U.S. Institutions, Press Ask:
Is President Bush Nuts?
by Jeffrey Steinberg
An Establishment consensus is rapidly emerging over the ever-more obvious lunacy of President George W. Bush, and the strategic implications of allowing a man with long-term and severe psychiatric disorders to remain in the Presidency during a period of systemic financial disintegration, which is driving some leading synarchist bankers to push for World War III—using mad George as their patsy. Indicative of the emerging Anglo-American consensus that Bush is too far gone to serve much longer, is British Prime Minister Tony Blair's own "Damascus Road" break with G.W., since his last visit to Washington in the late Spring.
While vacationing in the Caribbean in early August, Blair, according to British sources, allowed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to tell a group of Labour MPs that Bush's handling of the Middle East crisis was "crap." Prescott's comment was quickly leaked to all of the leading British dailies, triggering a public debate, and reports that Blair had encouraged his deputy to signal London's break with George Bush's and Dick Cheney's Washington.
In a series of high-visibility television news broadcasts and opinion pieces appearing in the U.S. over the past two weeks, a clear message has been conveyed: The President is mentally incompetent to serve out the remaining months of his term of office, and the sociopathic Vice President Cheney is going to have to go, as part of a clean sweep of the White House.
Precisely how this clean-out is going to occur is by no means settled. But the verdict has been delivered, loud and clear, and a lively public debate has been stoked, through the medium of some popular news/entertainment programs, including MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," Comedy Central's "The Daily Show"—and even the formerly slavishly pro-Bush Washington Post.
The most dramatic sign of the Establishment's conclusion that Bush is too lunatic to continue in office came on Aug. 15, when former Republican Congressman-turned-right-wing-TV news analyst Joe Scarborough aired a ten-minute segment of his "Scarborough Country," posing the question: "Is Bush an Idiot?" Throughout the segment, the words "Is Bush an Idiot?" ran across the bottom of the screen. The segment provoked a firestorm of media commentaries, including two subsequent "Scarborough Country" segments, an equal number of satirical assaults on President Bush's mental midgetry by Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, and a detailed news account in the Aug. 20 Sunday Washington Post of the conservative revolt against the Idiot-in-Chief. Equally distressing for the White House is a series of op-ed pieces by previously loyal conservative pundits, including George Will and National Review editor Rich Lowry, all declaring that Bush's Iraq misadventure has been a dismal failure.
A senior U.S. intelligence figure described the situation in Washington as "chaos—the worst chaos I have ever seen." He confirmed earlier reports that former President George H.W. Bush is apoplectic over his son's descent into messianic madness, and that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is so isolated from the White House, that she is not even consulting with the President as she attempts to find a replacement Deputy Secretary of State, to fill the vacancy left by Robert Zoellick's sudden departure in June. When Rice attempted to appoint top aide Nick Burns as Zoellick's replacement, she was blocked by Vice President Cheney, and George W. Bush did not weigh in to support her.
It is no secret that Cheney, the leading synarchist bankers' asset in the Administration, is pressing for a resumption of Israel's military actions against Lebanon, and an expansion of the Israeli aggression into Syria—this, despite the fact that Israel's mid-July invasion of Lebanon failed to destroy or even militarily weaken Hezbollah. The renewed Israeli military operations would be, for Cheney, a prelude to a full-scale U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, perhaps before the November U.S. mid-term elections. Sources have confirmed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have unanimously informed the President that, under no circumstances would they support military action against Iran. "There is no military option against Iran," the Chiefs informed the President, according to several well-placed military and intelligence sources, who spoke to EIR on condition of anonymity. Yet, a number of senior policy analysts freely admitted that they could not say with any degree of certainty that the unanimous view of the JCS will carry any weight at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Between Cheney's commitment to regime change in Tehran before January 2009, and Bush's psychotic refusal to entertain any "bad news" assessments, the U.S. could race, flight-forward, into a pre-emptive war against Iran, in much the same way that Israel raced blindly into its greatest military fiasco ever, in Lebanon. Sane voices in the Israeli military had warned, repeatedly, that a military strike against Hezbollah's asymmetric war-fighting capability would end in dismal failure. Those voices were ignored—largely due to pressure on the Olmert government from the Cheney circles in Washington.
World War III
It is this prospect, of a mad-hatter President and his Vice Presidential accomplice bringing the United States to the brink of self-destruction, that has triggered the institutional revolt. The Scarborough, Stewart, and related assaults on the President's lunacy are merely manifestations of a much deeper, behind-the-scenes process of debate, among senior Establishment figures, over how to deal with a dysfunctional White House, during a period of the greatest combined political and financial crisis in the nation's history. While sense perception might suggest that the television assaults on the President's mental state have triggered the institutional debate, the exact opposite is true. The American public, already sickened by the Administration's bungling, treachery, tyranny, and worse, is being brought into the top-down deliberations. The simple fact is: Nothing short of a top-to-bottom house cleaning in the Executive branch, starting with Cheney and Bush, is going to save the nation and the world from a New Dark Age of global asymmetric warfare, financial disintegration, and the collapse of the sovereign nation-state system itself.
If Bush and Cheney do launch a war against Iran, the outcome will be even more disastrous for the United States than the recent Israeli misadventure in Lebanon was for the Jewish state. If George W. Bush were looking for a shortcut to infamy, he could not choose a faster route than a bombing campaign against Iran. Perhaps the President will find a few strands of sanity, tied to his deep fear of failure, and will pull back from the brink. For the U.S. institutions to risk the fate of the nation on such a slender reed would be madness in its own right.
