The Gulf War As A Mental Disorder.htm www.psychohistory.com Since it is the task of a leader to provide enemies when required, Bush was not about to be caught short when his nation asked him to find an enemy. Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, had long been a U.S. satrap. Bush, as Vice President, had personally contacted Saddam in 1986 in a covert mission to get him to escalate the air war with Iran.34 America had been secretly and illegally building up Iraq's military forces, including their nuclear weapons program, for over a decade, including arranging billion-dollar "loan guarantees" that the U.S. would end up paying off.35 Secret arms transfers to Iraq, money sent to Iraq via Italian banks, official approval of U.S. exports of military equipment, even shipment of weapons from our NATO stockpiles in Germany were all part of the clandestine buildup, all illegal and all covered up by the Reagan administration.36 Iraq, for its part, felt beholden to the U.S. As Kenneth Timmerman put it in his definitive book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, The arming of Iraq was a 15-year love affair [for America]. Saddam Hussein was our creation, our monster. We built him up and then tried to take him down.37 Saddam Hussein, like so many dictators, had an unbelievably traumatic childhood.38 His mother tried to abort him by hitting her abdomen with her fists and cutting herself with a kitchen knife, yelling, "In my belly I'm carrying a Satan!" She gave the infant Saddam away to his uncle, a violent man who beat the boy regularly, calling him "a son of a cur" and training him to use a gun and steal sheep. Saddam committed his first homicide at eleven. His political career centered on the murder of his fellow countrymen, and he particularly enjoyed watching the torture and execution of officers who had fought with him. Saddam would obviously make an ideal enemy to whom America could delegate the task of starting a new war so that we could remain guiltless. In early 1990, before the Gulf crisis began, the U.S. military unexpectedly undertook four war games that rehearsed fighting Iraq, premised on their invasion of Kuwait.39 At the same time, Kuwait's rulers suddenly adopted a provocative stance toward Iraq, refusing to discuss outstanding issues over disputed lands and loans, an attitude that even Jordan's King Hussein called "puzzling"40 and regarding which one Middle East expert stated that "if the Americans had not pushed, the royal family [of Kuwait] would have never taken the steps that it did to provoke Saddam."41 In addition, the U. S. provided $3 billion in "agricultural loans" to Saddam, which he promptly used for military equipment. A special investigative report, based on leaked documents, published by the London Observer and ignored by the rest of the world press, revealed that early in 1990 "Bush sent a secret envoy to meet with one of Hussein's top officials. According to a summary of this report,42 "the envoy told the dictator's confidant 'that Iraq should engineer higher oil prices to get it out of its dire economic fix'...Hussein took the envoy's advice, and moved his troops to the border of Kuwait...'The evidence suggest that U.S. complicity with Saddam went far beyond miscalculation of the Iraqi leader's intentions [and included] active U.S. support for the Iraqi President'" in his military threat toward Kuwait. So overwhelming was the evidence that the U.S. financed, provided equipment for and encouraged Saddam's aggressive military venture that Al Gore, when running for Vice President, said, "Bush wants the American people to see him as the hero who put out a raging fire. But new evidence now shows that he is the one who set the fire. He not only struck the match, he poured gasoline on the flames."43 Saddam reacted predictably to Bush's encouragement, publicly threatened to use force against Kuwait and moved his troops to the border. To be certain he had U.S. backing for the invasion, he then summoned U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to his office and asked her what Washington's position was on his dispute with Kuwait. Glaspie, acting on Bush's cable of the previous day, gave Saddam the barely disguised go-ahead by saying that "the President had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq" and to deliver America's warm sympathy with his problems. She then stated, "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait....[Secretary of State] James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction."44 Senior Pentagon officials had feared Bush's cabled instructions would send a signal that it was all right with the U.S. if Iraq invaded Kuwait.45 "This stinks," one said about the cable. But Bush had prevented a Pentagon effort to draft a sterner message that might have shown American opposition to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Just in case there was any question about the American signal to Hussein, on July 31, after Iraqi forces had moved fuel and ammunition to front-line Iraqi military units on Kuwait's border, Assistant Secretary of State Kelly was asked at a public House subcommittee hearing what would happen "if Iraq...charged across the border into Kuwait, for whatever reason, what would our position be with regard to the use of U.S. forces?" Kelly first