According to Thomas Merton, they want it. They want war. It's not that they want peace and a better way of life for the Iraqi people blah, blah. It's not that they want security and freedom for us. They want the war. As if they have a chip, not on their shoulder but in their brains and it is programmed for war.

Thomas Merton believed what the rest of the world is trying to tell Bush, Cheney and their tapestry of advisers: war will exacerbate all problems - it will bury the chip deeper in some and release it in others but war will only make more war - more violence - more anger - and more of what war has always given us.

War is not, as Rumsfeld told a sea of soldiers in camouflage, a difficult means to a positive end. Thomas Merton believed that for the likes of Rumsfeld, war is the end. It is their moment to do the irresistible. They have strong-armed their way to the top and now they can have what they want even as they say they wish they didn't have to want it. Yes - those of us who are more suspicious of their stated motives can say it's about oil and neo-colonialism - that may very well be the subtext to the text of their rhetoric - but Merton believes that even beneath the subtext is the intoxicating pull of war in these mysterious psyches. Like drunkards - war is the apple of their bloodshot eyes.

Merton, a trappist monk, would say that if Mr. Bush in fact had Christ as his philosophical hero he would be on the phone daily with Saddam Hussein. He would send e-mails - he would talk this drama down off the ledge. But that message of Christ has no place in an unabashed appetite for deadly "justice". He had the stomach for the death penalty as governor and he'll have the stomach for war as president.

Thomas Merton wrote in the 1960's that, "the motive for which men are led to fight today is that war is necessary to destroy those who threaten our peace." Merton calls this "pseudologic" and that "...war, in fact, is a complete suspension of reason. This is at once its danger and the source of immense attraction...the awful danger of war is not so much that force is used when reason has broken down but that reason unconsciously inhibits itself beforehand in order that it may break down and in order that resort to force may become inevitable."

We are in the middle of that perverse process right now. A clueless cabal agitates and sells their nobility as they lay the groundwork for war and tolerate the objections. They "understand" the natural apprehensions of informed and learned people of good will but they are further along in the decision-making and they may or may not wait for the rest of the world to "catch up."

Once the bombs drop and the blood flows they seem confident that the others will be absorbed by their pseudologic. We'll see dancing in the streets of Baghdad - we will view videos of the confiscated weapons and exposed labs where WMDs have been percolating and we will be told that we got there just in time. Thousands of lives later we will be told that we are that much safer now.

According to Thomas Merton, the only weapons of mass destruction are those chips in the fevered brains of the men and women in charge and until they are defused nothing and no one can ever be safe.

Bill C. Davis is a playwright http://www.billcdavis.com/

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