http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/30/1059480413114.html

‘Self-appointed as God’s chosen people, Americans refuse to believe they can fail in Iraq’, writes George Monbiot.

‘So US soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons.

‘The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to “liberate” Asia and extend the realm of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted, “light the darkness of the entire world”.

‘Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.’