Further Thoughts on End-Times and Bush Foreign Policy

I'm not sure which scares me more - some nutbar hijacking a plane, or George Bush and his swaggering six-shooter approach to foreign policy (especially in the Middle East).

In a speech today, Bush is quoted as saying that "By now it should be clear that decades of excusing and accommodating tyranny in the pursuit of stability has only led to injustice and instability and tragedy." (Full text of Bush's speech is here)

Great - so you think that democracy imposed at the end of a gunbarrel is going to be stable? What kind of daft logic is that? Stumbling through over 1500 years of post-Roman Europe, western civilization only achieved the form of democracy we see today in the last 300 years or so (and that's being optimistic) Even if we can get the Middle East countries to adopt structures that are known to work reasonably well, there is a huge assumption about the cultural values and structures in that part of the world that BushCo. is ignoring.

Recent events in Lebanon are no surprise - no nation is going to be overly thrilled with the notion of being occupied by a foreign power. With opportunity knocking, the Lebanese people are rising up to push out the occupiers. That does not mean that the very divisions that led Lebanon into civil war in the 1980s (or was it 1970s - I don't remember) have been resolved or worked through. Democracy in Lebanon may be a very fleeting thing - to be replaced by another strongman power when opportunity knocks. (Nor would I accuse either Afghanistan or Iraq of being "stable" democracies at this time - neither country is stable in its government)

This coming on the heels of yesterday's announcement that Bush appointed John Bolton as the new American ambassador to the United Nations. Great, so you've just made a man whose disdain for the UN is well known America's representative to that body. Logical, hmmm?

BushCo's designs on the Middle East need to be carefully examined for what they are. With a president who seems to think that he is divinely inspired - or possibly even divine? - it's not hard to see where these policies lead. BushCo is putting into place the very people that will allow them to self-justify ignoring or even dissolving the UN, meanwhile, they can carry on their little crusade in the Middle East in a desperate effort to bring about the events forecast in the Book of Revelations.

Between here and there, Bush seems quite unconcerned about how many people will be injured or even killed (after all, doesn't the book of revelations say something about the dead rising up?). If Bush does manage to trigger the prophesied "rapture", he may well find himself alone in the White House. (The Book of Revelations doesn't suggest that God approves of the events of the apocalypse itself, does it?)