that “when you join the military, you’ve joined the ministry,” and it ardently associates conquest on the battlefield with religious conversion. In a 2007 report, MRFF provides links to photos of Fort Jackson troops posing with rifles in one hand and Bibles—some with camouflage covers—in the other. A Bible-study outline distributed by Military Ministry cites Scripture to sanction killing in combat by “God’s servant, an angel of wrath,” to “punish those who do evil.”

Other groups affiliated with Military Ministry include Valor, which targets future officers on ROTC campuses and labors to “help them become disciple makers around the world at their future duty assignments.” There is also Military Gateways, which concentrates on training agencies like the Defense Language Institute, and through its own array of subdivisions like Sailors for Christ, institutions like the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command and Naval Service Training Command.

Another prominent group, The Navigators, commands “thousands of courageous men and women passionately following Christ, representing Him in advancing the Gospel through relationships where they live, work, train for war, and deploy.” It has a permanent staff presence at military academies and its directors, like their counterparts at Military Ministry, frequently refer publicly to US servicemen and -women as “Government-Paid Missionaries for Christ.” (Pastor Ted Haggard, whose New Life Church was located a few miles from the Air Force Academy, was a familiar figure on campus until 2006, when it was revealed that he had had relations with a male escort and used illegal drugs.) The Navigators was founded in 1933 by Dawson Trotman, a mentor of Doug Coe, himself a prominent if low-key spiritual counselor to political elites in Washington. Coe is closely associated with C Street, an evangelical enclave for politicians and power brokers.

The revivalist subculture within the armed forces is as overt as Washington is loath to confront it. In late September Weinstein sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on behalf of more than 100 Air Force Academy cadets who said they were obliged to falsely assume fundamentalist identities—leaving Bibles and Christian literature and music CDs on their bunks, for example—lest they be singled out for harassment by their commanding officers. Weinstein’s letter, like his previous appeals to the defense secretary, was ignored. Congress is equally reluctant to take on the issue, and even Democratic lawmakers have distanced themselves from MRFF. Board director Wilson said he tried to persuade senior aides to Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to open hearings on some of the outrages Weinstein has unearthed, but to no avail. “What Mikey needs is a political ally, someone to champion his fight on the Hill,” said Wilson from his office in Santa Fe. “But the Christian right is very powerful, and no one wants to wage that war." (A source from the Senate Armed Services Committee says there is no recollection among committee members of such a discussion with Wilson, adding that the committee serves in an oversight role when it comes to reports of discrimination and proselytizing in the military. “The way we work is, we ensure the Department of Defense is investigating these allegations as they come up,” the source says.)

Weinstein was born and raised in Albuquerque, the son of a Naval Academy graduate who ultimately became a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 1977, he became a judge advocate general and, after leaving the military in 1989, worked as a Washington-based corporate lawyer and counselor to the Reagan White House. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he and his wife, Bonnie, lived a comfortably affluent life in the northern Virginia suburbs, attending their two sons’ sporting events in the afternoons and mingling with other A-listers on the Washington social circuit at night.

That changed abruptly in summer 2004, when Weinstein visited his son Curtis on the eve of his second year at the academy. Over lunch, a clearly agitated Curtis described several occasions when cadets and officers had subjected him to anti-Jewish verbal abuse. His account chilled Weinstein, who as a cadet had twice been beaten unconscious in anti-Semitic attacks. Weinstein filed a complaint; the Air Force responded by launching an investigation that exposed a predatory, top-down evangelicalism at the academy.

Since then, the Weinsteins have burned through their savings and retirement funds and leveraged credit card debt to sustain MRFF as a lonely sanctuary for besieged secularists. (MRFF often provides spending money for clients who are no longer in the military and are struggling to get by.) Each day, the group is peppered with appeals for help. During an interview with The Nation, Weinstein paused to take a dozen calls and text messages from clients in places from Fort Hood in Texas to Afghanistan’s Helmand province, where automatic rifle fire could be heard in the background.

The MRFF e-mail log is packed with detailed accounts of senior officers subverting with impunity regulations against evangelizing. In one, an Army staff sergeant tells how he and his comrades were forced to endure a Baptist minister’s graphic sermon about a girl who was roasted alive in a car crash along with her soul because she had not been baptized, then encouraged to embrace Christ with the help of religious counselors waiting just outside the door. In another case, during an official briefing an officer at a missile air base was treated to a Christian prayer for divine “guidance and direction” when deciding when to launch the weapons under his responsibility.

