[Peace-discuss] Bush is nuts (II)

[C. G. Estabrook]

Various shrinks quoted by Capitol Hill Blue suggest how the Bush
administration's aggression might be bound up with Bush's own Oedipal
struggles. In a talk at the mosque in October of 2001 (and, as I recall,
in the AWARE news notes), as the assault on Afghanistan began, I mentioned
that possibility on the basis of a peculiar article in USA Today:

===

A generation ago the US launched wars against poor countries in Southeast
Asia and killed millions; Americans were told that it was a necessary step
in the crusade against communism.  Now in the midst of a war against a
poor county in Southwest Asia, we are told that it is a necessary step in
what the president called a "crusade against terrorism."

Mr. Bush was quickly taken aside and told, perhaps without explanation,
that that term would not do.  But he was undoubtedly right in connecting
the two crusades, as he has now done several times.  And he has extended
the parallel to the campaign against fascism, the account of which by the
Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was called _Crusade in Europe_.

Our president has gone so far as to connect the crusades on the level of
personal psychology.  It's difficult not to hear a reference to his own
family in this careful plant in _USA Today_: "Bush has told advisers that
he believes confronting this enemy is a chance for him and his fellow baby
boomers to refocus their lives and prove they have the same kind of valor
and commitment their fathers showed in World War II."

===

But as this context indicates I think it would be a serious mistake to
conclude that the USG's vicious policies are mere craziness or simply the
result of Bush's own psychopathology.  "Though this be madness, yet there
is method in't," as an adviser to another murderous chief magistrate says.

We might profitably ask about the system (and the people) who managed to
place an obvious nut-case in the first office of our government,
especially as the same system (and people) have provided as an alternative
to said nut-case a member of (literally) the same club, perhaps at once
less nutsy and more pliable to elite interests.  The alternative also has
the questionable advantage of having killed people directly, whereas Bush
(so far as we know) has only done so by direction, if on a vastly larger
scale.

But the war we are opposing is not about nut-boy. He's only the mask on
murder, even if his own mask is slipping a bit. In the rest of the world
it's generally recognized that our government's goal is the establishment
of permanent military bases in a dependent state at the heart of the
world's major energy reserves.

That goal is not limited to the current administration. President Carter's
National Security Adviser recently wrote that "America's security role in
the region [that is to say, its military dominance] gives it indirect but
politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are
also dependent on energy exports from the region." That's what Americans
are killing, torturing, and dying for -- no wonder we have to have crazy
folks fronting for it.

--CGE