Bush in a Bubble

[morgan_dhu]

I'm not sure where he thinks he's going, but George W. Bush clearly has left the world that most of us live in far behind. I had thought he had a limited grasp on reality, but recent reports make it evident that I was being far too generous.

Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times reported last week that during a Monday August 14 "lunch at the Pentagon that included the president’s war cabinet and several outside experts," Bush expressed the following sentiments, which strike me as the maunderings of someone totally dissociated from what is happening in the Middle East.

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.

...

More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended. Source

So let me get this straight - Bush doesn't understand why the Iraqi people don't support an occupying army, and he doesn't understand why many people living in the Middle East would rather support Hezbollah than support the U.S.

Now I don't give Hezbollah a pass for killing civilians any more than I give the U.S. or Israel a pass to do the same - a war crime is a war crime no matter who committed it - but doesn't it strike anyone in the White Bubble that just maybe, trying to understand why some people in Iraq, and Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories might prefer Hezbollah or Hamas over America might help them figure out how to try and, in the sad cliche, win some hearts and minds? Or are they just going to keep on killing until everyone who doesn't like them is dead, and they don't have to ask themselves these kinds of questions any more?

Comments

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Good piece on Bush's psychology by Juan Cole here (http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/bushs-arab-dream-palace-is-it.html).

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link. Very interesting piece, indeed. I find it interesting to observe how many people perceive a pathology - even if there's some disagreement over what its exact nature might be - in Bush.

At the same time, I have the impression that Cheney is more likely to be represented as, not pathological, but purely "evil."

Maybe it's because we know that Cheney is actually capable and effective, while we suspect that Bush would be nowhere without his - or his father's - associates.

[victoriacatlady.livejournal.com]

It's odd to me that there's so much emphasis on the evil of Cheney. Yet he hardly ever appears in the news. Apparently he's the ultimate eminence gris, the shadowy power behind the throne.

I was hugely struck by one of the comments to Juan Cole's article, most of which I'm reproducing below:

If you examine US foriegn policy over the years, what we see during Bush's reign is more or less an exaggerated, over-the-top version of what previous administrations have been doing. This administration is much less inhibited in its demonstration of the "narcissism" that has infiltrated many aspects of American culture.

Yes, that seems right. All my life the U.S. has been engaged in one war or another, only a few of which became large enough to appear in the daily news, but all of which were examples of bullying from a sense of entitlement.

Narcissism, in its subtle but pervasive essence, has become a virtue in America. The American identity depends on the core belief that America is the best country in the World.
It never failes to amuse me how Americans find it surprising that people in other countries may surpass them in one aspect of life or the other.

Hell, it surprises me sometimes how Americans don't believe anyone can equal them, let alone surpass them. Surely no one else has a Constitution or a Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of speech, for instance.

What this leads to is a tendency for the masses to actually elect the more narcissistic candidates. It is, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Yes, I can believe that. And it does seem that it has to reach its extreme before it can fall -- essentially the only way such a powerful system can be destroyed is by undermining itself through its own hubris. Which is what seems to be happening now.