BEN MACINTYRE and The Times of London look at President Bush's overweening public piety and our national forced march to the End Times:

The literature of the First World War shapes our consciousness of war itself: nearly a century later, the language, myths and iconography of that conflict underpin an understanding of what war means across much of the world.

It seems appropriate, then, as we prepare for war in Iraq, that George W. Bush should be immersing himself in the words of a British writer from the Great War. His choice from the canon could hardly be more telling. Not for Bush the grimly inspired ironies of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, nor the poignant, painful questioning of Wilfred Owen. Instead, every morning at dawn, the US President devotes himself to the exhortations of Oswald Chambers, a Scottish evangelist who died while serving as an army chaplain in Egypt in 1917.

Chambers’s little book, My Utmost for the Highest, provides a daily devotional commentary alongside a biblical text. It is uncompromising stuff, “full of spiritual pluck and athleticism” in the writer’s words, advocating absolute devotion to the will of God. That Bush should be reading this before going into battle says much about the religious belief that permeates his Administration, and much about the way the conflict will be fought and interpreted. It is also central to explaining the disquiet of nations with embedded secular political traditions, most notably France, when faced with the most overtly Christian American President of modern times. The full story...

Several other writers, including Norman Mailer in the New York Review of Books, addressed this point this week. Mailer suggests the insane drive for empire might logically reflect the desparate need those who accumulated obscene wealth in the Niineties feel to create a military police state apparatus to guard their ill-gotten gains.and status from the lower classes.

In the 1930s, you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed. It may be that empire depends on an obscenely wealthy upper-upper class who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, are bound to feel no great allegiance in the pit of their heart for democracy. If this insight is true, then it can also be said that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the Nineties may have created an all-but-irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to empire. That would safeguard those great and quickly acquired gains. Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he's doing for the future of empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?

Considering the late hour and the immutable battle plan, these various writings evoke have the sense of foxhole prayers uttered in the last moments before the illumination rounds go up to light a pre-dawn attack, an attack which is risky for all but the politicians who order it.