Why?

by Phineas Dash

Why is he doing this? He is going to bomb Iraq, invade Iraq and now he has said he will occupy Iraq after Saddam is disposed of, until he is satisfied with a new government. He is going to do this with or without United Nations Security Council approval, with or without allies, with or without bases in Turkey or other help from governments in the region, and clearly without the approval of world opinion or the American people.

He is going to do this with few allies to share the costs, with no plans for how to pay for the costs, after telling the nation's governors already unable to pay for vital programs that they're on their own.

Instead he has made this invasion and occupation only the first step to transform the Middle East, and he justifies using this military power with a doctrine that suggests he will do it again repeatedly elsewhere in the world, to destroy governments he feels may threaten American security, and/or to replace them with democracies, as he defines the term.

Why?

As head of the Dash Brothers philosophy department, it is left to me to attempt an answer.

Every matter of importance, as Scott Peck points out, is overdetermined---it always has more than one cause. If the question is why the Bush administration is doing this, the well documented close ties of VP Cheney and other administration powers to oil and other corporations that stand to profit has to be part of the answer. The foreign policy pronounced and military strategies discussed are generally the work of exactly the same Republicans who first tasted power in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and were devised partly in their years of bitter exile during the Clinton administration. On the economic side, crippling the federal government was part of the Reagan agenda, and led in part to the lack of oversight that permitted corporate highway robbery, and the privatizing of public services that's led to more highway robbery.

But I suspect that when we come to George Bush himself, there's something else going on. His basic personality was there for all to see during the campaign: the skilled extravert, the easy manipulator, the salesman; emotionally immature, intellectually unskilled and undeveloped, with an overriding assumption of entitlement. He's the CEO as PR man. He was dangerous mostly for the people he would return to power. That, of course, was plenty dangerous.

But his "vision" was pretty much what a recent Doonesbury comic described: "no sex in the Oval Office." Then came 9-11, and I'm convinced I saw the moment of his transformation on live TV. He was standing on the rubble at the World Trade Center. He looked uncertain, uncomfortable. He started to speak to those who were still sifting through the wreckage. He didn't start well. Then he realized that some couldn't hear him. And he made a joke, something to the effect that the people who did this would soon be hearing America clearly. He got a rousing cheer. It surprised him. But that was it---that was the moment. G.W. found a purpose.

I'm only guessing, of course. I have no idea what latent beliefs this moment helped to galvanize. But this is my speculation: he became a true believer. He likes talking tough, and getting admired for being a strong leader. But he seems to believe this: that the United States is the salvation of the world, and its military might is the instrument of that salvation. I doubt that anyone around him is telling him anything different. You da man, is more like what he's hearing.

An extravert who is not a thinking person is easy prey to becoming convinced by a single simple belief, and becoming fixated on it, and finding clarity and purpose in it. Jungians point out that we’re most vulnerable at our weakest point, what they call our inferior function. It’s why thinking people get done in by sex, for example. People who don’t have a lot of thinking skills get done in by Big Ideas that make them feel smart and above all, right.

There are those who support this administration, and I would guess some who are in this administration, with a related motivation: they believe that the moment of apocalypse is at hand, that the final battle of good and evil will take place in the Middle East. The land now within the borders of Iraq is fraught with significance in the pre-history of humanity, especially for adherents of the desert religions: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Their mythologies dominate the cultures now in contention. The fact that the most contentious and extreme wings of each of these religions is currently in power in nations or regions armed to the teeth lends some credence to this apocalyptic scenario. (Of course, they may all be trumped by North Korea, now threatening nuclear holocaust in their part of the world. They are a little paranoid about being attacked by the U.S. I wonder where they got that idea.)

There are apparently some who expect this definitive showdown in the erstwhile Holy Land, and assume that in the end they'll be the ones who are saved, because they are the right and the righteous. I don't know if G.W. Bush's conservative Christian beliefs go that far. But to describe his speech last week as messianic, and to describe the Bush administration foreign policy as evangelical (as a Frontline program recently did), seems to be part of the answer.

It may be that Bush himself, along with the evangelical right, believes this to be a moral crusade, for which they are willing to spill the blood of everybody but themselves. The political right, some of whom are surely believers in a Christian mission or an apocalyptic showdown, or both, is not given to charitable behavior. Their scorn and hatred for anyone opposing them has no visible restraint; it's become part of their game. They find the moral absolutes congenial, especially those which justify immoral, unethical behavior, as well as behavior antithethical to civilized democracy. Bush can talk grandly about overcoming the evildoers. The ideological footsoldiers can handle the dirty tricks and character assassinations.

The Cheney faction may or may not believe any of the theology, but they don't have to. It works to their advantage, since they apparently believe this war will make them money, though I find it difficult to credit their judgment or even their sanity on that score.

Maybe it's still sinking in, that the vision described in Bush's speech to an ideological right wing audience went beyond the "nation-building" he once decried, to become the announcement of American empire-building.

At least this much has been clarified: UN inspection, even coupled with more limited military options, was never seriously considered as a solution because disarming Iraq was never the complete goal. Taking over Iraq is the goal that Bush and Cheney agree on. Bush may be naïve enough to believe the American Empire will only be a temporary necessity, and democracy will bloom once that damn satanic Saddam is gone to hell.

At the moment that the right wingnuts are vilifying the French for daring to question the Bush delusions, Jonathan Schell points out in Harper's that the nations of "Old Europe," which immolated themselves for the first half of the twentieth century in the World War, parts I and II, are now becoming a single peaceful political unit. We should be celebrating and studying what they have accomplished, instead of demeaning them and ourselves.

Old Europe is dealing with mixed races, clashing cultures and classes, economic challenges, and pretty much everything America has to deal with. But they're facing up to environmental challenges, not denying them. They're trying to solve social problems, not hide them. They have far less violent crime, despite the fact that in order to be allowed into the European Union, a country cannot have capital punishment. In standing up to the military and economic colossus of the world, France and Germany are acting with far greater courage than the political lackeys feeding off the ill gotten gains of rich corporations, the radio-inflamed bigmouths of America, safe in their righteousness and cynicism, far from harms way.

Zealots have been stopped short of causing absolute catastrophe in recent decades by those who asserted the primacy of political calculation. That's not happening this time, at least not so far. The political will necessary to sustain a long war, or even a long, costly and bloody empire-building occupation, does not exist. The economics of a costly war and occupation in a recession, with the government proposing to raise less money than it raises now, make no sense. There is no moral consensus that the announced ends of this war will justify the death and destruction it will cause. There is no general agreement that this war will effect those ends, or even that those ends are the war's real purpose. There is no moral consensus that this kind of war to prevent the possibility of being attacked is moral. Some people still believe that the question is whether the war is necessary, and they mostly don't believe that it is.

It may be that Americans are waking up to the fact that this is not just another reality TV show. Right now President Bush's poll rating is more than 10 points lower than President Clinton's was when he was being impeached.

Maybe the Canadian compromise will slow them down, but it's not likely. All we can hope for is that our system is resilient enough to survive until regime change can be effected in 2004, in Washington.