After two weeks of great cuisine and culture in Positano and Rome, I returned to the U.S. only to learn that it's still news in my country - the United States of Amnesia — when another insider from the Bush administration admits that President Bush eagerly sought war with Iraq. Indeed, the media are falling over themselves in order to cycle, recycle and spin Scott McClellan's less than startling revelations about warmonger Bush (for whom McClellan retains residual affection).
Nevertheless, McClellan deserves credit for his focus on the terrible downside of the "permanent campaign" mentality that afflicts politics in Washington. It goes far to explain why the Bush administration could win elections, but govern so disastrously.
However, McClellan's most banal allegation is his charge that "Bush was a leader unable to acknowledge that he got it wrong, unwilling to grow in office by learning from his mistakes — too stubborn to change and grow." More than a decade ago, Americans who were paying attention (and, indeed, that's the catch!) knew Bush was America's version of Oskar Matzerath (in Gunter Grass's novel, The Tin Drum) - a petulant child who banged his drum and shrieked while refusing to grow up.
But, whereas fictional Oskar's refusal to grow up was a precocious
response to the injustice and hypocrisy he found among adults in Nazi
Germany, Bush's inability to grow was the consequence of having
everything in life handed to him - including the presidency - and of
having every mistake mitigated by his parents, business associates or
Republican party sycophants. As Ann Richards famously observed: Bush
"was born on third base and thought he hit a triple." Spared serious
opportunities to struggle and the serious consequences of his many
failures, Bush had little reason to change and grow.
Given Bush's life of coddling and impairment, one shouldn't be
surprised to learn that he still held fast to the possibility of
achieving greatness. McClellan confirms it with his assertion: "As I
have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve
greatness."
Bush's observation does not appear to have been innocuous. Instead, it
appears to be self-referential and psychopathic, a possibility that
escapes McClellan's scrutiny. Simply ask yourself: "Who else, other
than a psychopath, would believe that the al Qaeda attacks during his
presidency were not evidence of personal failure, but a sign that God
had chosen him specifically to conduct the 'war on terror.' Who else,
but a psychopath, would confide to a foreign leader that God told him
to attack Iraq. And who else, but a psychopath, would assure Rev. Pat
Robertson that 'we're not going to have any casualties in Iraq?'" I
suspect it's the very same psychopath who, in his gut, believes that
"only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness."
McClellan's assertion bolsters those made earlier by Mickey Herskowitz,
a Bush family friend, who claimed that, in 1999, Bush was "thinking
about invading Iraq." Why? Because, in Bush's view, "one of the keys to
being seen as a great leader is to be seen as commander in chief."
Thus, some four years before giving the order to invade Iraq, Bush
believed: "Start a small war, pick a country where there is
justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade." [See Helen Thomas,
"Light Shed on Questions About War," Nov. 5, 2004]
Granted, in McClellan's interpretation, reshaping the Middle East — not
war per se — is the key to Bush's goal of achieving personal greatness.
But, Bush and his advisers eventually concluded that such reshaping
could only be accomplished through war. Moreover, because "Bush and his
advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not
support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of
transforming the Middle East," they commenced "shading the truth" about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to al Qaeda while
intentionally "ignoring…intelligence to the contrary." All of which
leads McClellan to conclude that Bush "managed the crisis in a way that
almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible
option."
Even worse, we know that Bush compelled his National Security Council
to plan regime change in Iraq from the very first days of his
presidency. As Treasury Secretary and NSC member Paul O'Neill put it:
"From the start, we were building a case against Hussein and looking at
how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country…It was all
about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President
saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'" [Ron Suskind, The Price
of Loyalty, p. 86]
Moreover, McClellan's words square precisely with the British
government's secret "Downing Street Memo" of 23 July 2002, which
asserted: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and the facts were being fixed around the policy."
Although McClellan doesn't make such an assertion, Bush's unprovoked
invasion of Iraq, under the cover of deception and lies, was an
illegal, immoral preventive war - naked aggression — that, in a just
U.S. and world, would lead to the impeachment and subsequent
incarceration of both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.
Conservative Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, got it
right when he wrote: "For misleading the American people, and launching
the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions
into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once
removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the
president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over
their sins."
Tens of thousands of Americans have been killed or severely wounded, as
have hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Iran is
ascendant in the Middle East, terrorist attacks have proliferated,
Osama bin Laden remains at large and the U.S. is despised around much
of the world. Were all of these events set in motion simply because a
psychopathic president proved incapable of asking himself whether the
coupling of "George W. Bush" with "greatness" yielded an indisputable
oxymoron?
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose
work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation,
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History,
the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President
of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
