Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq? Clive Hamilton confirms one of my suspicions at Alternet:
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated. . .
President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.
That is truly disturbing. I really believe that this last decade will go down as one of the darkest times in American history. Not because we were attacked on our own soil, but because in response to the attack, we, collectively, became the lowest version of ourselves.
So sad. We started off coming together – grieving together and holding each other up. Then the culture of fear overcame us, and sadly, we stooped to one new low after another.
Of course it's plausible, and I don't care for Bush much more than the next guy or gal… but the game of motive-guessing is a dubious one.
It's a part of life and probably everyone does it (including myself), but I try to avoid speculating on motives.
There is ample documentary evidence of the enormously religious tone of Bush's entire presidency, from the Biblical quotes Rumsfeld had put on his reports to Bush's own statements about prayer to the character of his cabinet choices and so on and so forth. Given Bush's magnificent incompetence with language and the fact that Chirac doesn't speak English, Bush could have been relaying something one of his staffers told him. I'm inclined to believe Bush held some such beliefs, but seeing the way he deflected direct questions about such beliefs driving the invasion, I don't believe he was stupid enough to say something like this to a head of state and actually mean it. Bush was opportunistic and his staff if not he himself knew how to play the fence between the religious right and the rest of us.
I'm more inclined to believe that Iraq was a combination of military theory and Oedipal nonsense. There was a way, odious as this notion might be to those opposed to the war on principle, to have made that whole mess work and put us in a position of unprecedented strength in the Middle East. But the details, at almost every turn, were utterly screwed up.
I've long suspected that Bush was nothing more than a puppet leader with Cheney, Wolfowitz, et Al pulling the strings.
And those strings were woven from Bush's evangelical background.
Ol' Dub simply wasn't smart enough to plan the web of lies, deceit and fraud that put us in two wars, destroyed our credibility to the rest of the world, and made the US the target of most of the worlds hatred so a relatively few people could get rich from the misery of the masses.
This fits well with an interview I saw of Bush shortly after the 9/11 attack. In it, he expressed the belief, or perhaps it was merely an impression of a belief that he displayed, that God had chosen him to be president because God wanted him to rid the world of terrorism. His first nine months in office were basically a non-event, then 9/11 happened and from that point on he seemed to believe he was on a Mission From God.
Unfortunately, like so many people who entertain that belief, his subsequent actions left a wake of death and destruction, from Iraq to New Orleans to, most recently, the global economy.