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CounterPunch
February
11, 2003
Inside Bush's
Brain
A Pathology of Fear and Lies
by WAYNE SAUNDERS
The debate over the impending US-led assault on
Iraq has often focused on the likely motivations to oust Saddam
Hussein and his regime.
There is the hawkish view. Namely, the
motives influencing the United States to attack Iraq stem from
a rational analysis of a set of obvious "truisms":
1) Saddam has weapons of mass destruction
and has been playing games with UN inspectors for 12 years.
2) He is linked to terrorists.
3) He has a history of aggression and
thus "threatens peace."
4) For added effect we are also reminded
that he's a really bad guy too, as if evil leaders automatically
threaten the United States.
For these reasons, we are told, he and
his regime represent a clear and present threat to the safety
and security of the United States, its "allies," the
"peace of the world," etc. and that war is the only
solution.
But such a conclusion, that this starved
and broken nation, is an immanent threat, is not based upon what
the world community thinks. It's not even based upon what US
and British intelligence thinks, or what many of their military
planners think. Nor is it based upon what the actual authors
of the so-called Iraq dossier think, (the British government
plagiarized and misrepresented their work, and in any case the
data dates back to 1991). And it's probably not what chief UN
inspector Hans Blix thinks either, not as I write this (though
his job is to describe not to prescribe).
Yet there you have it, in a nutshell,
the standard hawkish argument as to what motivates the US and
Britain: Iraq is an immanent threat because the US and British
governments say so, end of story. And if only everyone would
hurry up and get onside, then we could all get on with the business
of turning Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Tikrit to rubble.
Where to begin? Well, for starters Saddam's
only real hope of a "weapon of mass destruction," his
nuclear program, was by any reasonable analysis, dismantled years
ago. Whatever chemical or biological cocktails he may have hidden
beneath the desert sands, in some Syrian village, up his arseâ¤"wherever,
these are tactical tools for the battlefield and rather unreliable
ones at that. And on that score, his army is weak, and by all
accounts his missiles are short range and few in number. He has
not threatened his neighbours in over a dozen years.
Alleged links between al Queda and Iraq
are dubious at best, and at any rate, would signal a desperate
act of convenience and a stupid one at that. The enemy of my
enemy is my friend only works if you are capable of making friends.
Saddam has no friends. Why would he give a deadly concoction
to some loose cannon Islamists who want him dead, while giving
his main enemy, the Americans, the perfect excuse to blast him
to hell? He may prefer to go out with a blast, but by all accounts
he's rather anti-social lately.
So regardless of what scenario emerges
at the UN in the next few days or weeks, one salient fact remains
as clear as the driven snow: Iraq poses no clear and present
danger to the safety and security of the United States, or to
their tag-along British puppy.
So what can possibly be the motives?
Anti-war critics offer various conjectures.
There is the longstanding Anglo-American condominium over the
supply of mid-east oil, with Iraq straddling atop the second
largest reserves in the world. Having a compliant client in this
"vital region" (to quote Bush) is therefore mandatory.
Then there's the obvious windfall in profits for the arms sector
and the naked connections between both of these industries and
various members of the Bush cabinet. There is the neo-conservative
doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, predating Sept. 11 in which
Iraq is only the first target in an ongoing imperial foray.
There is the suggestion that Israel is
urging the US to attack in order to solidify their hegemonic
position in the Middle East. Still others suggest that it's just
Bush Junior trying to atone for the sin of Bush the Elder who
decided against capturing or killing the guy the first time round.
These and many other points certainly
have merit. Yet none alone, or even in combination fully account
for the Bush administration's monomaniacal fixation with Iraq.
To look for deeper motives, we must peer
into the collective mindset of the War Party and look for clues.
The first thing one notices is that fear mongering has become
the Bush administration's modus operendi. And if fear is the
flip side of anger, then it follows that fear mongering is the
flip side of warmongering.
But fear mongering need not always be
a case of conscious deception, although such trickery is always
at play among cynical practitioners, (and no doubt they exist
throughout the Bush administration). But it is also true that
the mongers themselves often believe their own fears have validity,
no matter how irrational.
Consider Bush himself. Equipped with
only a limited understanding of the world's complexity, he apparently
lives in a dualistic mental world of black and white, and good
and evil, as befits the fundamentalist creed. Such child-like
propensities suggest that he likely believes his own worst fears
are warranted, no matter how absurd they appear from outside
these limited mental parameters. A reasonable analysis from his
own CIA labeled Iraq a 7th level threat, Saddam a boxed-in third-rate
thug; but no matter says the boss. Because when you formulate
actions (I dare not say "policy") based upon your worst
delusional nightmares, all rationality goes out the window.
So there's a certain pathology at work
here. Of course it makes matters worse if you're a pathological
liar as well. Then you've come to believe your own lies too,
a list too long to get into here but suffice to say, that in
more honest times, the Mother of all Fibbers would have been
hung from the nearest telephone wire, pants ablaze. But apparently
Americans have come to expect those in high office to not only
lie, but to steal, cheat and murder as well. It's become rather
ho-hum.
So here we have a set of delusional pathologies
at play, lying and fear-mongering, and quite probably, succumbing
to many of these lies and fears as well. It's a deadly matrix.
Especially for the children of Baghdad whose souls and bodies
have the misfortunes of being in the targeting area of the 800
or so cruise missiles that the Commander in Chief plans to drop
on them in the first 48 hours of his great crusade.
In the highly acclaimed film "Bowling
for Columbine", documentary filmmaker Michael Moore seeks
out the reasons for America's propensity for gun violence. After
discarding several standard myths, Moore discovers that it's
really all about fear. Specifically White America has built its
edifice of power on a foundation of fear. Fear of everything
from Native Americans, to Black people, to killer African bees,
to mysterious new viruses, to badly functioning escalators. 9-11
gave fear-mongers their coup de tat.
Recall that Michael Moore was Ralph Nader's
campaign manager and in order to get out the Nader vote, he urged
against strategically voting for the Democrats. His assertion
was that when you make a decision based on fear, it never works
out.
The principle stands. Something to keep
in mind as Bush heads to war.
Post Script: a recent CBC news sound byte caught the Smirking
Chimp making yet another of his signature faux pas. While referring
to Saddam and his henchmen, Dubya almost said "the Iranian
people" but managed to fumble his way into "the Iraqi
people." Now don't you feel safe and secure?
Wayne Saunders
is a freelance writer based in Canada. He can be reached at planetway@netscape.net
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