Bush's Holy Warriors on a Holy Crusade

Mother Jones Daily Mojo

Tyler Marshall and John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times offer this small scene from today's Iraq:


"The lengths to which the administration has gone to promote Iraq as a safe place was underscored during last week's trip to Baghdad by Commerce Secretary Don Evans. At one point, Evans did a television interview with Fox News at the Baghdad airport, one of the best-protected sites in the country. Surrounded by armed guards, including a Humvee bristling with weapons that shadowed his every move, Evans delivered his message to the people of America about the current situation in Iraq: 'I'm not fearful [for] my security.'"

And that's just an edge of the trouble brewing in the kingdom of incipient crisis. Yet the Bush machine rushes onward, as the President has been doing in Asia this weekend, strangely oblivious, pushing yet more wars onto the horizon of the war on terrorism. The men of this administration combine, to put it politely, a certain religious "conviction" not to be denied -- as in Gen. Boykin's case -- with, for some of them, a near religious belief in the power of power and in the subterfuges that must be called upon to use it "well." There has been much shock recently in the mainstream media and elsewhere about the lies we were told to get us as a people into the Iraq war.

El - Good but doesn't mention the GOP representatives who went to Iraq and came back saying how secure it was. They stayed in Kuwait every night. Later he evidently doesn't know about both the AP and the UK parsing of Powell's UN speech which he was wishing for to go with this line-by-line treatment of Bush's major war speech.

More on Strauss. Danny Postel has conducted an interview with Shadia Drury, a Canadian professor of political theory. Drury is an expert on the work of the philosopher king who "appointed" many of the neocons -- the long-dead Leo Strauss who inspired many of them with his readings of Plato. As she points out:

"Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics... The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception - in effect, a culture of lies - is the peculiar justice of the wise.
...

The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country.

I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupulous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny."