Oh, Lord, help Dubya waste the Ay-rabs...

...and I’ll build You the biggest megachurch on Earth, right in downtown Tikrit.

So, what to do when nursing a big fever?

Sweating and shivering like a White House staffer on Fitzmas eve (and who coined that term anyway? Brilliant.) and working on a second bowl of chicken wondersoup from El Presidente -- a Mexican joint across town and delivered to this locale by a kind soul?

Well, I suppose I could wonder if it's Avian flu.

Nah. It's not, but the cat bit me on the ankle this morning, smiled and said, “Taste’s like chicken.”

But that's probably just be the fever talking.

Or play a rousing game of, "What's that smell?"

Nah. No way of telling olifactory hallucinations from the genuine articles.

No, when the eyes won’t focus and the body holds liquids as poorly as a pane of glass, what to do but read the interview with Juan Cole in the Asia Times.

It’s a long piece and worth a longer read, but I pared it down to a few paragraphs that underscored a point I hadn’t thought about in quite the way Professor Cole lays out (emphasis added by me.)

Asia Times 10/20/05

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Grenades in the global economic cockpit

Tom Engelhardt interviews Juan Cole

...
JC: ...

Basically, the public is informed about things like the Middle East by generalist journalists who were in Southeast Asia or Russia last year, and by politicians and bureaucrats who were dealing with some other region last week. And then there's official Washington spin, and the punditocracy, the professional commentators, mainly in New York and Washington, who comment about the Middle East without necessarily knowing anything serious about it. Anybody who's lived in parts of the world under the microscope in Washington is usually astonished at how we represent them. You end up with an extremely persistent set of images that almost no actual information is able to make a dent in.

TD: Can you apply this to Iraq?

JC: The famous instance is the interview deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz gave to National Public Radio in February before the Iraq War. He said words to the effect that Iraq will be a better friend to the United States than Saudi Arabia had been. It shows you he was intending to replace Saudi Arabia with Iraq as a pillar of the US security establishment in the Middle East. Saudis are Wahabis and they have sensitivities about their holy cities, Mecca and Medina. Iraq, he said, is a Shia society. It's secular. He juxtaposed Shia and secular. And then he added, it doesn't have the problem of having holy cities. The Washington power elite that planned out the invasion appears to have thought that Iraq was a secular society, including the Shi'ites amongst them, and they seem to have been unaware of Najaf and Kabala as among the holiest shrine cities in the world of Islam.

It's not a matter of stupidity on Wolfowitz's part. It's a matter of being uninformed. Willfully uninformed. He just believed whatever people like [long-time Iraqi expatriate politician and corrupt banker, now vice-premier] Ahmed Chalabi told him about Iraq. He probably hadn't read as much as a whole book on Iraq's modern history. Well, Iraq wasn't a secular society.

...

TD: Do you think Bush has dug his own grave?

JC: I mean, this is one of the great foreign policy debacles of American history. There's an enormous amount at stake in the oil Gulf, and Bush is throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the world economy. So I think he has dug his own grave with regard to Iraq policy. Most politics in the United States, though, focuses on domestic issues.

TD: Despite the usual centrality of domestic issues, I happen to think that, above all else, the war has driven the Bush people ever since the post-invasion period. When, for instance, you look at the latest AP/Ipsos poll, what's bothering the evangelicals now above all else? It's the war.

JC: Yes, they are upset about what happened in Iraq because Bush made an alliance with the religious Shi'ites, which meant an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists who have now put a Koran veto on legislation in Iraq. You know, the evangelicals were dreaming big. They thought Iraq was going to be a missionary success, that they would make the Iraqis into Protestants. But any missionary who showed up in Iraq now, we'd soon be seeing him on video pleading for his life. None of their objectives with regard to Iraq have been achieved.

This is something, by the way, that the evangelicals have been dreaming of since the 1850s. It's how the American University in Beirut got there. The Presbyterian missions were the ones that originally tried to missionize the Middle East and they failed all along the line - and they continue to fail. The Bush moment was a moment in which those nineteenth century dreams of evangelical missionizing and imperial might being melded together were briefly revived. Now it's become clear to them that this is just not going to happen, so they're angry, they're disappointed. You can understand that.

All of the facts have always been there. The mass exporting Bibles to Iraq. Casually tossing around the term “crusader” in the early, Cake-Walking days of the war. The strong and explicit “Dubya’s Doin’ God’s Work” Iraq War through-line (up to an including the likes of a our very own, latter-day Col. Jack T. Ripper in the person of Army Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin who was in the habit of launching into evangelical tirades, while in uniform, as infoplease ably sums up here:

U.S. Army general, violated military rules when he spoke in uniform at churches and before religious groups, portraying the war on terror in religious terms. He called the God of Islam “an idol,” and said, “My God was a real God.” He also declared that President Bush is in the White House because “God put him there.” The deputy inspector general for the Defense Department said Boykin made 23 such speeches dating back to Jan. 2002.)

But here Juan Cole synthesized the larger context so correctly and in the proper historical focus that after I read it I had a minor, “Of course” moment. Lightly slapped my head, got dizzy and then went caroming off the walls for a quick false-alarm visit down the hall to the bathroom.

Won’t make that mistake again.

Fucking flu.

Iraq was to be a “missionizing” moment for the Evangelicals that they saw as every bit as theologically target-rich, world-tipping and once-in-a-lifetime as the neocons viewed the U.S. conquest the 2rd largest proven petroleum reserve on Earth as the fulfillment of Phase One of their Imperial Dreams.

Every bit as much as the Patriot Act appealed to the not-so-secret Fascist heart that beats deep in the Republican Body Politic.

Every bit as much as wasting brown people appealed to the Racist Wing of the GOP.

Every bit as much as mutating the Halliburton keiretsu into a not-so-secret Shadow Government and Private Military, funded by American Taxpayers and answerable to no one but their Board appealed to conscienceless Corporatist thugs like Cheney.

In a day or two or three, I’ll have sweated out whatever it is that’s kicking my ass, and I’ll look back and wonder whether or not I really was watching a “Disco Murders at Club ‘Fever’” Starsky and Hutch rerun, because it’ll feel too weird. Too swirlingly dream-logical to have been true.

That’s the thing about being sick or drunk or oxygen-deprived; after the fact it’s sometimes hard to remember – or even believe – how debilitated you actually were or how oddly you actually behaved.

And now, by the grace of God, we hold out a sliver of hope that we may be watching our most ruinous national disease run it’s course. At home, we see indictments and weak but unmistakeable Moderate and Media rebellions popping up like mushrooms around (and even within) the fastness of the Party of God. Abroad, everyone who cheered on this dreadful War now has to watch as their particular slice of the Fantasy Pie curdles before their eyes; Each cult of the GOP coven with nothing left to do but stand as idly by as the head of FEMA while their anti-Democratic fever dreams circle the bowl and gurgle away into the septic tank of history.

And with a lot of luck, a year or two from now we’ll be passably sober and sane again, ravenously hungry and wondering out loud what in the Hell we were thinking ever letting the Gang that Couldn’t Loot Straight anywhere near the Treasury, the launch codes and the U.S. Constitution.