••Martin Amis weighs in on Bush's Crusade••

Without his war, Bush is an obvious one-term blowhard; and he listens to his political handler, Karl Rove, at least as keenly as he listens to Donald Rumsfeld. The supplementary motivation, hatched at the thinktank and prayer-breakfast level, is, I fear, visionary in tendency. It has been noticed that a great deal of the world's wealth is in the hands of a collection of corrupt, benighted and above all defenceless regimes. The war, as they see it, will not be an oil-grab so much as a natural ramification of pure power: manifest destiny made manifest, for the good of all.

All US presidents - and all US presidential candidates - have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious: "the loving God behind all life and all of history"; "the Almighty's gift of freedom to the world." "My acceptance of Christ", Bush has said (this is code for the born-again experience of personal revelation), - "that's an integral part of my life." And of ours, too, in the New American Century.

The present administration's embrace of the religious right also leads, by a bizarre route, to the further strengthening of the Israel lobby. Unbelievably, born-again doctrine insists that Israel must be blindly supported, not because it is the only semi-democracy in that crescent, but because it is due to host the second coming. Armageddon is scheduled to take place near the hill of Megiddo (where, in recent months; an Israeli bus was suicide-bombed by another kind of believer). The Rapture, the Tribulation, the Binding of the Antichrist: it isn't altogether clear how much of this rubbish Bush swallows (though Reagan swallowed it whole). VS Naipaul has described the religious impulse as the inability "to contemplate man as man", responsible to himself and uncosseted by a higher power. We may consider this a weakness; Bush, dangerously, considers it a strength.