A First Amendment vigilante, Weinstein is also on intimate terms with its abusers. His hate mail—mostly anonymous and unprintable grace notes from the bosom of white Christian America—casts him as everything from a troublemaking Jew to the Antichrist. (Among Weinstein’s many critics is his daughter-in-law’s father, who in a June 24 letter in the Colorado Springs Gazette derided him as a Christian-hating publicity hound. In response, Amanda Lee Weinstein, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2004, wrote a lengthy defense of her father-in-law in Veterans Today, as “the one that I call Dad.”)

Death threats against Weinstein and his family are routine. Vandals have shot through the windows of the Weinstein family home and painted swastikas and crucifixes on its walls, smeared his door with feces and destroyed his mezuza, the parchment roll of Hebrew verse traditionally hung on the door frame of Jewish homes. He retains a detail of security and explosives experts, and he has positioned firearms—from a twelve-gauge shotgun to semiautomatic handguns—throughout the house. (Amber, Weinstein’s 23-year-old daughter, sleeps with a .357 revolver by her bed.) The guard dogs have been trained to fend off intruders for at least eight seconds, which security consultants estimate is the minimum amount of time the Weinsteins would need to get to their guns.

Firearms, however, are not Weinstein’s offensive weapon of choice. Armed with a hundred years of case law, he is most formidable in court. In 2004 MRFF was alerted by service members that chaplains embedded in combat units were handing out vernacular-language Bibles in Iraq and Afghanistan in violation of a Pentagon General Order that prohibits proselytizing of any kind. After MRFF took up the case, the Pentagon responded by confiscating and destroying isolated caches of Bibles, although according to MRFF such evangelizing continues in both countries.

In January 2010 Weinstein exposed a private contractor who was supplying rifle scopes to the Defense Department imprinted with coded references to Christ-related biblical verses. After ABC News did a report on the “Jesus rifles,” as Weinstein called them, the Defense Department ordered that the scopes be sanitized of any subliminal content.

In April, in response to MRFF demands, the Pentagon withdrew an invitation to the Rev. Franklin Graham, known for his Islamophobic remarks, to speak at a National Day of Prayer Task Force service. In August Weinstein revealed that troops from Virginia’s Fort Eustis were confined to their barracks and assigned cleanup duty after they refused to obey their commanders’ orders to attend the performance of a Christian rock group. That same month MRFF publicized the mass baptism of twenty-nine marines at California’s Camp Pendleton before their deployment to Afghanistan. News accounts of the ceremony, part of a battalion commander–inspired operation called “Sword of the Spirit,” were republished by Ansar Al-Mujahideen, a leading jihadi website.

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The number of Muslim service members seeking Weinstein’s help has grown geometrically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the cruel odyssey of Zachari Klawonn is a particularly ripe narrative for the jihadi mill. The Fort Hood–based Army specialist, a model soldier with no reprimands on his record and some of the highest physical-fitness ratings in his unit, has alleged that he was subjected to regular abuse because of his Muslim faith. According to the half-Moroccan Klawonn, who enlisted two years ago at 18, his dream of being an Army careerist was challenged by a culture of Islamophobia from the day he put on his uniform. “With 9/11, Islamophobia in the military was born,” Klawonn said in an interview. “You can see it in the libraries, the Christian concerts. They look at me like I’m an outlaw.”

While marching in basic training, says Klawonn, troops would mockingly chant “hajji,” a term of respect in the Muslim world for those who make the annual hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. During a prisoner interrogation training exercise Klawonn was instructed by his drill sergeant to play the role of a suspected terrorist—not just for his own unit but for others throughout the day, depriving him of his own training interval. His requests to fast and pray were angrily denied, and his Koran was anonymously seized from his locker and torn to pieces.

The harassment continued at Fort Hood, where he was assigned in November 2008, and intensified a year later after Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting spree at a base medical clinic, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty. After a threatening note appeared on his barracks door, Klawonn was advised by Fort Hood authorities to find quarters outside the base because his safety could not be guaranteed, but he was denied the standard stipend for off-post housing.

On April 27 Klawonn turned to Weinstein, who immediately retained a Dallas-based attorney to represent his newclient. Within days, Klawonn was ordered to appear before the second-highest commander at Fort Hood, who demanded to know why he was generating such negative publicity. “Clearly they were feeling the heat,” he says.

