Article: Sleight of Hand

"If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." -- Albert Einstein

Is George W. Bush planning an attack on Iran?

Is that the real basis for his force surge in Iraq?

Is there some sort of terrorist incident planned or expected to justify an attack on Iran? Would the Bush Administration set up a "false flag" operation that either threatened or actually assaulted an American city, or American military assets overseas, possibly with weapons of mass destruction, in order to justify an attack on Iran with tactical nukes?

Do bears defecate in the woods?

The Iranians and Kurds are the only real winners so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom (originally Operation Iraqi Liberation or OIL). The Kurds have a de facto independent state in what was northern Iraq. The Iranians are within a hairsbreadth of gaining de facto control of southern Iraq and its oilfields; with the bonus of watching its most substantial potential enemy, the United States, eviscerate its military. Yet, current circumstances indicate that the Busheviks are planning an attack on Iran.

There are two critical pieces of evidence which leads me to this conclusion.

The first of these is the fact that this "surge" is going to include Patriot Surface to Air Missiles, to protect ourselves and our allies from air attack. The Iraqi insurgents do not have aircraft; and the Patriot is useless against whatever rockets that the insurgents might possess. (Those rockets would be similar to the Soviet-designed Katyushas used by Hezbollah against Israel last year.) Our Patriot surface-to-air missiles are highly useful for defending against an Iranian (or even an Iranian/Syrian) aerial counter strike against our allies, as well as U.S. airbases in Iraq, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula, employing aircraft and cruise missiles. Against Katyusha rockets, they are worthless.

The second is the appointment of Admiral William D. Fallon to head Centcom.

This is the first time a Naval officer has been appointed to that command. His specialty is aviation. I have to wonder if he wrote a paper (immediately declared Top Secret-Shoot Yourself Before Reading) in either the Navy's or the Pentagon's War Colleges, describing how to take out Iran's nuclear and other potential facilities of WMD manufacture. His appointment, together with our unprovoked assault on an Iranian Consulate in Iraq, screams that George W. Bush is planning an air and missile war against Iran.

So if George W. Bush wants to start a war against Iran, what is his motivation?

George W. Bush wishes to be remembered as a "great" President, and believes that the best way to do this is to be a successful "war time" President. This belief demonstrates President Bush's abysmal ignorance of history. The wartime Presidents who have engaged in wars for empire (Polk in the Mexican War, McKinley in the Spanish-American War) are not remembered fondly (if at all) by the American People.

Underlying George W. Bush's wish to be remembered as a "great President," is his desire (bordering on obsession) to outdo his father, President George H.W. Bush. Dubya has, I suspect, been very conflicted every time his father has-directly or indirectly-bailed his eldest son out of trouble. Arbusto, Harken Oil, the Texas Rangers baseball team, the 2000 election: each of these incidents has left President Bush 43 both grateful and resentful about his father's help in the same instant. He desperately wants to succeed where he feels his father failed: Iraq. I believe that this mindset will make it impossible for him to withdraw American troops from Iraq. This is the reason he is leaving the problem to the "next President." This is also one of the underlying reasons he wishes to attack Iran, to distract the American people from his growing failure in Iraq.

I would like to now consider President Bush's other psychological (and psycho-pathological) motivations and drives. Dr. Justin Frank has already dealt extensively with Mr. Bush's mental state in his excellent book, Bush on the Couch, as have many other individuals on various websites, most recently clinical psychologist Dr. Abbas Sadeghian, in an article on OpEd News.com, The Neuropsychology of George Bush (January 12, 2007).

We know that President Bush has a sadistic streak (branding frat pledges at DKE fraternity in the sixties, blowing up frogs when he was a boy); and that he lacks empathy for others (the execution of Karla Faye Tucker and his treatment of Cindy Sheehan when she first went to the White House after losing her son are two examples). The more recent examples of this sadism can be seen in his approval of torture, even after the travesty at Abu Ghraib. At the time of the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal, I wondered out loud to a friend if the President and the rest of his death-aspected coterie were enjoying videos of torture from Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, and other detention facilities throughout the world, at parties in the White House and Pentagon. It is still a question I wonder about.

George W. Bush also has an inferiority complex, for which he overcompensates by bullying people to dominate others and get his own way. I suspect that much of his bullying habit came from his domineering (and possibly abusive) mother, absent father, and his severe dyslexia. He is incurious because it is frustrating for him to try and study any subject in depth. His obsession with physical fitness is an overcompensation for his inferior academic ability, as well as a means for his brain to produce additional endorphins and other neurochemicals to compensate for the alcohol and drugs President Bush allegedly no longer imbibes. Obsessive exercise, his abuse of drugs and alcohol, as well as his conversion to a fundamentalist form of Christianity, has been a way to block out the emotional anguish and frustration that he has experienced his entire life, without having to constructively deal with these emotions.

As is the case with too many conservatives, President Bush cannot fully admit personal responsibility for his mistakes. This is because for these conservatives, to admit any error is to admit the possibility of being in error about their entire belief system. This behavior is a common compensatory mechanism for individuals who feel threatened by critical self examination and self awareness.

