The Bush Gospel- Interesting Letter to the Editor (Pakistani Newspaper) [View All]

[Bhaisahab]

The Bush 'gospel'

When King Louis XIV said, "L'etat c'est moi (I am the state)," it was in a different, much milder context. But President Bush's answer to a reporter's question about the 9/11 inquiry commission's report that it has found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda has far greater implications.

He was quoted as saying, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda" is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Even those commentators who are opposed to his arrogant and reckless unilateralism often take a charitable view of the president. Richard Cohen, for instance, asks: "Is George Bush the Iraq war's "useful idiot?", meaning he is credulous and gullible and believes whatever his aides whisper into his ears, without a question.

Nevertheless, the above statement is immensely portentous when judged in the context of his overall posture on the Iraq invasion. For instance, Maureen Dowd, in her April 15 column "Head spook sputters" in The New York Times recalled that the president in a news conference two days earlier "reiterated that his mission is dictated from above".

Also, according to the same columnist, in their new book "The Bushes," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, who interviewed many Bushes, including the president's father and his brother Jeb, quote one unnamed relative as saying that 'W' sees the war on terror as a religious war.

"He doesn't have a P.C. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know," the relative said.

Commenting on the same prime time news conference in The Washington Post, Richard Cohen in his column "America's Ayatollah" writes: "What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: 'We're changing the world.'

He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq 'I also know that there's an historic opportunity here to change the world,' Bush said of the effort in Iraq. The United States, the president said, had been 'called' for that task." And finally, Howard Fineman, in his Newsweek cover story "Bush and God", refers to the former having sort of a tete-a-tete in the "wee" (emphasis added) hours of the morning with God and perceiving Jesus Christ as a "friend".

Bush seems to go even farther than Louis XIV; he claims his statement to be the gospel. How is his blind faith differ from that of a suicide bomber in Iraq, or Palestine, or Sri Lanka?

S.G. JILANEE
Karachi

http://www.dawn.com/2004/07/13/letted.htm