Reply #1: tell him to read this book...

[bpilgrim]

N.Y. Times Book Review of "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century"

Phillips identifies three broad and related trends . . . that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.

Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.

more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19brink.html?_r=2&incamp=article_popular&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

peace