God Made Me Do It

 

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is currently working on a book about America's policy toward political Islam over the past 30 years.

Is Dick Cheney God? If you read the Gospel According to Woodward, it's clear that the president seems to think so.

A few months ago, I wrote a profile of the Rev. Tim LaHaye for Rolling Stone. LaHaye is the author of Left Behind, the best-selling series of books on the End of the World, a hyped-up version of alleged Biblical prophecies that predict that Jesus Christ will return to earth after a climactic battle between God and Satan at Armageddon. Satan, of course, happens to set up his headquarters in Babylon, just south of where Baghdad is today. LaHaye is a highly influential organizer of the Christian right"he founded the Moral Majority and the secretive Council on National Policy"and he helped elect Bush by swinging skeptical Christian-right leaders behind him in 2000. LaHaye and his fundamentalist flock often equated Saddam with the Antichrist"literally, not figuratively. In Rolling Stone, I speculated that LaHaye's weird beliefs might have influenced the president, a born-again Christian whose decision to go war in Iraq seems to have been directed as much at Satan as against Saddam.

Maybe I was right.

Yesterday in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes, Bob Woodward presented a terrifying picture of a president obsessed. Bush demonized Saddam, creating a Manichean world in which America was a God-inspired nation combating the Beelzebub-led hell of Iraq. It's not clear whether Bush believed"like LaHaye"in the necessity of a climactic struggle with Satan's legions from Babylon, but the president's crusade had all the same fervor.

Apparently he talked to the wrong father. Reports Woodward and 60 Minutes:

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? "I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, 'Well no,' and then he got defensive about it," says Woodward. "And then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, 'He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.' And then he said, 'There's a higher father that I appeal to.'"

Perhaps Bush believes that he has a pipeline to God, that he can ask God for advice about which wars to launch. By all accounts, however, his real father"the earthly one, not the imaginary one in the sky"was against the war. Or, perhaps Bush mixed up God and Dick Cheney. Woodward makes it startlingly clear that Cheney was the driving force behind the Iraq misadventure. But for Bush, war in Iraq wasn't Cheney's will, it was God's:

Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. I'm surely not going to justify the war based on God. . . Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course I pray for personal strength and forgiveness.

Says Woodward, succinctly, of Bush: "He's not an intellectual." He's not. But Woodward makes clear that Bush is perfectly capable of disguising his godly work from people who disagree, such as Colin Powell, who wasn't told of the decision to go to war even after war planning was well underway:

And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."

There's lots more in the book. It ought to be required reading for anyone planning to cast a vote in November. With at least 11 more Americans killed this weekend, with well over a thousand Iraqis killed since April 1, with U.S. troops poised for massive assaults on Najaf and Fallujah, with Iraq's Governing Clowncil crumbling fast, with civil war looming in Iraq,, and with the growing possibility that the crisis in Iraq could spill over into Iran and Syria, too, Americans are asking: How did we stuck in this mess? Woodward has answered that question better than anyone else so far.


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Published: Apr 19 2004