The best analysis of Bush's 'Mission' ever here. "Bush's Texas Chainsaw Massacre"

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050107D.shtml

By Tom Engelhardt

"You have to reach across the chasm of Bush administration disasters - from Kabul and Baghdad to New Orleans and Walter Read Medical Center - to another moment, another mood in the United States. If you do, perhaps the first thing you'll note about that magic-hour speech is its globally messianic and militarized nature. The President, for instance, congratulated the returning sailors and airmen in this over-the-top way: "All of you - all in this generation of our military - have taken up the highest calling of history." It's the sort of line that brings to mind one of the President's favorite hymns, "A Charge to Keep": "To serve the present age,/ My calling to fulfill:/ O may it all my powers engage/ To do my master's will!" It also brings to mind Bush's post-9/11 slip of the tongue when he spoke of his beloved "war" as: "this crusade, this war on terrorism."

And what exactly was that calling, the highest in history, for which they were fighting? A President, just off the plane ride of his dreams, was perfectly willing to spell it out. It was nothing less - he announced from the deck of a ship whose planes had just pummeled Saddam Hussein's Iraq - than "the peace of the world." And the "peace" the President had in mind wouldn't be some namby-pamby cooperative endeavor. It would be an armed demand of the rest of the world. After all, the invasion Bush had launched just weeks before, hadn't been an ordinary military operation, a simple superpower "cakewalk" over a pathetic force hollowed out by years of war and fierce economic sanctions. Operation Iraqi Freedom, as it was called, was something "the world had not seen before." Talk about awesome! "You have shown the world," the President assured the Abraham Lincoln crew, "the skill and the might of the American Armed Forces" - the likes of which, the power of which, it was clear, had never been witnessed on the face of this planet in all of history from all the empires that ever were.

Invoking the American-manufactured image of Saddam's falling statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, Bush waxed enthusiastic, perhaps imagining Biblical idols dropping before the one true God: "In the images of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era." A new era! You can feel that messianic exclamation point embedded in the spirit of the claim. And it wouldn't for a second be an era in which the lion lay down with the lamb; it would be a U.S. military-enforced era of "freedom." In the American military's ability to crush enemies without harming civilians, the kind of war being fought, he swore, was nothing less than "a great moral advance."

The highest calling in history! The peace of the world! Something the world had not seen before! A new era! A great moral advance!"

...a two bit despot with the best weapons money can buy; a compliant, the fattened populace flush with the booty of decades of conquest; the corrupted chattering class who dines and laughs at the court of the Crimson King, and the ravaged vassal states, "barbarians" at the gates, waiting for any chance to deliver a crushing blow against the blood soaked empire.

Same story, different actors, and unfortunately, a predictable result.