To lay the blame on one man is to ignore the stupidity of all those around him and all those who kept fighting - all in the name of “following orders.”

* Though he was from a military family with a war-hero dad, George W. Bush didn’t serve in Vietnam. Rather, he used Daddy’s coattails to get a cushy stateside tour in the Air National Guard. So once he became commander in chief he had to prove — to himself and others — that he was tough enough after all (classic overcompensation for a perceived earlier deficit). Other neocons, including Cheney, are in the same vein.

* W is not officially a “junior,” but he’s a de facto one with the same first name as his father. Juniors, in my informal study the past 20 years, generally have to try harder to prove (there’s that word again) themselves — to get out of Daddy’s shadow. George H.W. Bush (”41″) had a big shadow, but part of it was “wimp” (recall the Newsweek cover story, “Battling the Wimp Factor,” in the summer of ‘88 when the elder Bush was the GOP’s heir apparent to Reagan). W seems determined to prove that neither he nor his dad is a wimp — with tragic global and personal consequences.

Dan Shenk
April 1, 2007

As for pre-emptive wars, I listed a half-dozen in which the U.S. was essentially the aggressor. The rationales may not have been as blatant as Hitler’s “Operation Canned Goods,” a trumped-up pretext for invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, but the U.S. was clearly flexing its military muscle in places where the locals didn’t stand a chance (though the Filipinos held out for three years).

In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present he quotes Theodore Roosevelt in 1897 as saying to a friend: “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” Roosevelt, of course, wasn’t president yet (McKinley was), but by early 1898 the U.S. was moving toward war with Spain in Cuba. It was deemed too important to U.S. commercial interests to leave it in the hands of the Cuban rebels, who got virtually no credit after Spain was evicted.

By the way, thank you, Nathan Eanes, for your insight into binary thinking. You’re absolutely right about WHEN binary thinking becomes a problem. Zinn makes this point again and again in his masterpiece of looking at U.S. history through the eyes of ordinary people around the world.

I’d say that Bush himself is not solely responsible for anything that’s happened. His cabinet members and Vice President Cheney are more involved in the planning and execution of the plans than the President is; in many ways, he’s just their figurehead.

As far as the phrase “binary thinker” is concerned, I’d say that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the existence of good and evil in this world. Binary thinking becomes a problem when people start thinking that good and evil can exist in their pure forms and be embodied by entire nations (as in, the United States is good, and our enemies are the “axis of evil.”)

Still, I have to question if Bush truly is solely responsible for all that. Has calling someone a “binary thinker” become an insult, effectively diminishing the subject in the readers’ eyes more than would just tossing out a traditional “idiot” or “moron”?

Out of curiousity, would you explain this statement a bit more? “The previous pre-emptive wars in U.S. history pale in comparison to Iraq in size, scope, length, cost—maybe even audacity.” To which pre-emptive wars are you referring?