Bush's Bunker Mentality

I recently saw the German film The Downfall, which portrays the final days of Hitler and his entourage in the underground bunker in Berlin. Critical reception of the movie has been mixed, and I myself was left a little cold by it. Perhaps it was too faithful in portraying the "banality of evil," although I would not have wanted to be entertained by a ginned-up, bathetic version of the story. That would merely be grotesque. Whatever the shortcomings of the film, it has struck a chord with me regarding the insularity and irrationality of political leaders who feel empowered by a messianic purpose, and those who allow such leaders to lead us all into destruction and death. Roger Ebert came away from the film with this warning:

What I also felt, however, was the reality of the Nazi sickness, which has been distanced and diluted by so many movies with so many Nazi villains that it has become more like a plot device than a reality. As we regard this broken and pathetic Hitler, we realize that he did not alone create the Third Reich, but was the focus for a spontaneous uprising by many of the German people, fueled by racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear. He was skilled in the ways he exploited that feeling, and surrounded himself by gifted strategists and propagandists, but he was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable evil. It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does not inoculate us against others.

It would be misguided indeed - not to mention intellectually lazy - to compare George W. Bush with Adolf Hitler. But it is equally mistaken to believe in Nazi exceptionalism - that strains of the "Nazi sickness" do not continue to plague us today. I had that in my mind as I read today Seymour Hersh's latest reporting in the New Yorker on Iraq and the Bush's leadership of the war. (Something tells me Arianna will never call Hersh just another dumb blonde, as she did Wooward. Sy Hersh is the real deal, it would appear. Call him the T-Rex of journalists, however - I fear his species is extinct.)

I'm excerpting his article at some length here. It's too important to miss. I think because we have lived with a version of this reality for so long now, it's become nearly normalized. We're not really engaging with the staggering implications. We have allowed ourselves to become distracted, inoculated, appeased, indifferent, and blase - as if were believed present course were merely a pendulum swing to the right. This too shall pass. In other words, if our democracy was truly being threatened by fascistic leadership, we wouldn't really notice.

UP IN THE AIR
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSHNew Yorker Issue of 2005-12-05
Posted 2005-11-28

[...]"Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President's religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that "God put me here" to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that "he's the man," the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his re-election as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the President, 'We're not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.'" The President, he said, "appeared displeased" with that answer. "I tried to tell him," the former senior official said. "And he couldn't hear it."

[...]

Many of the military's most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don't want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has "so terrified the generals that they know they won't go public," a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that "things were fucked up." But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon's top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer "from what I call battle fatigue" in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as "the common enemy" in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House's claims - that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers "haven't captured any in this latest activity" - the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. "So this idea that they're coming in from outside, we still think there's only seven per cent."

Murtha's call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House's resolve. Administration officials "are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy - both on substance and politically," the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha's speech, Bush said, "The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . . . If they're not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I'm going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch."

"The President is more determined than ever to stay the course," the former defense official said. "He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.'" He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. "They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway," the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. "Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House," the former official said, "but Bush has no idea."