Thursday, May 20, 2004

The religious warrior of Abu Ghraib
"Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered his spiritual crisis. 'There is no God,' he said. 'If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers.' But he was thunderstruck by the insight that his battle with the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and the false one. 'I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.'
Boykin was the action hero side of his boss, Stephen Cambone, a conservative defence intellectual appointed to the new post of undersecretary of intelligence. Cambone is universally despised by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial style and regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. A former senior Pentagon official told me of a conversation with a three-star general, who remarked: 'If we were being overrun by the enemy and I had only one bullet left, I'd use it on Cambone.' "