Bush's dreams, the people's nightmares

It's hard to think of the most appropriate word for this.  Sad? Disgusting? Scary? Fanatical?

Bush 'would understand' attack on Iran Jerusalem Post/JTA 11/02/06

President Bush reportedly said he would "understand" a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran s nuclear sites.

The only hopeful thing about it is that that one sentence seems to be the entire news available.  So without knowing a little more about the context, we can't really say that Bush was giving a green light to an Israeli military attack on Iran.

Bush repeated his current favorite bogeyman image of the Islamunists (or is it Islamunofascists this week?) in South Carolina in a speech of 10/28/06:

We face an enemy that knows no bounds and no conscience. They're ideologues.  But their ideology is the exact opposite of ours.  They kill innocent people to achieve their evil objectives.  But make no mistake about it, they have objectives.  They have clearly stated that they want to drive the United States from the world so they can establish a caliphate, a governing organization from Indonesia to Spain, that would allow them to spread their ideology of hate, allow them to dominate a society in which people could not worship freely, or speak freely, in which people who did not adhere to their point of view would be punished.  They seek safe haven from which to launch further attacks to achieve their objective.  And their attacks would aim right here at the United States of America.

I want you to think about a world in which rival forms of radicals competed for power in the Middle East, to deny the hopes and aspirations of millions of people who simply want to live in peace. They would topple moderate governments.  They would use oil as an economic weapon to bring the West to her knees, and to mix all that in with a country with a nuclear weapon.  And 20 or 30 years from now, if that were to happen, people would look back and say, what happened to them in 2006? How come they couldn't see the challenge? How come they couldn't see the threats to a generation of Americans?

That Cheney and Bush and their Republican Party treat the Al Qaida fantasy of a massive new caliphate as a realistic threat shows just how much Bush and Osama Bin Laden play depressingly well into each other's desire for escalation and expanding war.  Lots of fanatics make lots of fantastic plans.  Bin Laden's califate dream is one of them.  And it's exactly that, a fantasy.  And the idea that America pulling our troops out of Iraq would result in the establishment of a Sunni Salafist caliphate is such a distant possibility that's it's delusional - or plain dishonest - to treat it as a realistic threat.

Needless wars don't make the United States safer.  At best, they get a lot of people killed for no good reason.