When politicians' actions stop making sense, conspiracy theories flourish. It's a way to avoid having to face up to the fact that our political system is so hopelessly broken that we would elect grossly incompetent people into office. The theory that George Bush invaded Iraq to fulfill a biblical prophesy isn't new (in fact, i heard the same thing during the first Gulf War as well), but it's been picking up steam lately. It's discussed in part in this article by Kevin Phillips about his new book American Theocracy:

The excesses of the Religious Right in the Bush years represent a particular danger.. Some 45% of U.S. Christians believe in the End Times and Armageddon, and Tim LaHaye's lurid Left Behind series helped mobilize them and shape Washington awareness of their importance. Centrist religious leaders believe it's a gross distortion of the Bible, but there’s no doubt that a large percentage of the Bush electorate believes that war and chaos in the holy lands (including Iraq) heralds the Second Coming.

More here from the NYT's review of American Theocracy:

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life - radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" - the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive. (My emphasis)

It's easy to actually start believing that Bush believes this. There's plenty of crazy religious fanatics out there that do believe it, and Bush seems to be very religious himself. He also has made enough comments indicating that he talks to God and that God wanted him to invade Iraq. Furthermore, every rationale given for the invasion has turned out to be forced, so either the people in power are incredibly stupid or they are wacky enough to believe in this sort of thing. I lean towards stupid (and corrupt, and blinded by ideology), but maybe it's a case of Bush himself believing some of this, and his handlers going along with it for their own reasons. In any event, i see more people out there turning to the idea that this is a religous crusade.

Here's Christopher Priest, comic book writer:

The popular notion floating out there is that Bush somehow sees himself as being an agent of the APocalypse and that Iraq (Babylon) is some kind of holy war.

I have severe doubts Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would be comfortable with the notion of President Bush ushering in the Apocalypse, but religious fringe groups are already speculating about Daniel's biblical prophecy (Daniel 8: 3-8), noting that ancient Babylon is modern day Iraq and claiming that the ram signifies fundamentalist Islam and Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant Dr Ayman all-Zawahiri represent the horns of the ram described in Daniel's dream, one horn being taller and younger than the other. Bush's 2001 call for a global organization against terrorism happen to spell the acronym "GOAT." This is, indeed, fringe thinking, but what if this business somehow plays into the president's motives? That the United States must act as the arm of God and sword of righteousness? Could this all be some Christian version of an Islamic jihad or holy war?