BUSH TELLS PALESTINIAN PM GOD MADE HIM ATTACK IRAQ..."God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." --Ha'aretz, 06.25.03
The Washington Post subsequently reported that a call to the White House for clarification went unanswered. A number of reports* cautioned that Bush's exact words may have been lost in translation, but no alternate translation or attendee has contradicted the meaning expressed in the Ha'aretz translation. Bush's belief that he is acting as the hand of God has been well documented this past year, and his comments to Abbas wouldn't be the first time Bush has used his religious beliefs to score political points. Anyone who is capable of calling an empty trailer found in Iraq a Weapon of Mass Destruction is perfectly capable of telling a religious Arab that God told him to invade Iraq. --Politex, 07.01.03
Earlier, Jackson Lears in the New York Times reported Bush as saying, "''Events aren't moved by blind change and chance''..., but by ''the hand of a just and faithful God.'' From the outset he has been convinced that his presidency is part of a divine plan, even telling a friend while he was governor of Texas, ''I believe God wants me to run for president.'' This conviction that he is doing God's will has surfaced more openly since 9/11. In his State of the Union addresses and other public forums, he has presented himself as the leader of a global war against evil. As for a war in Iraq, ''we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them.'' God is at work in world affairs, he says, calling for the United States to lead a liberating crusade in the Middle East, and ''this call of history has come to the right country.''"
"And this is the mindset--or rather, the primitive fever-dream--that is now directing the actions of the greatest military power in the history of the world. There can be no doubt that Bush believes literally in the divine character of his mission. He honestly and sincerely believes that whatever "decision" forms in his brain--out of the flux and flow of his own emotional impulses and biochemical reactions, the flattery and cajolements of his sinister advisers, the random scraps of fact, myth and fabrication that dribble into his proudly undeveloped and incurious consciousness--has been planted there, whole and perfected, by God Almighty." --Chris Floyd, God made me do it, says St. George
