August 22, 2006

At Bush’s press conference Monday, he made two things clear. First, there’s no way he’s getting us out of Iraq.

“We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the President,” he said.

As part of his ever-changing justification for being in Iraq, he did mention the dirty little three-letter word oil, interestingly enough.

Here’s what he said: “A failed Iraq . . . would give the terrorists and extremists an additional tool besides safe haven, and that is revenues from oil sales.”

I guess he thinks it’s OK to refer to Iraq’s vast oil supplies now, three and a half years after launching the war, whereas it would have been too crass to mention them before.

But it makes little sense to suggest that Iraqi nationalists would hand over their oil to Al Qaeda, which is blowing up innocent people. If the U.S. leaves, the Iraqis—Sunnis and Shiites alike--are more likely to go after Al Qaeda, not less.

That likelihood doesn’t fit into Bush’s script, though.

But attacking Iran does, and that was the second ominous noise that Bush made on Monday.

Bush warned a couple times of the “danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Asked about Tehran’s influence, he said, “Iran is obviously part of the problem. They sponsor Hezbollah. They encourage a radical brand of Islam. Imagine how difficult this issue would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon.”

He called Iran “a central part of creating instability, trying to stop reformers from realizing dreams.”

Then he fused Iran and Iraq together, joining the Islamic state and the failed state into one single enemy.

In broken syntax, he laid it out: “The question facing this country is will—do—we, one, understand the threat to America? In other words, do we understand that a failed, failed states in the Middle East are a direct threat to our country’s security? And secondly, will we continue stay engaged in helping reformers, in working to advance liberty, to defeat an ideology that doesn’t believe in freedom? And my answer is, so long as I’m the President we will.”

In response to a question about Tehran’s growing influence, despite his efforts to curb it, he said, most threatening of all: “The final history in the region has yet to be written.”

This was Bush the Deluded speaking, the messianic militarist who believes he’s writing the final history of the region, or at least transcribing God’s wishes for it.

And his transcription machine is an F-16.