Bush’s America Goes to War

The ghastly aerial attack of 9/11 on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the financial and military nerve centers of our nation, was traumatic in the strictest sense of the word. A trauma is a deep wound to the mind, heart, and nerves that will not heal. Not just individuals, but large groups, even whole peoples, can be traumatized. 9/11 traumatized Americans collectively.

Three kinds of reaction follow on a trauma either singly or in combination. One is incessant, painful recall. Another is too late defense against the traumatic blow. The third, and most drastic, is to relive the trauma in disguise unawares.

Traumatized America is reacting in all three ways at once. The haunting remembrance of 9/11, the memorialization and mourning, have hardly diminished since the event, which has meanwhile crept into the subsoil of our fantasies and nightmares. We have defended against its recurrence in its original form by focusing vital counterterrorist controls inordinately on airports and immigrants, as if bin Laden would simple­mindedly try the very same stunt a second time. And we are conjuring up 9/11 in thin disguise through a war on Iraq which, billed as a war on terrorism, is as if calculated to promote more terrorism ­ a textbook case of traumatic reliving.

That war was launched by an aerial attack on the nerve centers of Iraq’s capital and main city: shades of 9/11. It bore the distinctly traumatic code name “Shock and Awe.” Ostensibly designed to

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shatter morale, it predictably only aroused hatred for the assailants instead, just like 9/11.

Historically, traumatized groups often do their reliving through leaders who relive traumas of their own in the process. In this historic mode, Bush has hijacked the American national trauma of 9/11 for his own innermost purposes ­ his “hidden agenda,” hidden even from himself. To uncover these purposes, I must first back up a little.

The dominant theme of Bush’s early inner life was a failing rivalry with his father marked by adulation and emulation. Somewhere beneath every such failing filial rivalry lurks ­ even without the benefit of a Freudian father complex ­ secret anger inwardly denied. The anger and the idolatry feed each other.

Sent to the same schools as his namesake, the younger George came of age in the shadow of the elder one’s shining academic, athletic, military, and business record. He trailed his father humiliatingly on all four scores and took refuge in alcohol and-­as he pointedly did not deny when asked ­ drugs. At age 40 he shook his addiction only to go the opposite extreme as a crusading born-again Christian. From this “dry drunk” vantage point, he watched his father as president triumphantly form and lead a United Nations coalition that undid Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait short of destroying Saddam himself.

In April 1993 came a car bomb attempt on the elder Bush’s life in Kuwait that local officials promptly blamed on Saddam. That misfired blast boomeranged as the younger Bush projected onto Saddam with a bang the repressed filial rage within him for an idolized father he could not measure up to. With this new target he had found a purpose. He put it guilelessly last September at a fund­raiser in Houston when he called Saddam “the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

After 9/11, invested with personal power to

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conduct a war on terrorism for America, the younger Bush twisted this congressional mandate into a God-given mission to kill Saddam. Thus would he prove himself a loving and worthy son who, into the bargain, can go one better than his father, never mind our blood and our civil liberties drained, the United Nations and international law flouted, and our moral stock plummeting world­wide, let alone the Iraqis caught in the crossfire. Just as the Kuwaiti claim that Saddam was behind that attempt on Bush senior’s life was unproven, Bush junior’s claim that Saddam was harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction was unproven. The preliminary blow of “Shock and Awe” targeted Saddam personally: this re­edition of a flubbed assassination attempt duly missed its mark. Everything meshed.

This tight fit between the course of escalating traumatic disaster engaged by Bush’s America and a pattern of pathology documented in numerous historical case studies is no mere academic curiosity. It is a highest worldwide alarm signal: blinding red. Is our nation too far gone to heed it?

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