Robert Fisk: Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2029238.ece

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 George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - 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, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

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. George W 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.

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Even Hitler must chuckle at this bloodbath, he who claimed in April 1945 that Germany would still win the Second World War, boasting that his enemy, Roosevelt, had died - much as Bush boasted of Zarqawi's killing - while demanding to know when General Wenck's mythical army would rescue the people of Berlin. How many "Wencks" are going to be summoned from the 82nd Airborne or the Marine Corps to save Bush from Iraq in the coming weeks? No, Bush is not Hitler. Like Blair, he once thought he was Winston Churchill, a man who never - ever - lied to his people about Britain's defeats in war. But fantasy knows no bounds.

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Like Hitler and probably also Brezhnev. It's fascism, folks! It is not sustainable because the information flow is hampered by fear, so that the Leader don't receive the negative (but correct) information that might produce the correct desicions.
In addition, the bloated ego of the Leader makes him (and it's almost always a man) view criticism with disdain and contempt - only he knows the real solution.
Hitler took control of his armies directly, and as the war progressed into disaster he fired the generals that took a negative view and promoted the suck ups.

Any opportunity for a universally acceptable conclusion of the conflict in Iraq has long since passed, if it ever existed to begin with (IMHO doubtful).

What is left to do is to choose the best of the remaining poor solutions and move forward from here.

Mr. Fisk makes that abundantly clear in his commentary, as he aptly points out, that there are no "graceful" exits from Iraq.

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I agree that 'grown-ups' need to make this decision and the current Administration is woefully understaffed in that area.

I personnally worry that an attempt at impeachment would become front page fodder while many people will suffer and die on Page 2. That said, I believe for all the sacrifice this country has and will endure, the people deserve an accurate understanding of what their leaders have done in their name.

Then and only then is impeachment a good idea. By the way, should impeachment take place, I would volunteer to direct traffic in front of the White House, to facilitate the exit of Bush's moving vans.

Fisk is never in denial.