American Theocracy - Clear and Present Danger

Read the NY Times Book Review of 'American Theocracy' by Kevin Phillips.

Kevin Phillips, who as a young political strategist for the Republican Party, wrote in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, that a stronger Republican Party would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change, in his new book, American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury', presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.

He identifies three broad and related trends - none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies - that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt- current and prospective - that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory - that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ('Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath,' an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. 'You can't ask for better than that.') Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.

Also read NY Times Review of Kevin Phillips' earlier book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush