Just what was US President George W. Bush thinking? His secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, went to meet the great oligarchs of the Middle East this week, and promised them more than US$60 billion worth of arms and ammunition, bombs, missiles and warships.
Mr Bush and Dr Rice, together with US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, are handing out multibillion-dollar weapons of death as if they were five-cent lollipops being given to children who have hoodwinked their teachers into thinking that they are good.
It is especially difficult to understand coming from a president who has enjoyed essential support from evangelical Christians and who professes to be a Christian himself. Given that evangelicals spend a lot of time speculating about the timing of the second coming of Christ and the exact site of Armageddon in the Middle East, these weapons sales are rather like some pyrotechnic acolyte of the Antichrist, lighting as many fires as possible to provoke, if not Armageddon, then the end of the world.
As a mainstream Catholic, I see this as a profoundly unchristian act. Christ spoke of love as his guiding commandment; love for God, for neighbours - and for enemies. These are weapons of hate, destruction and war. Love doesn't come into it for Mr Bush, US Vice-President Dick Cheney or Dr Rice. Instead, it is their misguided view of the tough, practical politics of the modern Middle East.
Here, too, they are wrong. They are wrong to imagine they will help to contain Iran and its nuclear ambitions; wrong to imagine that arms sales make the US safer; and wrong to think that Mr Bush's professed aims of bringing democracy and security to the Middle East will be in any way enhanced by this stupid action.
The only justification for the arms package is that it will help the US military industrial complex, whose spokesmen are already crowing about the extra income and jobs, which, they claim, would only have gone to the likes of China, France, Russia or Britain otherwise. What a sad, mad world.