With MRFF gathering evidence and interviewing prospective witnesses in anticipation of a lawsuit, things have improved for Klawonn. He has started receiving his housing allowance, and a Muslim prayer room and imam have been made available on base. As the details of his treatment have slowly emerged in the media, the hostility toward him has subsided. Many of the 3,540 active-duty Muslims serving in the military—the actual figure is probably higher, as a considerable number of them are thought to be “closeted”—have expressed their support for Klawonn’s cause. His ambition to make officer grade has survived his ordeal, and he is even considering a career in politics. “We’re going to fix what’s going on at Fort Hood,” he says. “The only thing to do is to be productive and progressive and tackle the problem head on. You lead by example.”

Asked if harassment and discrimination against Muslim soldiers like the kind Klawonn received could have contributed to Hasan’s murderous rampage, Klawonn acknowledges the possibility that it was provoked. Nothing justifies murder, he says, but “the reality is that there was Islamophobia at Fort Hood. Could it have pushed an individual to a breaking point? Absolutely.”

Should Klawonn’s case come to trial, a key witness on his behalf will likely be another victim of religious discrimination at Fort Hood. Zachary Arenz, an Army specialist who turned to MRFF in June, was subjected to sustained abuse not because he is a Muslim but because he is a Jew.

From 2007, when he first reported for duty at Fort Hood, to his departure from the service in June, Arenz was singled out by both flag and noncommissioned officers for his faith. His request for kosher meals in the field was denied, and he was ordered by his platoon sergeant to find a fatigue-colored yarmulke so as “to restrict its visibility.” In his cot after a day of field-training exercises, Arenz was reading Hebrew Scripture; his platoon sergeant loudly demanded to know why the Jews killed Jesus. On another occasion, Arenz returned to his barracks to find a swastika scrawled on the parchment from his mezuzah. At one point, his battalion commander told him that “all Jews make bad soldiers” and that Judaism was “incompatible with military service.” He was even ordered to give his mother’s telephone number to Fort Hood authorities so they could confirm that he was, in fact, Jewish. Eventually Arenz was found guilty in a court-martial of what he says were trumped-up charges of having a cellphone in the field and not being at an appointed place of duty.

During his struggle with the Army bureaucracy, Arenz, a native of Huntsville, Alabama, petitioned his senators and Congressman for assistance, with no success. “I just want my day in court,” he says. “I want to face my tormentors and I want them relieved.”

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In addition to his running skirmishes with religious discrimination, Weinstein can now add alleged predation to his casebook. In October he agreed to represent Jean Baas, who charged that directors of a nonprofit organization called Cadets for Christ prey on Air Force Academy cadets and manipulate them into marrying one another, a common cult practice known as “shepherding.” Baas based her accusations on her experience with her daughter, Lauren, who, she claims, was brainwashed into participating in CFC’s rituals, culminating in her September engagement to a fellow group member.

“They still dictate every move she makes,” Baas said by telephone from her Gulfport, Mississippi, home, where Lauren grew up. “It’s sickening to watch while the Air Force does nothing.”

According to her mother, Lauren was a strong-willed and devout Catholic who attended Mass regularly at Colorado Springs during her first year at the Air Force Academy. In August 2008 she was recruited by a friend and CFC member to participate in the group’s functions, which included weekend spiritual retreats, Wednesday night Bible study on the academy grounds and dinners at the home of group directors Donald and Anna Warrick. Soon, according to Baas, Lauren was disparaging her family members as irredeemable papists. During visits home for holidays and semester breaks, she was sullen and aloof, retreating deep into the fold of Scripture. By March 2009 she had forsaken her dream of becoming an Air Force pilot for the divinely inspired role of wife and mother. That Labor Day weekend, Lauren e-mailed her parents of her intention to marry a fellow CFC member, whom she knew only through Bible study meetings. (Lauren had already formally announced her engagement during a CFC gathering at the Warricks’ home.) In late June Lauren and her fiancé spent several days with her parents in Gulfport, poring over packages of materials provided by the Warricks that enumerated the spousal responsibilities of the “shepherd” and his “sheep.”