This behavior is closely tied to the philosophical foundation underlying most conservative thought: that left to its own devices, humanity is inherently bad; some would even say evil.

These conservatives believe that the realization of this "fact" somehow lifts them above the rest of humanity. As a member of this group of "cognoscenti" (those who are aware or have special knowledge), this (in the conservative individual's mind) automatically makes them one of the arbiters of law and morality for the "clueless" mass of humanity.

This also tends to make the conservative very judgemental. After all, the conservative is one of those who knows their perceived underlying truth for all human interactions: that these interactions are all inherently corrupt and self-serving.

This belief, however, contradicts the conservatives' initial assumption that all humanity is inherently bad or evil, unless the conservative is somehow no longer truly human. In order to buttress this belief, the conservative uses the idea of an aristocracy, of which he is of course a member, together with "proofs" from self-described impeccable sources. The religious conservative uses the Bible and the concept of original sin as promulgated by the Apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and John Calvin to support his arguments. The secular conservative uses Cicero, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Alexander Hamilton, and Frederich Nietzsche (among others) for the same purpose.

This bolstering of their belief system by "experts" helps the conservative maintain his personal, outwardly ambiguous system of belief, without critical examination of the basis for his beliefs. In the 2003 study titled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," in The Psychological Bulletin that, "This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliche's and stereotypes..." Such a mindset makes critically honest self-examination and self-awareness impossible.

I have also seen many authors attempt to equate George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler. President Bush-thank God-has neither Hitler's charisma, nor does he have Hitler's intelligence. But there are two areas where there is a close congruency between our current "President," and the Nazi Fuhrer.

The first of these is Mr. Bush's belief that "he was chosen by God to be President" (The Faith of George Bush by Stephen Mansfield). To declare yourself-without evidence, let alone proof-to be chosen by God is at best a strong indication of schizophrenia or other psychological disorder, and at worst blasphemy. Adolf Hitler also declared on a number of occasions to be God's chosen, in statements going back to the 1920's. It is sometimes called a messianic complex, and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accept criticism or personal responsibility. Both Hitler and Bush seem to be plagued by this condition.

The second of these is Mr. Bush's belief that he can change reality by simply willing it so. Statements delivered by Mr. Bush and his surrogates demonstrate this belief again and again. We could have won Vietnam if we had the will to do so. The Iraqi people will greet us as liberators. Mission Accomplished! Iraq is not a civil war. A surge of twenty thousand more troops will take care of the problems in Iraq.

Hitler demonstrated a similar belief in the power of will about the First World War (The German Empire had lost because of a lack of will). The Fuhrer also made pronouncements about the need for willpower to succeed during the battles at Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, in Normandy, at the Battle of the Bulge, and in the defense of Berlin. Such a degree of disconnection with reality is called delusion by the public, and dissociation among psychiatric professionals. All of the will in the world will not make the sun set faster, nor will it change the ebb and flow of the tides. It should be noted that the Japanese militarists had a similar belief in will to victory with which they inculcated their troops. This in turn led to the Japanese troops fanatically fighting to the last man against impossible odds. It was not successful.

These neuroses and character disorders exhibited by George W. Bush makes it impossible for him to fully understand the consequences of his actions. He is fixated upon the goal of being a "great" President, ignoring the costs to the United States, its military, its people, and our nation's standing with the rest of the world. The costs to both the American and non-American victims of Dubya's madness has no impact upon his conscious thought.

President George W. Bush is not as unintelligent as many pundits think, nor is he simply the puppet of Vice-President Dick Cheney and the other neocons. His intelligence might better be described as the cunning of a man who has skated at the edge of legality and morality his whole life, but Dubya is still untouched. Do not ever "mis-underestimate" this madman, whose presidency has destroyed American prestige abroad, and our trust in the government at home.

I believe that George W. Bush is legally insane, incapable of discerning the difference between right and wrong. Under the XXVth Amendment to the United States Constitution, we are given the means by which a President may be removed from office for illness or disability. A failure to do so violates the cabinet members' oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

If Vice President Cheney and the cabinet officers fail in this duty, they should be impeached, with the failure to do their Constitutional duty in removing the mad President as one of the articles of impeachment.

This use of the XXVth Amendment is perhaps a bit of misdirection, sleight of hand to distract the Busheviks, and distract them from their burgeoning plans against Iran. It is imperative for the American people and their representatives to distract the Bush Administration from attacking Iran, while we still can.

An attack on Iran is likely to be the first act of a global thermonuclear war. It is the first step down a slippery slope from which I see no salvation or purchase. We cannot permit George W. Bush and company to take us down that path to the abyss.

Remove George W. Bush from office before he destroys the world as he has so nearly destroyed the United States, its Constitution, and its middle class. It is not only the duty of our Congress and the rest of the government, but it is our duty as citizens to help make this happen.

May Providence help us all in this endeavor.