Bush gagged on his chicken a la king Meal Ready to Eat (MRE). Flying westward the
next day, Bush stopped in Geneva for a meeting with Hafez Assad of Syria, a true villain
and butcher who had, during the month of October, taken advantage of his deal with
Bush to finish off Gen. Aoun's independent Lebanese state. Bush's meeting with Assad
lasted for three hours. Assad had provided 7,500 Syrian troops for the coalition attack
force in Saudi Arabia, which he promised to increase to 20,000. "Mr. Assad is lined up
with us with a committment to force," said Bush. "They are on the front line, or will be,
standing up to this aggression."
Manic hysteria at the top of a bureaucratic apparatus will swiftly infect the lower
echelons as well, and this was illustrated by the mishaps of Bush's travelling entourage,
which clashed with Swiss security officers while entering and leaving Geneva Airport. A
new factor exacerbating Bush's mental instability during this trip was the imminent fall of
his Anglo-Saxon Svengali, Margaret Thatcher, who was about to be dumped as prime
minister, primarily because she had become persona non grata among the leaders of
western Europe in an era in which Britain's future survival depended on parasitizing the
wealth of the continent. The Swiss have some of the most level-headed and expert airport
protocol personnel in the world, but Bush's retinue was determined to run amok. Bush
and Fitzwater wanted the press corp free to run around the airport to get the most
dramatic shots and sound bites of Bush's epic entry into one of the centers of world
diplomacy. When Bush landed, the "photo dogs" wanted to gather under the wing of
Bush's plane, but the Swiss moved them out of the area. At the departure, the press corps
went bonkers, and many of them had to be physically restrained by the Swiss officers
when they attempted to break through a crowd-control line. Fitzwater complained that
State Department protocol chief Joseph V. Reed (the scion of the Jupiter Island magnate)
had had a machine gun shoved into his stomach, and that Sununu had been "verbally
abused" during the altercation. But Fitzwater was an accomplished prevaricator: "I must
say I have never seen that kind of brutal and vicious treatment by a security force in the
last 10 years. It's strange. It's supposedly a peace-loving nation but they gave us the most
vicious treatment I've ever seen." Thierry Magnin described the actions of some US
reporters as "deplorable" and "inadmissable." Magnin said there had been "a row and
heated words, but this was to enforce security measures...taken in accord with the
American security services." He denied that any submachine gun was ever pointed at
Reed. [fn 68] Magnin said the Geneva police would not apologize, and later it was indeed
the US which backed down.
It was during this period that Lyndon LaRouche, from his jail cell in Minnesota, called
attention to Bush's increasingly psychotic behavior. On November 24, LaRouche
commented:
I have been obliged today to use nothing other than the term "psycho-sexual impotence"
to describe the characteristic features exhibited by a visibly paranoid President George
Herbert "Hoover" Walker Bush in the context of his reactions simultaneously to
knowledge of the certainty of the ongoing economic depression, and the mess in the
Persian Gulf, in which he, guided largely by certain Israeli influences and Margaret
Thatcher, has enmired himself, the nation, and a good deal of the world.