Reached by e-mail, Donald Warrick described Cadets for Christ as “a Bible-study group for interested cadets,” many of whom have received early promotions to flag rank. About a third of its members worship with the Warricks, he wrote, while the rest attend services elsewhere, and “all of them are free to come and go from our study as they choose.” The CFC board is aware of the allegations made by Jean Bass and Weinstein’s representation of her, according to Warrick, “and while their reality about what takes place and is taught in Cadets for Christ is far different from our own they are of course free to say what they want, and we wish them well.”

The Baases and their daughter, now stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, are completely estranged. “I’m not surprised this kind of evangelicalism exists,” says Baas. “But I am surprised at where it takes place. This is no accident. Someone is allowing these people to operate there.”

A current MRFF client corroborates Baas’s account of Cadets for Christ and indications of at least passive academy support for the group. In an e-mail made available to The Nation on the understanding that its author will remain anonymous, the client says her daughter was recruited by the Warricks, whom she describes as “dangerous and destructive individuals.” Just as disturbing, she writes, “is how these folks are at the academy, recruiting some of the brightest and the best, to carry out their mission…right under the unsuspecting or maybe the knowing, leaders of the academy. Then when it is pointed out to them, it is denied. Is that denial out of ignorance or is it to protect? This is why I say that this issue may be much bigger and broader than what appears.”

Asked for comment, Air Force Academy spokesmanLt. Col. John Bryan said the allegations relating to Cadets for Christ are not substantiated. Bryan also stated that “the academy remains committed to protecting an individual’s right to practice any religion they choose, or no religion, provided their practices do not violate policy or law or impede mission accomplishment.”

When Baas petitioned the academy for help, she was told by a chaplain to write a letter to the superintendent but to betray “no feelings, so as not to sound like a crying mother.” In the fall, she came across MRFF during an Internet search and, frustrated with what she regarded as academy inertia, contacted Weinstein. With signature alacrity, he fired off e-mails to senior Air Force officers in Washington—including a former Air Force chief of staff—and the media, landing an exposé in Truthout, the online general news site. He publicly expressed outrage that academy officials would allow a private religious group to proselytize at a government institution, a charge he said was corroborated by statements from dozens of cadets. “We are now in a state of war with the academy,” he told the weekly Colorado Springs Independent in September.

He was back in the ring, canines bared.

In Damascus, Restoring Beit Farhi and the City’s Jewish Past

Ghosts inhabit Damascus' Old City like players on a stage. You can see them peering through the ramparts of the citadel and tending to the faithful at the Omayyad Mosque. In the narrow passageways of the main souk, they clamor among the spice markets and connive between the caravansary and Byzantine colonnade.

You can see them. There is the Ottoman Governor As'ad Pasha al-Azem, receiving visitors and hearing petitions in the salamlik of his palace, a Mamlukian treasure. Across the way is a merchant from Andalusia offering textiles from Pisa for a set of Persian ceramics. At the Burmistan al Nur, or "house of patients," a group of surgeons are gathered under a kumquat tree for a lecture on the latest techniques of scapulimancy - a method of divination - from Toledo, Spain. And here among litter of citrus fruit, chatting among shop owners and munching on Arab pastry, is the cunning and charismatic Mu'awiya - the caliph himself - so secure in his authority he is attended by only a single bodyguard.

But the real power center in Old Damascus - indeed, in the whole empire - is a few hundred yards away, off Al-Amin Street in the old Jewish Quarter. That would be Beit Farhi, the grand palace of Raphael Farhi, the successful banker and chief financial adviser to the Ottoman sultanate. It was Raphael and his older brother, Haim, who collected the taxes that financed the granaries, foundries and academies of Greater Syria, and it was the subterranean vaults of his palace that held the gold that backed the imperial coin. Until his family's tragic dissolution in the mid-19th century, Raphael Farhi - known as "El Muallim," or the teacher - was not simply the leader of Syria's famously prominent and prosperous Jewish community; He was one of the most powerful men in the Ottoman world. Hakam Roukbti knows this better than anyone. As the architect who has assigned himself the epic task of restoring Beit Farhi to its former glory, he has been working with a full complement of ghosts - Raphael, his brothers and their extended families, the palace guests and servants - peering over his shoulder. "The Farhis controlled all the finances in Greater Syria," says Roukbti. "He was paying the pashas' salaries. He appointed governors. This house was the most important of all the houses in Damascus."

