Bush's Knesset Speech

Just when you think perhaps George W. Bush has absolutely scraped bottom, he gets his dredge out and digs down another hundred feet, as he did in Jerusalem a couple of days ago. This is getting completely embarrassing. And scary as hell.

I was thinking recently about the late great Molly Ivins and her book about Bush, Shrub, which I read in 1999 or so where she concluded, somewhat surprisingly but hopefully, that we would find W "sort of adequate" if he were elected President. Writing as she was before the 2000 election and basing her opinion on Bush's largely ceremonial job as Governor of Texas (the chief executive operations are mostly left to the Lt. Gov in the Lone Star State), Molly extrapolated into a forecast of benign mediocrity for the Midland Miscreant. What I wonder now is how someone of Molly's brilliance and penetrating insight could be so far off.

I would surmise that what she probably left out of account was the effect the job of President would have on Bush. Since he had never previously had access to the kind of power which would be his as President, there was no reliable means of foreseeing that the office itself would serve as a toxic environment or incubator for his strange and grandiose ideas about himself. As time has gone on, as we saw at the Knesset, Bush has gotten progressively crazier and more removed from reality. This mental state, combined with such meager intellectual resources, is a truly frightening combination to contemplate, because in the event of a real national emergency, this would be the guy in charge. We saw what happened on 9/11 and in the aftermath of Katrina. Once a real problem confronted Bush and his overblown image of himself, Bush folded like a lawn chair. What if there were a nuclear attack? Oy vey iz mir.

Bush likes to think of himself as Winston Churchill. This is how far out of hand his schizo-paranoid break from reality has progressed. Comparing Bush to Churchill is like comparing Sergeant Bilko to General Omar Bradley. Apparently there's a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, and if so, Winston must have developed an expression of nauseous despair by now. Elaborating his delusion, Bush likens the proposal of talking to the Iranians as analogous to Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" of Hitler in Munich in 1938. In the first place, I can't think of anything more calculated to give offense to a room full of people who probably to a person number a close relative among those murdered in the Holocaust. You don't throw around analogies to "Hitler" when you're referring to a country which presently lacks any means of projecting decisive military power against either Israel or the United States. Iran does not have nuclear weapons, the National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 stated they are not currently trying to develop them, and an even more recent intelligence report concluded that the Iranian "interference" in Iraq has been greatly overstated.

But in the second place, Chamberlain's "appeasement" had nothing to do with talking to the the Nazis. The Conservative Government in 1938 encouraged the effort. What tarnishes Chamberlain's memory is his conclusion of a non-aggression agreement (the Munich Agreement) with Hitler which acquiesced in Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Hitler's military parity with France and Great Britain was obvious and giving him the signal that his ambitions to the East would go unopposed set the stage for the later invasion of Poland. That's appeasement. That's whistling past the graveyard.

On the other hand, engaging in negotiations or talks with a Middle Eastern country that does not yet possess a nuclear weapon in an effort to avoid its development is not appeasement, it's smart. I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon; I don't want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons. I like what South Africa and Libya did, and what some of the former Soviet Socialist States did -- get rid of the things. Each time another country develops nuclear weapons, the danger is not enhanced by simply the percentage increase over the countries which previously were in the "nuclear club." You have also complicated the confrontational permutations among them to a much greater degree than the addition of one country. And when nuclear winter and ozone destruction in the mid-latitudes (as detailed in a recent Univ. of Colorado study) are now imminent dangers from even a small-scale nuclear exchange (50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, prox. 500-750 kilotons, according to that study), we have to pull back from the brink. Everything possible must be done to avoid a nuclear war. If, as Hillary Clinton recently suggested, we "obliterate Iran," it is likely (if we use surface blasts against urban areas) we will obliterate somewhere between 25 and 40% of the ozone in the mid-latitudes worldwide in the Northern Hemisphere for a period of at least five years. In other words, we may obliterate ourselves in the process.

If we don't talk to Iran, Russia and China will. We will simply lose control of the situation and what will happen, will happen. The mindless, adolescent idiocy of Bush in congratulating himself on giving Iran the Silent Treatment, and inflating it into national policy, can't end a minute too soon. We have to endure another 247 days or so of this guy. Keep your fingers crossed.