bush's pre-2000 iraq war plans, political capital

According to Bush Sr. and Jr. ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz in a great article by Russ Baker.

Not time to write much, but wanted to note the following:

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

That notion of "political capital". I think this is a great term for what the neocons (as opposed to, say, radical Christian fundamentalists) admire about Bush. His political capital. It's not essentially different from love of monetary capital. Capital can be used to purchase other things, but the "best" use for it is to put it work generating more capital. Business and politics as the same kind of machines -- capital-generators. One produces monetary capital, the other political, and both are viewed as absolutely amoral, completely objective processes in which there's one and only one rule: whatever produces more capital -- do it.