Obviously, choosing the size of his humiliation comes easy to a psychopath. Bush has pulled it off by trumpeting so-called "turning points" - one after the other.
The first turning point was the fall of Baghdad, with its staged toppling of Saddam's statue. The second was the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003. The third was the election of January 2005 and the installation of a new government tasked with writing a new Constitution. The fourth was the referendum on that constitution in December 2005 and the fifth was the election of a permanent government in early 2006. [p. 382]
And that's precisely what America's psychopathic president will do this evening, when he proclaims that turning point number six - the surge - has finally allowed America and Iraq to turn the corner.
Yet, were you to read Geoffrey Perret's recent book, Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America's Future, you'd find that he believes that Bush's invasion of Iraq constitutes "the greatest strategic blunder by a leader of a Western democracy in nearly two hundred years." [p. 363]
It strengthened Iran's position in the Middle East while enhancing China's throughout the world. It has rendered the U.S. incapable of dealing with the world's environmental problems and has taught developing countries that they do not need nuclear weapons now to deter the U.S. - just the wide distribution of assault weapons and explosives, the creation of an embryonic network of insurgents and a willingness to create chaos.
Finally, "nobody wants to be dependent on an America that talks loudly about how indispensable it is, yet stages coups, makes threats, overthrows governments, democratic or not, and kills many of the world's poorest people, to the amusement of some generals." [pp. 388-89]. Such is the state of our union.
1 | 2