Roukbti, a Syrian who left for Spain in 1966 to study Islamic art, and his wife, Shirley Dijksma, have devoted themselves to the faithful renovation of the massive and labyrinthian Beit Farhi -- from the Hebrew language inscriptions carved in the reception hall to the orange trees in the courtyards. Their goal is to complete the work this summer and launch it as a luxury boutique hotel not long after that.

It is all part of a wider renaissance in one of the longest-inhabited cities in the world. While an economic boom is transforming greater Damascus into a modern metropolis with five-star hotels and shopping malls, the old city is keeping true to itself. Villas and caravansary are being carefully restored and converted into restaurants, cafés, inns, and art salons. Even the usually absent municipal government is getting into the act; the citadel has been completely renovated and strips of the souk's narrow streets have been appointed with gas lamps.

At the epicenter of this reawakening is Beit Farhi, all 25,000 square feet of it. The rooms are nearly finished, complete with spot lighting and central heating, and soon the reception hall will be sealed under a glass canopy that will protect guests from the city's pollution and insects. (It was one concession Roukbti made to modernity.) The cellar bar, which will stretch along the entire north side of the palace, is poised to become a favored watering hole of Damascus' well-fixed expatriates. It was dug out at a price, however; according to Dijksma, an interior designer who promotes local Syrian artists, the same laborer was bitten three times by scorpions.

But while Beit Farhi may soon be hosting international film stars and celebrity politicians in its pricey chambers, it is far more than a commercial enterprise. The Muslim Roukbti and the Christian, Dutch-born Dijksma are on a mission that is as much ecumenical as aesthetic. The Syrian Jewish population has a history, as lush and complex as Beit Farhi's marble-inlaid floors, that begins on one end of the Mediterranean and ends on the other. For centuries, it was a vital part of the mosaic of varied religions and ethnicities that made Damascus the world's first city of commerce and culture.

For decades, the Jewish quarter has been a mute stepchild to the perennially chaotic main souk. Emptied after the creation of Israel and the wars that followed, its apartments and stalls have been padlocked by families now living elsewhere. Today, the remains of Syria's Jewish community consist of about three dozen aged men and women in Damascus and even fewer in the northern city of Aleppo. Albert Cameo, a leader of Syria's residual Jews, recalls with delight the day Roukbti introduced himself as the man who was going to save Beit Farhi. "I assumed he was crazy," Cameo says above the din of workers sanding stone walls in preparation for painting. "But then I thought, ‘What does it matter if he can pull it off?' And now, look at this miracle." Cameo, who like many Sephardic Jews - including the Farhis - has roots in Moorish Spain, grew up in a house just a few blocks away. He remembers his parents telling him stories about the Farhis and the great palace and how its library was open to any Jew who wanted to read from its many volumes. Cameo's recollections and those of his contemporaries have helped Roukbti in his restoration.

There are also written accounts from 19th-century visitors like Lady Hester Stanhope, the famous traveler and Orientalist, who described the palace's five inner courtyards, opulent gilded walls and gold-studded coffee cups. John Wilson, a noted biblical scholar of his day, wrote of the palace as "a little like a village ... [with] sixty or seventy souls. The roof and walls of the rooms around the court are gorgeous to a high degree." Wilson wrote of the Farhi's grand hospitality and he detailed the palace libraries, both the public one and Raphael's private book collection, in admiring detail. For the purposes of restoration, however, these accounts lacked depth. Roukbti and Dijksma had only one visual source that depicted Beit Farhi at its apex: an 1873 rendering of the palace's main courtyard by the classicist painter Sir Frederick Leighton. Titled Gathering Citrons, it portrays a woman in lavish robes looking on as an attendant drops fruit plucked from an orange tree into the outstretched hem of a young girl's skirt. The stone columns are painted in alternating stripes of apricot and blue and the arches are enameled with intricate ceramic designs.

