American fundamentalism drives Bush's Middle East policy
• Christian Fundamentalism
A British journalist is quite amazed by the fundagelical nuttiness that many of us have grown up taking for granted. (My daddy used to make me listen to Dr. Jack Van Impe's LPs about the End Time, the AntiChrist, Gog and Magog.)
So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.
Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power