Goerge Bush: God talks to me

A BBC series that will go to air later this month, includes mention of a meeting Bush had with Palestinian leaders in 2003. It was during this meeting that Bush divulged his "special" relationship with the man upstairs.

In the BBC program - Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs - due to be aired this month, Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says he and Mahmoud Abbas were treated by Bush to the following revelation:

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

The hymn "In the Garden" that includes the lyrics "he walks with me and he talks with me" has nothing on the President's relationship with the great hypothetical. To hear Bush tell it you would think he had God on speed-dial.

Bush's ill-conceived "War on Terror," launched on the back of 9/11 and a pack of lies, features an enemy that has been largely concocted in order to justify Bush's madcap adventures. R.T. Naylor's book - "Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation in the War on Terror" - exposes the inner-workings of a "war" that is more myth than reality.

The tall tale the Bush administration has been peddling about a global Islamic terror network stretching from the Middle East, to Chechnya and the jungles of the Philippines - is a fiction. Worse Bush has conned the American people into buying this fable - but who are they to argue, God himself is giving Bush inside tips.

The tragic part is that a good time Charlie with limited skills and childlike notions about "God" was ever let anywhere near the Presidency of the United States. The American people and the global community have paid a terrible price for this man's follies, including a massive civilian toll in Iraq and 1,950 dead American service men and women.

Recently Bush said that he honored the military dead by giving up golf - an unintentionally insulting statement that turned out to be a lie, since there is evidence that he went ahead and played golf anyway.

The idea that Iraq has now been "liberated" and "victory is at hand" is Bush administration propaganda. Buying-off Sunni insurgents and maintaining a tenuous grip on the security situation is a guarantee of nothing, especially given the changing dynamics in the Middle East.

The global tensions fired up by Bush, with quasi-religious warnings of "evil doers", an "axis of evil" and a mythical global terror organization with the backing of a sophisticated financial network, was the scenario he needed to justify his military adventures. God apparently was in on it all, urging Bush along a path of lunacy - pushing the world ever closer to the abyss - an abyss that yawns wider with Iran now in the cross hairs.

God of course is a great alibi. If your schemes backfire or when you are faced with the horrific consequences of your actions, you can say "God told me to do it" and absolve yourself of guilt and responsibility.

God is a hypothetical, but unfortunately George W. Bush isn't. Even with his popularity at an all-time low, he continues to embrace his delusional world view and mocks American Democrats as "appeasers" from a platform in the Knesset. His comparison of the situation in the Middle East with Nazi tanks rolling into Poland and the machinations of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich is inflammatory and wrong headed. At that stage in WW2 the prospect of military actions unleashing a nuclear disaster wasn't part of the equation, as it is now.

Bush's term as president is drawing to a close, but the consequences of his actions will continue to reap a bitter harvest for many years to come.