It is a charming tableau - and a far cry from Beit Farhi's condition when Roukbti bought it in 2004. (A successful Paris-based architect, Roukbti financed the purchase with the help of several partners.) Like so much of the largely evacuated Jewish quarter, the palace was a nesting place for squatters. More than a dozen families, mostly Palestinian refugees, were living in each of its many rooms and it took Roukbti six months to buy them out under Syrian law. The main reception hall, which the Farhis used as their personal synagogue, had been ransacked and burned by looters decades earlier. Even the fountain had been dug up and carried away. It took another six months to clear the debris and crumbled stone from years of neglect and plundering before the real work could begin. Whenever possible, Roukbti and Dijksma drew from indigenous sources to complete their work. The stones were quarried locally, though some of the marble was imported from Turkey and Italy. The pigmentation powder used in recreating Beit Farhi's iconic ochers and azures was obtained from nearby shops. They recruited dozens of young artisans to repair or recreate from scratch the elaborately carved wood ceilings, marble floors and delicate frescoes. "It was difficult to find them," says Roukbti, who has an artist's easy manner and a thick head of grizzled black hair. "And even then, I had to be on top of them all the time. But now they are highly skilled. This has been like a finishing school."

The work site has the quality and feel of an archaeological dig. The foundation of Beit Farhi begins with a layer of roughly hewn stones cut during the Aramaic period beneath far more precise masonry typical of Roman construction. The area was occupied by modest dwellings of black stone before the Farhis arrived in 1670 from the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, where they lived for two centuries after King Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. "They came with money," says Roukbti. "And they came with powerful connections with Ottoman authorities."

It was the dawn of a powerful Syrian dynasty that lasted some 200 years. During Napoleon Bonaparte's advance on Palestine in 1799, Haim Farhi is credited by Jewish historians for having rallied the Jews of Acre in a successful resistance. An ambitious pasha had him killed in 1824, however, and a reprisal attack led by Raphael ended in failure with the loss of his brother, Solomon.

Despite Haim's death, the Farhis would enjoy unrivaled wealth and power over the next two decades with Raphael as treasurer and vizier to the sultanate. But his fortunes were undone in 1840 by the family's association with the suspected murder of a Franciscan monk. Several of Damascus' most prominent Jews were arrested in the matter, including a Farhi family member, and it took intercessions from high-ranking diplomats and officials - all the way up to Mohammed Ali, the rogue Ottoman ruler of Egypt and the Levant - to clear them of wrongdoing. The affair was a mortal disgrace for the Farhis, however, and they scattered themselves about the capitals of the world.

At the very least, Roukbti hopes the rebirth of Beit Farhi will redeem Syria's Jewish heritage - if not the Farhis themselves. Already, according to Cameo, two groups of Jews from abroad have visited the site and he is eager to host more. "This house has suffered so much," he says. "Its return is very important, not just for Syria's Jews but for all Syrians."

Yet Another Great Game

If a report circulating among senior members of America's defense establishment is any guide, the Sino-American war for future petroleum supplies has already begun. According to the 80-page study, Beijing has identified the United States as "a paramount threat to its energy security and economic stability" and is busily establishing a "string of pearls"—forward deployments of surveillance stations, naval facilities and airstrips—to safeguard the petroleum-transport route from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea.

Once it controls Asia's vital sea lanes, the report goes on, China may then move on some of The World's key oil reserves—perhaps by replacing the United States as Saudi Arabia's patron and protector, or by seizing a strategic oil pipeline in the Russian Far East. The Chinese, the report says, "equate energy security with physical possession or control of energy supplies" and "have a tendency to see securing their energy security as a zero-sum game." Nowhere is that more clear than in sub-Saharan Africa, where Chinese oil and natural-gas companies have over the past several years inked deals with regimes such as Sudan's, ostracized by the West for its complicity in atrocities committed against villagers in Darfur.

"It's very effective and farsighted diplomacy," says John Tkacik, a China expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "They look to where their opponent is not and discreetly place their pieces in unclaimed areas of the map, which in this case is Africa."

In staking out Africa, however, Beijing is setting itself up for a seismic rivalry with the —United States, which has identified the region as key to its efforts to diversify its oil sources away from the unstable Middle East. In the aftermath of 9/11, a U.S.-Israeli study group recommended that Washington prevent "rivals such as China" from horning in on Africa's natural resources, while the Pentagon study says, "Chinese companies are investing in East, West, and North Africa and [the Chinese Army] has sent troops to protect its energy investments in Sudan" —an assertion long rumored by human-rights groups and other Africa experts but never confirmed.

In turn, American oil companies have raised their profile in Africa amid rumors that the United States is planning to build a military base in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea. "In Africa," says Jamal Qureshi, an oil-markets expert at PFC Energy in Washington, "you've got new players, with China as a possible counterweight to the U.S. There could be elements of confrontation."

