Dubya is hearing voices and his pals are getting the $30bn message

IT WAS with a certain sardonic smile that I scanned the headline in one of the Sunday papers last weekend: “Bush to tell IRA it must renounce violence.”

The IRA has been on ceasefire for years, has decommissioned arms and weapons twice and has been more silent than Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, if you remember him.

It's ironic, isn't it, and a bit much, that the republicans - Irish ones - must take advice on peace from a man who has contrived a war with Iraq for no other reason than America wants to control its oil and who, as Governor of Texas, was a serial despatcher to death row.

George Dubya's economic philosophy is simplicity itself: America needs a secure source of oil, Iraq has it, let's go get it.

What is not quite so simple to understand is why Tony Blair, the man who won the historic landslide election victory for the British Labour Party, should allow himself politically to be joined at the hip with a man whose "election" to the White House is suspect, to put it mildly.

Blair, who is obviously an intellectual giant in comparison to Bush, has inexplicably gone along with a man who sees himself leading a posse rather than a nation.

Even now, with a revolt in his own party gathering momentum, Blair seems unable to extricate himself from a situation which will be apocalyptic in its culmination.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave him an out when he said that the Yanks would go it alone if necessary, recognising that Blair was in the political mire."To the extent that they are able to participate in the event that the president decides to use force that would obviously be welcomed. To the extent they are not, they are work-arounds and they would not be involved, at least in that phase of it," said the condescending Mr Rumsfeld.

Tony Blair did not grasp the political lifeline handed to him, and stubbornly stuck with a decision which is anathema to the majority of the people who supported him.

He has only himself to blame and the French, of course.

George Walker Bush, on the other hand, has already lined up the Lord as the fall-guy when the Iraqi adventure turns inevitably into a nightmare. Before each cabinet meeting, he invokes the higher power to guide him in his deliberations, and he is now hearing voices.

When he heard it first, Dubya thought the voice said: "Saddam, tomorrow; Saddam tomorrow."

In actual fact, the voice said: "Sodom and Gomorrah, Sodom and Gomorrah."

Far from telling him to invade lraq, the message was a reminder to him of what happened to the biblical sites. But he, being George Dubya Bush, got it wrong again.

Both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed at the same time by an enormous conflagration, when the Lord rained down burning sulphur on them because of the goings-on there.

There is ample evidence of subterranean deposits of a petroleum-based substance called bitumen, similar to asphalt, in the region south of the Dead Sea.

According to the Bible, Abraham viewed the destruction from a vantage point west of the Dead Sea, and it records what he saw: "He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace" (Genesis 19:28). Dense smoke suggests smoke from a petroleum-based fire, but whether it was leaded or unleaded, the good book does not record.

That was the message that the God-fearing Dubya missed.

The rest of the cabinet, on hearing GW had the benefit of divine intervention, indulged him knowing, as they did, how he was inclined to get things mixed up. Dubya's tongue and his brain are only distant relations, and they don't meet too often. Now they're about to start a war, just to indulge him further.

The only message Tony Blair is getting is from the opinion polls and his own backbenchers, and it's not coming down in tongues of fire - not yet.

Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, delivered a perfectly reasoned and impeccable presentation to the 15-member Security Council last Friday.

Saddam had proved helpful on some issues, not others. There was still plenty of work to be done, but the inspections were making steady progress.

"If we were given more months, I'd welcome it. It seems such a short time to close the door. It will take not years or weeks, but months," he said, and was immediately offered ten days by the Brits.

Then a voice from the wilderness grated on the nerves. Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, along with prominent Pentagon hawks, argued that another deadline could only invite further Iraqi deceit.

So a deadline was agreed between Britain and the US, which coincides with St Patrick's Day.

Last January 30, Bush had set a timetable for disarmament of "weeks, not months." By the end of this month March 30 two months would have passed, and for the president's sake that could not be allowed happen. Of course the contrived war is not just about oil. There is far more at stake, and it has nothing to do with the human rights of the unfortunate Iraqi people.

It's got to do with money contracts worth billions of dollars to be doled out to friends of the US administration through the reconstruction of a country which their military machine will level. Political largesse on an incredible scale.

One of the companies which will benefit is Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was at one time chief executive. Now, ain't that surprising!

Already the US administration has invited companies to compete for projects which could begin in Iraq immediately after the war.

Plans for the reconstruction contracts worth up to $900m are being co-ordinated by the United States Agency for International Development (USAid).

The agency is said to have discreetly sent out requests for tenders from at least five companies involved in infrastructure and engineering. Education, health, transport and energy schemes are involved in what would be the biggest rebuilding project since World War II.

Plans for the reconstruction have been detailed in a privately distributed USAid document, called "Vision for post-conflict Iraq."

A US Aid spokeswoman said that the companies were chosen because of their proven ability, and that it was policy to use US companies for projects funded by the American taxpayer. Non-US companies were free, through their governments, to organise their own business, she said.

Among the companies invited to tender is the Texas-based Halliburton, where Dick Cheney served as chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

Halliburton has already been reported to have acquired a contract to oversee fire-fighting operations at Iraqi oilfields after any invasion.

Many more contracts will have to be awarded after any possible war.

Estimates of the cost of rebuilding a post-war Iraq vary widely unofficial figures from the UN suggest it could be as much as $30bn.