As the end of July approached, Neil Bush was becoming a severe public relations
problem for his father George. To make matters worse, economist Dan Brumbaugh, who
enjoyed a certain notoriety as the Cassandra of the S&L debacle, appeared on television
to confirm what the insiders aleady knew, that not just the S&Ls, but the entire
commercial banking system of the United States, from the Wall Street giants down
through the other money center banks, was all bankrupt. Economic reality, Bush's old
nemesis, was once against threatening his ambition to rule. Then, in the last days of July,
the White House received information that a national newsmagazine, probably
Newsweek, was planning a cover story on Neil Bush. [fn 23]
Such were the events in the political and personal life of George Bush that provided the
backdrop for Bush's precipitous and choleric decision to go to war with Iraq. This is not
to say that the decision to go to war was caused by these unpleasant developments; the
causes of the Gulf war are much more complicated than that. But it is equally clear that
Bush's bellicose enthusiasm for the first war that came along was notably facilitated by
the complex of problems which he would thus sweep off the front page.
There is much evidence that the Bush regime was committed to a new, large-scale war in
the Middle East from the very day of its inauguration. The following analysis was filed
on Palm Sunday, March 19, 1989 by one of the authors of the present study, and was
published in Executive Intelligence Review under the title "Is Bush courting a Middle
East war and a new oil crisis?":
Is the Bush administration preparing a military attack on Iran, Libya, Syria, or other
Middle East nations in a flight forward intended to cut off or destroy a significant part of
the world's oil supply and drastically raise the dollar price of crude on the world markets?
A worldwide pattern of events monitored on Palm Sunday by Executive Intelligence
Review suggests that such a move may be in the works. If the script does indeed call for a
Middle East conflict and a new oil shock, it can be safely assumed that Henry Kissinger,
the schemer behind the 1973 Yom Kippur war, is in the thick of things, through National
Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and the State Department's number-two man Lawrence
Eagleburger. [...]
Why should the Bush administration now be a candidate to launch an attack on Libya and
Iran, with large-scale hostilities likely in the Gulf? The basic answer is, as part of a manic
flight-forward fit of "American Century" megalomania designed to distract attention from
the fiasco of the new President's first 60 days in office. [fn 24]
Despite the numerous shortcomings in this account, including the failure to identify Iraq
as the target, it did capture the essential truth that Bush was planning a Gulf war. By
August, 1988 at the latest, when Iraq had emerged as the decisive victor in the 8-year
long Iran-Iraq war, British geopolitical thinkers had identified Iraq as the leading Arab
state, and the leading threat to the Israeli-dominated balance of power in the Middle East.
This estimate was seconded by those Zionist observers for whom the definition of
minimal security is the capability of Israel to defeat the combined coalition of all Arab
states. By August of 1988, leading circles in both Britain and Israel were contemplating