1 Boring Old Man

In the earlier days of Psychoanalysis, a Viennese Analyst, Robert Waelder, expanded on Freud’s idea of overdetermination with his principle of multiple determination. What both of them were getting at was that any given psychological act shouldn’t be viewed as having "a cause," but rather "many causes." Erik Erickson, in a paper about Freud’s book on dreams, showed by re-examining Freud’s sample dream that any and every dream contains the whole history of the dreamer, if one knows enough to figure it out. While these may seem to be obscure references, they point to an essential piece of mental life – there is no psychological action that’s simple – no "single" motivation for anything.

Right now, the examples on the table are the cases of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and the question of "why" are they so determined to "stay the course" in Iraq. Why did they take us there in the first place? Suspicions about their individual and shared motives are everywhere: Bush’s struggle with his father; Cheney’s oil interests; Neoconservative leanings; Overcompensation for their own avoidance of the Viet Nam War; American Dominion in the post- Cold War era. But that’s just scratching the surface of the multiple forces that might be at work in each of them or both of them together. But such speculations are about "unconscious" or "barely conscious" motives.

We’ll never know the answer to such questions. Unconscious motives can only be discerned through a careful examination of a willing  person who shares the desire to discover those motives. It takes that to overcome the resistance to acknowledging and facing one’s more unsavory motives. Neither Bush nor Cheney are such people. But what about "conscious" motives? These would be things known directly by the persons in question. Here’s what I currently think about the Bush/Cheney duo. I think Dick Cheney is now, and has always been, conscious of going after the oil fields in Iraq as one of his principle motivations. There’s just too much evidence in his public speeches when he was at Halliburton from 1995 to 2000 [1][2]. While I think he really thought [hoped] Iraq had WMD’s, that was important as a justification for his other motives, not primary.

I think it’s still true. I envision him actually saying to his confidantes, including Bush, "We can’t withdraw now! Those oil fields will fall into the hands of the Shiites and we’ll never have access to them." Though I expect he would talk less directly using phrases like "Vital American Interests in the Persian Gulf" as a synonym for "oil." So our speculations of the deep, and perhaps hidden, internal motives that have shaped these two men’s psyches are not the point here at all. The point is what they actually think and say. I’m sure somebody has heard them say it, and needs to go to the Press, or a Congressional Hearing and tell us what they heard.

But there’s one thing we can know for sure. The war in Iraq smells like rotting fish from the get go. They are not just motivated by what they say publicly – things like love of freedom and democracy. At this late point, they might be  simply be trying to justify the global mess we’re in, or they might be trying to salvage something from this collosally failed endeavor, but altruism? love of the Iraqis? peace in the Middle East? – Absolutely no way!