If you watched NBC Nightly News last night you saw Iraqi children in despair, suffering from traumatic stress disorder having watched so many people die. You don't see much of substance on televised nightly news lately, but this was a glimpse into the horror created by a war that never needed to be fought.
What chinks do such images make in the armor of men assured they have God's ear and He theirs? None, we may surmise if religious extremism is as James Carroll describes it. Reading an interview with him sends shivers down the spine as he clearly articulates how it isn't the ends or the means that matter to people like George W. Bush, but rather what they see as the purity of their intent. This is why, it could be extrapolated, how the war ends, even whether it ends, is far less important to GW/Cheney and the fundamentalists they represent than doing what is "right" -- based on demented, misguided, often vitriolic authoritarianism raised to a calling.
To the president's credit, he has been trying to tell us how narrowly he thinks. We may laugh and consider him ignorant when he says, "My job is to make decisions" or "I'm the decider." But this is serious stuff. He isn't so much stupid as stuck in a rut with either no idea or no concern about how far the "pure purpose" zealots among his backers might push this country toward the brink of collapse. It is this purpose that matters to them -- its rightness out of context (bolstered by oil, money, and grandeur) -- rather than the horror it unleashes on innocent children in Iraq and the financial cost robbing poor children in America of life-saving health care. In other words both the ends and the means aren't as important as the conceptual beginnings and all else falls as it may. This is especially the case when they're sitting comfortably in mansions complaining about possibly losing their ill-gotten tax cut.
Such people are religious parasites living off something good, creating something awful. They do make Machiavelli look like a wimp. And none of them is even remotely a prince.
Dr. Reardon is author of It's All Politics, The Secret Handshake, and The Skilled Negotiator.