Your reading of European history also is, um, incomplete.

I would credit Henry VIII and his successors and actually Martin Luther in Germany for bringing about church and state separation more than Hobbes and Locke.

The Reformation didn’t separate church and state; it simply gave Catholicism several rivals in the church-state business. The Reformation only took hold in places where the local government authority (i.e., prince or other nobleman) made some form of protestantism the established religion. Eventually the bloody religious wars of the Reformation led to Hobbes, etc.

Well, yes, they had a plan, but I’m not sure they were on the same page regarding objectives. It’s hard to tell. Certainly their motivations were all over the lot. Bush himself doesn’t seem to think past his own glorification. Cheney and many others no doubt were thinking about oil, and the neocons were thinking about Israel, and they were all thinking about American hegemony. And somehow their fevered imaginations all fixated on the removal of Saddam Hussein as the linchpin of their hopes.

She implies there has been a single plan that has been carried out from 1991 all the way through. This is not the case.

The current administration for sure had plans for that part of the world, and they have had plans for a long time … since the mid nineties at least. I agree with maha that they sincerely believed that democracy would occur (step 1. depose Saddam, step 2. ???, step 3. democracy!), but they certainly didn’t want democracy for democracy’s sake, and the betterment of the Iraqi people played zero part in their plans. They wanted a bigger and better and more centrally located natural ally in the region than Israel … they figured that the resulting democracy would be friendly to the US, and more importantly, in debt to the US, and in no shape to ask the US to move US military bases off Iraqi soil. Then, with a huge military presence in a friendly country sitting right on top of a huge chunk of the world’s oil supply, they figured we’d more or less CONTROL all that oil, via our ability to choke off supply to the rest of the world from there, anytime we felt like it.

Their dismisive attitude towards Europe and Russia are fairly easily explained then … Europe, Russie, and China are absolutely dependant on Middle Eastern oil. With a friendly base on top of all that oil, we’d have the rest of the world by the short and curlies, so to speak, and thus would be able to ensure the US’s position as the world’s sole superpower.

All of that, tho, every last bit of it, was utterly dependant on the idea that after we deposed Iraq, it’d turn into a friendly and indebted ally. Obviously, that has not and will not happen. That is where the incopentence part comes in.

IMHO, of course.

-me

What you’ve always got to appreciate about the Bush Administration is that they have little idea what they’re doing.

Diana replied:

You seriously underestimate these criminals. Don’t let them off the hook so easily. This plan was kooked for a long time. The trail is as clear as day, from the first Gulf War, on through sanctions, through kooked intel about WMD, they knew exactly what they were doing. Their blind spot is that they misjudged the Iraqi people. They thought they were like Americans, easily bought, easily duped, easily rendered submissive.

Diana has this part right. Yes. BushCo was extraordinarily incompetent in execution, extraordinarily drunk on their dreams and on the imaginings of their capabilities, but they most definitely had a plan for this part of the world, worked up well in advance of their seizing power in this country. They could never plead in a court of law that they did not kow what they were doing.

I love philospohy and intellectual history but I also think Mr. Lilla goves Hobbes and Locke and other thinkers for that matter a lot more credit than they really deserve. I would credit Henry VIII and his successors and actually Martin Luther in Germany for bringing about church and state separation more than Hobbes and Locke.

As you note, the author seemed to avoid naming Bush with his pseudo-Xtianity in all but the most subtle ways. Good thing, because to have done so would have just fed into Bush’s self-proclaimed Third American Great Awakening & sent the most worrisome wingnuts into a ranting defensive tizzy, which we certainly don’t need when trying to place these things in a sensical historical context.

Agreed, also, that the really dangerous “messianic” mentality is not necessarily religion-driven, just one of the more virulently dangerous forms of it. But from the pov of an intellectually lazy prosepective tyrant, why reinvent the wheel & construct an entirely new philosophy of things *in any event, beyond Bush’s intellectual capacity* when a seething pot of American anti-intellectual fundie religion anger has already been stirred up & pissed off at having been denied a place in the public square for so long (or so they’ve been led to believe)?

One more reason I think the Bush presidency has been a most unfortunate “perfect storm” of disastrous events.

But what do I know? I’m just another Godless liberal whining the loss of our about civil liberties at home, resenting the fact that George has used his trumped-up “War on Terra” to convince us, somehow, that it’s all justified.