Before 9/11, U.S. oil companies generally kept their distance from such countries as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Libya, due to political risk, concerns over human-rights violations, sanctions or all three. True, U.S. firms have done business with autocracies like Nigeria, despite the Bush administration's public snubbing of President Olusegun Obasanjo. But until now, such deals have been cut on a piecemeal basis—unlike those recently struck by state-owned China National Petroleum Co. (CNPC) as part of an official policy of nurturing diplomatic ties in exchange for oil concessions.

During the cold war, China reached out to Africa in political solidarity with its nonaligned nations, and to block them from having relations with Taiwan. Indeed, Africa accounts for a dwindling share of the 27 or so countries that still recognize the island state over China. Now China is supporting developing countries as part of a transparent bid for economic gain, and its petro diplomacy extends worldwide. In October Beijing agreed to buy up to $100 billion in Iranian petroleum and gas and to help develop a major Iranian oilfield near the Iraqi border—evidence of an evolving Sino-Iranian alliance that is featured in the Pentagon report. Earlier this year Beijing signed a 25-year deal to develop natural-gas reserves in Iran—despite U.S.-led sanctions—and it is increasingly active in the Gulf states. Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh recently said that the strengthening Tehran-Beijing link was "neutralizing" U.S.-imposed sanctions. "Japan is our No. 1 energy importer for historical reasons... but we would like to give preference to exports to China," said Zanganeh.

Africa, though, remains the new oil frontier for both China and the United States. Since Chinese President Hu Jintao's February goodwill mission to oil-producing states, Beijing has signed agreements with Algeria, Gabon and Nigeria, and is discussing similar deals with Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo and Angola. In return for access to raw materials in Africa, China is financing and building roads, dams, airports and energy grids, signing free-trade agreements and even promoting Africa at home as a tourist destination. Within the next half decade, according to energy analysts, Africa is expected to account for nearly a third of the oil China purchases overseas, up from 25 percent today.

Once oil-independent, China has over the last decade become increasingly reliant on imports, which now account for 60 percent of its oil consumption, up from 6.4 percent in 1993. Within the next five years, according to Beijing, China will be importing 50 million tons of oil and 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Even for a country more concerned with human rights, those kinds of numbers would remove many inhibitions.

In 2001 Beijing identified Sudan as the springboard for its campaign to triple its overseas oil production within four years, despite U.N. sanctions against the Sudanese regime. CNPC now dominates a consortium of Asian companies drilling Sudan's fields under license by Khartoum. Through a subsidiary, CNPC took a lead role in building a 1,500-kilometer-long pipeline from the main oilfields to the Red Sea and built a refinery near Khartoum with a 2.5 million-ton processing capacity. Safely distanced from the chaos in southern Darfur, these facilities have helped swell Sudan's oil output to 345,000 barrels per day, up from 270,000 in 2003, and provide an estimated 8 percent of China's total oil consumption. The sales have also helped finance Khartoum's arms purchases from Beijing; the government is thought to be nurturing a Sudanese arms industry with Chinese technology.

"Khartoum is emboldened and encouraged by China's assistance," says Jemera Rone, a Sudan specialist for Human Rights Watch. "It is using petrodollars to manufacture arms, many of them knockoff versions of Chinese weapons."

The Sino-Sudanese ties are complicating U.N. efforts to isolate Khartoum for its alleged complicity in massacres and rapes in southern Darfur. Beijing has blocked or diluted several U.S.-sponsored draft resolutions condemning Khartoum, and has signaled it will veto further sanctions. Washington, which needs Chinese support in Security Council matters regarding Iraq, is unlikely to push Beijing on Sudan.

While the United States appears to have conceded Sudan to China, it is active elsewhere in Africa. U.S. President George W. Bush has made a point of meeting with leaders of such countries as Chad and Congo, which in the past barely registered on Washington's foreign-policy map. The African Oil Policy Initiative Group, a confederation of oil executives, members of Congress, White House officials and consultants, has recommended that the United States work openly with Nigeria to secure Africa's oil-rich areas and enhance the prospects for foreign investment. It has also urged the Pentagon to build a naval base at the oil-rich islands of So Tome and Principe, and to permanently deploy a large force of U.S. troops there.

Some analysts even suspect that the deliberate way in which the United States lifted sanctions on Libya earlier this year was a move to check China's growing influence in Africa. If China sees energy security as a zero-sum game, so, it appears, does its American rival.