replied, "I cannot get into the realm of 'what if' answers." Then, when the Congressman asked, "Is it correct to say, however, that we do not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage U.S. forces?" Kelly replied, "That is correct."46 Yet General Norman Schwarzkopf had been planning and practicing through war games for nearly a year a massive attack by U.S. forces in case of Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.47 Nevertheless, the green light was given to Saddam that an attack on Kuwait would not be countered by the U.S. On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The "child killer" theme was soon spread by the media. Particularly convincing was a wholly invented story told by a 15-year-old girl, who testified before the Security Council and Congress that a surgeon in Kuwait had seen Iraqi soldiers taking hundreds of babies from incubators, "leaving them on the cold floor to die."55 None of those hearing this testimony and none of the hundreds of reporters who swallowed the story thought to check out any of its details, since it confirmed the nation's unconscious fantasies that they shared. It wasn't until after the war ended that it was revealed that the "surgeon" and the girl had used false names and identities, that the girl was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.-a fact known to the organizers of the meeting-and that the story was completely fabricated, as were other stories of mass rape and torture by Iraqis.56 WAR AS RENEWAL THROUGH RITUAL COMBAT The Gulf War was hardly the first to be started by creating an enemy and then engaging in combat with him. America has a long history of going to war with dictators it has previously armed.57 The goal was national renewal through combat, as in early civilizations, where, when countries felt depressed, "polluted," they often openly arranged battles in order to "cleanse" themselves and "rebirth" their sinful people.58 The Aztecs, for instance, would periodically decide that they had become polluted and would set up "Flower Wars," dividing their own armies into two sides and fighting a Cosmic Battle between them in order to revitalize their country. During this ritual combat, they not only slaughtered thousands to assuage their bloodthirsty female goddess an early version of the Terrifying Mommy but they also took victorious warriors from the battle and ripped out their hearts in a ritual blood sacrifice to the goddess.59 War in early civilizations often began by making the leader undergo a ritual humiliation, the purpose of which was to symbolically reenact the humiliation that they had experienced as children. The Babylonian king, for instance, would be slapped on the face, forced to kneel in abasement before a sacred image and made to confess his sinfulness.60 In America, in the months prior to the Gulf war, President Bush was forced to undergo a similar humiliation ritual by being called a "wimp" (the national cartoonist Oliphant pictured Bush in cartoons wearing a woman's purse on his limp wrist) before he could regain his lost masculinity by going to war. At the end of 1989, Time magazine even showed him on their cover as two George Bushes, one strong and one weak-a device identical to that used by early societies who appointed a "double" of the king before wars in order to represent his weaker half and to emphasize his strong and weak aspects.61 Bush told the country it was fighting for a "New World Order" that would produce a "New Era of Peace" everywhere in the world. Americans interviewed before the invasion told reporters, "The course of history has changed...I don't know exactly what that means, but I know things are going to be different...The country had crossed a threshold...This [is] one of those events that marks the end of an old era and the start of a new one."69 Like the ancient societies, America fantasized the world would be reborn through human sacrifice. The war was vicious, as promised. In 43 days of war plus the years of embargo afterward, America achieved what the U.N. termed "the near apocalyptic destruction" of Iraq. Starting with 42 days of bombing, there were 110,000 aerial sorties, the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs. Over 120,000 soldiers were killed plus over 1,000,000 children81 most of whom died of malnutrition and epidemics caused by our systematic targeting of Iraqi irrigation canals and food-proceesing plants and of our continuing embargo, a genocidal violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the starvation of civilians.82 The sacrificial ritual had been carried out exactly as planned: by a genocide of women and children. The nation had been cleansed of its emotional pollution. The president's popularity rating rose to 91 percent, the highest of any American leader in history. The stock market soared. "Bush...restored America's can-do spirit....It felt good to win."87 The country had been united by slaughter as it had never been by any positive achievement. Editorials across the country congratulated the President on his having "defeated Evil," and speculated on what the New World Order would look like and when it might begin. The victors no longer felt depressed. America's twenty-eighth war-perhaps mankind's millionth-had again restored our potency. We felt as if we had been reborn.
