To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican
party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the
decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial
matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any
mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the
ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax,
capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and
immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they
turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles
away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and
near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was
"watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The
motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to
Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to
absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it
wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the
extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people
of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign
affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we
still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an
extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers
cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to
Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was
the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's
occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle
East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied
by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the
antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will
lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will
either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to
Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is
that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who
believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and
wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the
worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to
watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents
being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven
years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This
means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US
Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there),
sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding
ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle
with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European
Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for
their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the
guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly,
Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my
view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby
exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you
might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should
take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one
point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled
with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are
all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debat ing its
constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the south Atlantic, Hamas
has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming
is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse
among teenagers and a weak showing by the antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That
their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American
pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or
movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999
suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The
best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the
Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a
"fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes
it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will
happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe
it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John
Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several
prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay
(who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle
Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel
last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no
moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much
of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on
Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its
members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation
(9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great
river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They
batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for
Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of
Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian
fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this.
Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US
electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of
secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the
electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a
personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there,
his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in
other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli
aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to
listen to these people. He would also be mad no

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to
think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing
superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion
that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable." H.L. Mencken