Bush: Not Fit For Command.

The president's persistence in the face of reality represents a disturbing state of mind

BY PAUL SIEGEL

Paul Siegel is assistant professor of clinical psychology at the State University of New York, Westchester.February 11, 2007


Critics are charging almost daily that President George W. Bush is in "denial" about Iraq. A recent Newsweek poll found that "67 percent of Americans believe that the president's decisions are more influenced by personal beliefs than by the facts." But denial is just the tip of the Freudian iceberg.

Psychologically, Bush has been in a more serious state: dissociation from reality. Dissociation is a more complicated defense mechanism than denial. It doesn't just pretend that reality isn't there. It replaces reality with a fantasy world. We dissociate when we daydream. But when we repeatedly live in our own world, we do so at our peril. A gambling addict buried in debt is sure that next time he is going to win, but he almost never does. Despite his wife's expressions of unhappiness, a husband believes he is in a good marriage, and is shocked when she announces she wants a divorce. A patient avoiding childhood memories of sexual abuse tells her therapist she had a happy childhood when it couldn't possibly have been.

We see evidence of the president's dissociation in his assessments of Iraq. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he still maintains that Iraq is not in a civil war, but "in a difficult struggle against the insurgents."

Long after his generals concluded that we are not succeeding there, he repeatedly declared "we are winning."

Last week, some Iraqi officials blamed the new U.S. strategy in Baghdad for the worst single suicide bombing in the war, at a Shia market in Baghdad. The Mahdi Army, the Shia militia, which had been deterring sectarian reprisals, was scattering before new U.S. troops arrived.

Bush's response: "It's a good sign that there's a sense of concern and anxiety" about Baghdad security.Such statements are not just political spin. Political spin is crafted to frame specific situations.

Dissociation reveals itself in a persistent pattern of behavior.

Present-day Iraq is hardly the only situation in which the president has dissociated. Lacking evidence of any link between Iraq and al-Qaida, the president insisted for years that the two were intimately connected.

He uttered perhaps his most famous dissociated line - "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie" - as New Orleans was subjected to destruction on a biblical scale and the federal government responded incompetently. More recently, his new Iraq policy ignored the results of the midterm congressional elections and the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Commission. We see a clear pattern of avoiding reality.

Behind every dissociation is a fantasy - such as the husband's belief that he's in "a good marriage," or the sexual abuse victim's that she had a "happy childhood." In Bush's case, the fantasy is a grand vision of a free, democratic Iraq, a wish that seems difficult for him to relinquish. He has staked his presidency on it.

Imagine for a moment that you are he, and the possibility of failure is dawning in your consciousness. How would you cope? Acknowledging the possibility of failure could be tantamount to committing psychological suicide - unleashing enough guilt and shame to demolish your identity as commander-in-chief. Dissociation, however, would allow you to absorb the blows that reality has dealt to your dream of a new Iraq, and to devise a plan to rescue it. Hence the troop surge.

Were he not dissociated, the president could acknowledge, as most military experts have suggested, that a far larger presence of U.S. troops is necessary in Iraq. Or he might face up to the full degree of ethnic conflict and begin to withdraw our troops. I believe the president is being genuine when he says that sending 21,500 additional troops will make a real difference.

Psychological magic tricks work when people believe them. A psychotherapist, were Bush willing to see one, or a wise counselor might be able to help the president to understand his deepest wishes and see how he dissociates on behalf of them. Bush might then arrive at the conclusion that too many Shia, Sunnis and Kurds seem more interested in killing one another than in building a democracy, and that democracy is his dream, not theirs. For this president, what a frightening thought that would be.


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