A Tragic Anagnorisis

A while back I wrote on this blog:

I have long thought that W’s entire political career was built around the Oedipal urge to outwit his father’s ghost. So, if George 41 raised taxes once, George 43 lowered them 5 times; George 41 tried to balance the budget, George 43 let it balloon; George 41 didn’t finish off Saddam, George 43 would; George 41 was cool towards the evangelicals, George 43 embraced them; even George 43’s nickname “W” is reflective of this urge to distinguish himself from his father.

And

Woodward provides some more grist for the mill of W’s tortured relationship with his old man. As you may recall, in Woodward’s Plan of Attack the intrepid reporter asked W why he didn’t ask his father for advice for the invasion, and W answered that “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” In Denial we learn that Bush says he really loves his father – a father who clearly is in anguish over his son’s poor judgment on Iraq. One comes away with the impression that Junior moved away from more benign manifestations of rebellion, such as drinking and cocaine, to waging a war that his old man wasn’t strong enough to fight. Scowcroft reads it this way, for he muses to Woodward that W “couldn’t decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game” (p. 420). This brings up a very important historical question that some real archaeologist must eventually unearth. When did W first begin to have disdain for his father’s handling of the 1st Gulf War, and what role did the necons play in this? Of course the list of neocons in W’s administration is long and conspicuous for the fact that they were at odds with the important members of #41’s team: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, Khalilizad, Abrams, Armitage, Hadley... When Bremer replaced Jay Garner in Iraq, Woodward reports that he brought along a large, young staff which Garner’s group dubbed the “Neocon Children’s Brigade” (p. 202). From Woodward’s account, however, it appears that W’s adoption of so many neoconservatives into his administration is almost an accident, as if he didn’t know them in advance and did not pick them for their neocon ideology. And yet, one of the original signatories of the neocon manifesto of 1996 was W’s brother, Jeb Bush, so W must have been aware of them and their basic tenets. Are we to imagine that W wasn’t in their circle too and wasn’t aware of what they were saying, which was basically that George H.W. Bush fucked up in Iraq and around the globe by his policy of “appeasement” and that he didn’t set about to “fix” his father’s mistakes?

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Until now that was just my hunch, but today I finally came across some hard evidence (hat tip to Juan Cole's Informed Comment) that these views may be correct:

“He [W] was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz [Bush's ghost writer for his autobiography before he became prez]. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.” [snip] Herskowitz also revealed the following: In 2003, Bush’s father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son’s invasion of Iraq.

I have little doubt that deep down this is what truly motivated W to invade Iraq -- it is the most economical, feasible and comprehensive explanation for such an irrational act. I am particularly struck by the phrase "political capital", which if uttered by W before 2000 is just uncannily similar to what he said immediately after he won his second term in 2004 and would mean that consciously or subconsciously he viewed his winning a second term as slaying the ghost of father's alleged failure not to take out Saddam. Likewise, if these quotes are true and date before 2000 we must also view all of W's poses as a "great leader" and "commander-in-chief" in a new light as attempts to outshine the perceived weakness of his father's shadow.

By the way, the word anagnorisis means "recognition" and was singled out by Aristotle as one of the key components of a good tragedy, the other two being peripeteia/metabole (sudden swing in fortune) and pathos. Aristotle held up Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus as the finest example of such a plot structure (Oedipus recognizes his unintended error of killing his father and sleeping with his mother, has a sudden swing of good fortune to bad, and suffers). If George Bush Jr. is even capable of having an anagnorisis, I think it will be when he realizes that despite the fact that he beat out his old man in the area of winning a second term, nevertheless his presidency will be viewed as an utter catastrophe and failure while his old man's presidency in contrast will look better and better as the years, decades and centuries pass by.