How does Bush manage to persuade himself?
Jun 16, 2008
EDITOR—More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia and still President George W. Bush is in denial! How does he do it? How does he persuade himself that the United States will stay i
EDITOR—More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia and still President George W. Bush is in denial! How does he do it? How does he persuade himself that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete�
The ‘job’— Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s image is long dead.
History’s ‘deniers’ are many—and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory— or because they have themselves so often promised victory—that fate will be kind. Bush—or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter—need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.
In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability in the region†only days before Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution brought down his regime.
President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters. And was it not Saddam Hussein who promised the “mother of all battles†for Kuwait before the great Iraqi retreat in 1991? And was it not Saddam again who predicted a US defeat in the sands of Iraq in 2003?
Saddam’s loyal acolyte, Mohamed el-Sahaf, would fantasise about the number of American soldiers who would die in the desert. Bush left some White House meetings to laugh at these fantasies. So who is laughing at Bush now?
Robert Fisk
Washington
The ‘job’— Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s image is long dead.
History’s ‘deniers’ are many—and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory— or because they have themselves so often promised victory—that fate will be kind. Bush—or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter—need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.
In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability in the region†only days before Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution brought down his regime.
President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters. And was it not Saddam Hussein who promised the “mother of all battles†for Kuwait before the great Iraqi retreat in 1991? And was it not Saddam again who predicted a US defeat in the sands of Iraq in 2003?
Saddam’s loyal acolyte, Mohamed el-Sahaf, would fantasise about the number of American soldiers who would die in the desert. Bush left some White House meetings to laugh at these fantasies. So who is laughing at Bush now?
Robert Fisk
Washington