More Evidence that Bush Is a "Dry Drunk"?

More Evidence that Bush Is a "Dry Drunk"? What September 11 did was provide the justification. “From the start,” said Paul O’Neill in his book interview, “we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country…It was about finding a way to do it that was the tone of it…the president saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ And how would O’Neill know? O’Neill, as Secretary of the Treasury also sat on the National Security Council.

Even though, under pressure, while O’Neill has tried to tone down his statements, the mass media have continued to highlight the revelations. Missing from all the recent analyses and editorials, however, is any attention to the reason why: Why did Bush have this thing about Saddam? Why the “detour into an unnecessary war in Iraq?” as the U.S.Army War College recently put it.

“He tried to kill my Dad,” the President once explained. But I believe there was more to this unnecessary war than that. I believe there was a method in Bush’s madness, a method that most likely had as little to do with oil as it did to terrorism. For the answer we need to look deeply in the psyche of the man (inferred from his biography).

Earlier several other writers and I likened Bush’s personality characteristics to those of a person who, in AA parlance, is “dry” but whose thinking is not really sober. Grandiosity, rigidity, and intolerance of ambiguity, and a tendency to obsess about things are among the traits associated with the dry drunk. The dry drunk quits drinking, but his or her obsession with the bottle is often replaced with other obsessions. Twelve Step programs help their members modify their all-or-nothing thought patterns which associated with the disease alcoholism. “Easy does it” and “One day at a time” are among the slogans; the serenity prayer, similarly, helps persons with addictive tendencies to curb the tendency to excess.

In Bush’s irrational patterns of thought lie the clues to his single-minded obsession with Iraq. For the explanation for Bush’s vendetta against this one country, we have to look to his biography and to the meaning that Iraq held for his father.