Robert Fisk: Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial
By Robert Fisk
12/01/06 “The Independent” — — More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia – and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself – as he apparently did in Amman yesterday – that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”? The “job” – Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s image – is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.
History’s “deniers” are many – and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory – or because they have themselves so often promised victory – that fate will be kind. George W Bush – or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter – need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.
In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah’s Iran as “an island of stability in the region” only days before Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution brought down his regime. President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters. (….Full Article Here)
