All Bush's "gaffes" are really putdowns, to show the other person who's boss, and humiliate them in such a way that they can't do anything:

"Yo, Blair"

- Barging in on Gordon Brown's Washington visit about something else entirely

- Making the Queen 200 years older than her 81 years

- Plonking himself down on his chair while the Queen was still standing after her toast at the State Banquet

- he's saying, as ever, "I'll do what I want when I want it, and there's nothing you can do, so there". It's catching - Blair does it to us here in Britain.

Maybe it's much simpler. Bush thinks might is right, no wonder given his background, and he wants the oil and profit from elsewhere that he could not have by legal means in his own backyard. He sees other people as puppets, of no value except when they immediately do what he wants.

Bush's epitaph will be "All he ever did was show off at the expense of other people, no matter if it cost lives".

Don't believe the hype - Bush and Blair, and their enablers including Podhoretz, are posing as "antifascist" honchos because they envy their parents' generation the simplicitiy of their moral choices and their achievements against the Nazis. It's all about their own vanity and self-glorification ("legacy"), not to mention the oil. "Islamofascism" is a propaganda construct. It's Bush and Blair who have the violent ("nuclear holocaust") fantasies every time they don't get their way with impunity , and don't get their daily fix of abject praise. Fool me once ...

Also read how the Nazis managed to make their enemies look like the very monsters they had conjured up themselves (projective identification, imputing to others what you want to do yourself) in CounterPunch 24.09.07, article about Hannah Arendt, who has analysed this propaganda phenomenon).

The more our leaders lie to us and fail us, the more they want "one last chance to prove themselves", but it's all "self-sabotaging prophecy and practice". It's not about the Greater Middle East, it's all about our leaders' inflated SELF-IMAGE. You can seen that because they conflate, as they did before, Sunni and Shi'a, Arab peoples and Farsi-(or similar)-speaking peoples ..."they" are all a big fat threat and we must act ASAP, blah, blah, blaaah. It'a all malignant narcissism and follow-the-money, all about themselves (Bush, Blair, and enablers) and not about the actual people who live in the Middle East and who deserve better than our fantasies, violent or "benevolent". It should NOT be all about us, control of the oil, natural gas, and pipelines, and arbitrary "regime change" for our own benefit. Bush and Blair are so obvious in their self-serving distortions. They positively want another war, just to show off, just because they can.

Surprise, surprise: As with Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush knew the whole time he had no case, but the bullying and the oil/pipelines were just too irresistible - and the profits, material and ideological, from the warmongering. Now will he go after his bestest friends, the Saudis, having been rumbled everywhere else? What about some "domino theory" there, since it's all about "democracy" (identical with "free trade ", rigged to profit the United States)? And some conversion attempts to apocalyptic Christianity in Saudi Arabia, just to see if he can get away with incitement to a "war of civilisations" again? But then the Bush administration has already been shown to be "the emperor without clothes", the self-interest and the fawning have been shown up too clearly now.

Missing evidence? Yeah, right. Very convenient, and Bush has pulled it off before, when he forgot to finish his stint ast the "champagne unit".

Meanwhile, John Bolton is already calling the revised NIE about Iran a "quasi-putsch" against Bush (cf. DER SPIEGEL, German political weekly, 08.12.07 at 13h European Continental time. The article is in German, but you'll still get the gist of it).

So now, because Bush doesn't get to bomb Iran, will he declare a state of emergency à la Musharraf? And is Bolton preparing the way in slagging off his own country's combined secret services?

It's all about getting their own way, no matter what the cost to other people, by hook or by crook. And like torturing and calling it something else, Bolton's outbreak is about another power/oil grab and calling it something else. The Bush people have a way of accusing other people of what they are in the process of doing themselves (projective identification). Get them out ASAP, they're bad for you and the world.

If it wasn't for the Bush administration's bellicosity and its tendency to project its own worst faults on some demonised "other" - Bin Laden, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, take your pick - we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. It's only because of its worldwide power grab, and its mendacity and pretend-concern for other people while yet pushing their own selfish interests - that we do have it. The US is in meltdown and taking half the world with it. Nothing would be more tempting than to create a giant distraction from that by starting another war and providing another "casus belli" to go with it - so as to be able to say "it wasn't me, guv". See the SEC's inquiry into the Arbusto insider trading and bankruptcy in the Seventies, and Bush's copouts at that time and later. The whole administration is about "getting away with it again and again", but it's up to us to be vigilant this time round, even if we were genuinely duped or gave the administration the benefit of the doubt before. It wants to make the greatest possible mess because it can't win: "Walhalla", big bang rather than questioning the self-importance and the "Admire me, or else" conceit. I wouldn't put it past them.