Sins of the Son: The family drama behind Bush's invasion of Iraq and his "descent into messianism"

WP book review: Sins of the Son
An attempt to penetrate the family drama behind George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
Reviewed by Michael Getler
Sunday, January 20, 2008; Page BW03

THE BUSH TRAGEDY
By Jacob Weisberg

....At its core, The Bush Tragedy is a portrait of a deeply flawed president and presidency based upon a very big dose of psychoanalysis. Weisberg -- editor-in-chief of the online daily magazine Slate, which is owned by The Washington Post Company -- is a talented writer and political analyst. But he is not a psychoanalyst, and the president's defenders will undoubtedly accuse him of psychobabble. His many flat assertions about what really makes Bush tick ("illegal weapons had never been his real reason for going to war") may make this book easy for some to brush off.

Yet Weisberg also provides a broad, dark, nuanced way of thinking about why we went to war -- a value that far outweighs his amateur shrink and converted believer status. "Act One of the Bush Tragedy," he writes, was "the son's struggle to be like his dad until the age of forty." Act Two was "his growing success over the next fifteen years as he learned to be different." And the "conclusive third act" has been a "botched search for a doctrine to clarify world affairs" and a "progressive descent into messianism."

The "final irony" of Bush's disastrous venture into Iraq, Weisberg argues, is that "it vindicated his father's choices," particularly the elder Bush's decisions in 1990-91 to force Saddam Hussein to withdraw his troops from neighboring Kuwait but not to topple the Iraqi dictator, for fear of setting off a violent power struggle among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Because exactly such a struggle has occurred since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Weisberg writes, what once looked like Bush 41's failure to finish the job "now looked like an act of wisdom. . . . Appreciating the value of stability now sounded like maturity. Avoiding needlessly bellicose rhetoric seemed like common sense." And so a son who wanted a parental "acknowledgement that he, not Jeb, was the outstanding son" and "who tried to vindicate his family by repudiating his father's policies ended up doing the opposite of what he intended."...

***

The Bush Tragedy is a relentless indictment not just of the president but of his surrogate family members as well -- Vice President Dick Cheney and top political adviser Karl Rove, in particular. Weisberg does not depict the president as Cheney's puppet, even on Iraq -- though he does contend that the vice president recognizes Bush's need "to make himself his father's antithesis." He sees Cheney's cardinal sin as pushing Bush toward open-ended claims of executive authority and privilege. As for Rove, Weisberg argues that he "put an indelible political stamp on the War on Terror" by seizing on the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to generate a political realignment that would keep the GOP in power for many years. Reinforcing Bush's worst instinct by politicizing the war was Rove's greatest disservice, ensuring that Bush would lose the ability to pull the country together, Weisberg says....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/17/AR2008011702692.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national

(snip)

One of my favorite books about the war, George Packer's widely acclaimed The Assassins' Gate, also addresses the question of just why the United States invaded Iraq . Packer describes a telling exchange with Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning at the time, who said he expects to go to his grave not knowing the reason. In the end, Packer writes, Haass seemed to believe it was just something some people wanted to do.

Which is the real reason for everything.

and they probably have never reviewed a single book about:

- dollar collapse (maybe)

- peak oil (never!)

- gangster imperialism in government as a natural stage of capitalism

- drugs, terror, banking and arms as a single complex of industries

etc. etc.

A perfect tool. to be molded and used. Of course it's the money, and the power. But it's all to easy to get George II to go where daddy did not. And daddy surrogate (also known as Darth Vader) dances him down the merry path. Things do not have to be either /or in life. Many times the answer is a sick twisted mix of this , that and a little of the other thing.

soon as I heard the name, long before I knew anything about the relationship?

No doubt it's a combination, but to ignore the big material factors and cover the family soap opera is as radical a distortion as one can commit. Whereas the reverse would not be true. Some other soap opera could have fulfilled the function as well - the day was always coming when the U.S. empire would attempt to seize the oil and redraw the Middle East.

And I find this excerpt innaccurate: "It also reminds us of the unsolved anthrax attacks just a month after 9/11 and their extraordinary effect inside an administration that feared they were the precursor to massive bio-terrorism. Weisberg even says, "Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq."" Uh, the anthrax attacks were directed at Dem leaders and media, those who might be expected to be against war, or at least approach it catiously. Therefore, the guilty in the attacks were most likely those in favor of an immediate rush to war. gee, who would that be?

If they really thought the anthrax attacks were a symptom of a threat, they would have actually tried to find out who was behind them. Since they never did, we can assume,

1. They didn't care, and
2. Liked the effect they had