Bush's Mideast motivation: Anti-Poppy? Fundamentalist? Neocon? End-timer?

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: What's the Motivation?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, August 4, 2006

....What is really motivating our policy in the Middle East? And who's really making the decisions?...These are particularly important questions as the Bush White House's nearly absolute deference to Israel in the current Lebanese conflict strains other alliances and arguably makes the situation in the Middle East deadlier and more intractable every day....

***

On Wednesday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the New York Times about how Bush's strong predisposition to support Israel contrasts with his father's....

Yesterday, I noted former Newsday and Knight Ridder White House correspondent Saul Friedman 's essay on NiemanWatchdog.org: "I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president's religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies....

Former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal sees another, related form of evangelism at work: The neoconservative variety. He writes in Salon: "By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it....

And here's another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/08/04/BL2006080400780.html

[tularetom]

1. Like everything else, cheney is calling the shots

for the benefit of his cronies in the oil (and arms) bidness. They get the simpleminded * to be the front man for their policies by appealing to his fragile sense of his own masculinity. There is definitely an anti-poppy element at work here - he has to show mommie he isn't a needle dick like his daddy. The apocalyptic bullshit helps get the hicks on board but I doubt if even * is stupid ebough to believe it.

[LuckyChoice]

2. you've nailed this one

on all points.

[WinkyDink]

3. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ is my guess. The rest is for P.R.

It also helps that death and destruction appeal to the Psychopath in Chief.

[VOX]

4. War in itself means FAT gov't. contracts for certain corporations...

"What's the Motivation" is a legitimate question, and we've been told that Saddam was a direct threat to the U.S. (lie); that Iraq had (or was about to have) nuclear weapons (lie); that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (lie)...

When all those stories didn't pan out, the neocons changed their script to replicate and archaic Democratic schtick -- we doing this to free a down downtrodden people, so they can have liberty, freedom, and democratic elections -- i.e., nation building.

In the end, it's all about 1) creating chaos; and 2) diverting massive amounts of federal funds (out tax dollars) to underwrite the clean-up and the creation of new infrastructure. At least that's how it's *supposed* to work. We don't even get that!

Groups like Exxon, and General Electric, and Halliburton have all posted record profits in the past few quarters. It doesn't take an economist to figure out what's happening.