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Friday, January 05, 2007

It's not about ideology, it's about whoever can save Bush's ego
Posted by Jill | 6:42 AM
The L.A. Times makes the mistake of painting Bush's plan to throw more bodies at the problem of Iraq as a "resurgence of the neocons", as if anything as complex as the ideology of empire lay behind the decision:

Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war's intellectual architects — the so-called neoconservatives — have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.

Eventually, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Defense department's most senior neocon, went to the World Bank. His Pentagon colleague Douglas J. Feith departed for academia. John R. Bolton left the State Department for a stint at the United Nations.

But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military analyst at a prominent think tank, the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago.

In their view, not enough troops were being set aside to stabilize the country. They also worried that the Pentagon had formulated a plan that concentrated too heavily on killing insurgents rather than securing law and order for Iraqi citizens.

These neoconservative thinkers have long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis and earn their trust.

But until now, it was an argument that fell on deaf ears.

"We have been pretty consistently in this direction from the outset," said Kagan, whose December study detailing his strategy is influencing the administration's current thinking. "I started making this argument even before the war began, because I watched in dismay as we messed up Afghanistan and then heard with dismay the rumors that we would apply some sort of Afghan model to Iraq."

If Bush goes ahead with the surge idea, along with a shift to a more aggressive counterinsurgency, it would in many ways represent a wholesale repudiation of the outgoing Pentagon leadership.

These leaders — particularly former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the departing Middle East commander — strongly resisted more U.S. troops and a larger push into troubled neighborhoods out of fear it would prevent Iraqis from taking over the job themselves and exacerbate the image of America as an occupying power.


The attempted whitewash of Donald Rumsfeld's reputation is a clue about how off-base this article is. Having been offered a ladder to use to crawl out of the hole by his father's guys, he has chosen instead to keep digging, egged on by the neocons. Why keep digging? It all goes back to Bush's psychopathology, his need to never, ever admit to being wrong, no matter what the evidence. Aside from the obviously sexual potency implications of describing the effort as a "surge", it allows Bush to at least temporarily escape the painful reality that what he has done is nothing less than implementing the worst foreign policy debacle in a generation. As Dr. Justin Frank told BuzzFlash the other day:

He is essentially saying that he can’t be wrong and he is not ever going to be proven wrong. What seems like dithering or failure to react to the Baker Commission, is much more of a direct reaction, which is a way of ignoring it completely. He is very honest when he says I’m not going to change. He said that to Tim Russert in 2004. He also said that a couple of months ago, that if everybody in the world disagreed with him, he would sort of stay with Laura and his dog, and that that would be that. He is not going to change.

In his Wednesday press conference, he started talking about bipartisan behavior, but hee tried to reshape what seemed to me to be a voter mandate about getting out of Iraq, or changing course, into a message supporting his own needs, and he’s always done that.

It comes down to his psychic survival. It’s the fear of being wrong. It’s the fear of shame and humiliation at needing other people. It’s a fear of dependency, like we were talking about earlier about the antipathy towards psychoanalysis. He is determined to never be wrong, and to never make a mistake, because shame is a terrible thing for him.

[snip]

...there is a grandiose and somewhat paranoid aspect to him. The word I use in the book was megalomanic, which is that he has a corner on what is right and what is wrong. And he feels that so strongly that nobody is going to be able to shake him. It is a form of a delusion, where a person feels that nothing that can affect them, and nothing can change their point of view. When you’re stuck to a delusion, that’s that.

[snip]

I think it’s reductionistic to say that it’s rejecting his father and turning the Baker report into an intervention by his father. And by reductionistic, I mean, it oversimplifies things. I think what he does is he turns everybody who disagrees with him into his father. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually the concrete representation of his father, like Baker, or the voters who vote against staying in Iraq. We have become his father. We are the people he is now defying. He will turn everybody, any authority, anybody who disagrees with him, into a father figure who he’d have to defy.


Whether you have loved ones in the military or not, the idea of a president's psychopathology driving the future of the entire Middle East and determining the future of hundreds of thousands of young American military personnel; his neuroses exploited and exacerbated by the neocon noise machine, aided and abetted by the man who wants to badly to succeed Bush as president that he's willing to sacrifice his own reputation to do it, that should make your blood run cold.
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