Oedipus Wrecks

What are we doing in Iraq? Do we have any perspective on how we got into this mess? On why, almost two and a half years after we went in, we've spent all this time, money and blood to get rid of a dictator who was not a threat to us, creating nothing but anarchy and chaos in the process?

Some people blame what they consider to be the evil neoconservatives in the West Wing. They're the ones, some believe, who wanted war in Iraq even before Bush was inaugurated, and the minute they got a like-minded president in the Oval Office they pushed and prodded him until he finally caved in and did their bidding. In this scenario, Bush is merely the puppet, and the neocons are the puppet masters, secretly pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Some people on the left actually believe this scenario (some on the right do as well), but I don't think it's true.

Frankly, I think the truth is sadder and more pathetic.

I think this is solely George W. Bush's war. He wanted it and went after it from the day he was sworn into office. He wanted to find a way to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and he wasn't going to stop until he did it – and he didn't care if he had to lie to the American people to do it. He knew it didn't matter. He knew that, so long as the outcome was successful, no one would care about how it began. So he went ahead, confident of victory.

But why? Why spend so much time and effort lying to get into a war? People don't usually do things unless they are strongly motivated to do so. What was Bush's motivation for war? What was in it for him?

The answer is both simple and sad. Americans have fought many wars over the past two and a quarter centuries. Some of these wars have been necessary, and some have been unnecessary. All have been costly in lives and human suffering. But this war has been unique, because this has been the first Freudian war in our nation's history.

All his life George W. Bush has labored in the shadow of his father, and has suffered by comparison. Bush the elder was a war hero. Bush the younger blew off his last year of military service. Bush the elder went to Texas and made his fortune. Bush the younger tried to emulate his father's business success and failed miserably, losing millions of dollars of other people's money and having to be bailed out time and again by his father's friends. Bush the elder made friends and compiled an impressive resume. Bush the younger was at the age of forty a drunk and a failure.

It must have galled him. He couldn't even get elected president on his own – he had to have the Supreme Court bend the rules, violate the Constitution and sneak him in the back door of the White House by default. But once he was sworn in, he must have thought that this was finally his chance to prove that he was a bigger man than his father. He would show the world who the real man was. The son who once drunkenly threatened his father to a fistfight would now prove that he was the man his father wasn't by doing the one thing his father was unable to accomplish – put Saddam Hussein behind bars.

Could anything be more pathetic? To send young men and women to fight and die in a war under false pretenses just to prove you're more macho than your dad? But I believe that's just what George W. Bush has done – and 1,700 Americans are dead because of it.

And if that isn't an impeachable offense, I don't know what is.

Tom Moran

[Note, 7/27: I wrote this post before reading the book "Bush on the Couch," which makes some of the same points as I do here, but at far greater length. I highly recommend it, along with Peter Singer's "The President of Good and Evil," if you want to find out about the psyche of the man currently occupying the Oval Office.]