Bush clearly has no intention of listening to the will of the American people. He has no intention of listening to the advice of the Iraq Study Group. He has no intention of listening to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has no intention of voluntarily leaving Iraq. He is in total denial that the War in Iraq, as countless experts have pointed out, is already lost. He is only interested in hearing voices that support his self-serving delusions. Unwilling to face up to and admit his disastrous foreign policy misadventures in Iraq, by wanting to send in more troops he is simply increasing his folly and worsening a catastrophic situation. To quote ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern and retired Army colonel W. Patrick Lang, “Those who believe still more troops will bring "victory" are living in a dangerous dream world and need to wake up.” It is as if Bush has fallen asleep at the wheel and is dreaming. Like a mad person, he is clearly not in touch with reality.
Filled with hubris, Bush is acting out the ignorant belief that “might makes right,” which is the universal mistake that has led to the fall of all major empires throughout history. Bush is (mis)leading us off a cliff, taking our nation down an infernal road of self-destruction. At this point only people who are blind do not see this. We simply cannot passively stand by watching this madness play out for the next two years, just impotently waiting for when Bush’s term is up.
Describing this age-old pathology, the great doctor of the soul, C. G. Jung is as if describing our current president when he said, “...they avoid self-criticism to an amazing degree, preach to others, and know nothing of themselves. They are happy to possess no self-knowledge, because then nothing disturbs the rosy glow of illusions.” Jung is describing the pathological state in which someone becomes taken over by their unconscious and lives in a fantasy world of his or her own self-reinforcing delusions. George Bush is embodying and acting out on the world stage the very pathological state that Jung is describing.
Because of his extreme dissociation, Bush has become “inflated” by his unconscious identification with one side of an inherently two-sided polarity, which as any psychologist knows is a sure sign of madness. Overly identified with the light, Bush splits-off from and projects out his own darkness and then, with the greatest war machine the world has ever known, tries to destroy it as it is reflected back by the world. And yet, in the process Bush has unwittingly become possessed by the very darkness he is trying to destroy. Jung pointed out that “Inflation magnifies the blind spot of the eye.... A clear symptom of this is our growing disinclination to take note of the reactions of the environment and pay heed to them.” When someone is inflated, they don’t accept any reflection or feedback from the outside world which contradicts their self-serving delusions and puffed up image of themselves. Instead of being open, receptive, and learning from the outer world, Bush perversely interprets what is happening in the world so as to feed and support his psychosis.
An inflated consciousness, to again quote Jung, “...is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it [and others within its sphere of influence] dead.” If Jung were alive today, he would not have to change one word to have an exact description of the madness of our current president.
Because of the moral depravity and self-deception that Bush has fallen into, he is the very last person on earth who should be leading our country. As evidenced by his endless trail of failures in his life, he is not even capable of leading his own life effectively, let alone the lives of others. If left in power, Bush will continue to wreak unspeakable havoc on the planet. How can anyone not see this? The prognosis for Bush’s pathology is always “death-creating,” in that it ultimately results in self-destruction, not just for himself, but for all those under his dominion, which in this case is all of us.
We need to save Bush from himself. What would we do if we saw a mad person who was destroying himself? If we were sane, which is to say in touch with our compassion, wouldn’t we intervene and stop that person from doing further damage to himself? If this mad person were in a position of power where he could do damage to not only himself but the rest of us as well, wouldn’t we, for the good of everyone, remove him from his position of power? For God’s sake, (not to mention everyone else’s), Bush needs to be impeached and put in a safe place where he can do no further damage.
The most direct and profound way to restore dignity and respect for the American people in the eyes of the international community would be to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the other key members of his criminal gang. Changing Bush’s policy of resisting the ICC and joining forces with the global effort to establish an international rule of law, we can then try Bush and his regime for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. To do anything less is criminal.