Do you trust George Bush to run the war?

The thought of the President losing the plot suddenly is frightening - and not implausible

George Bush is terrifying. The anti-war campaigners regularly explain that they loathe Saddam – and most of them honestly do. It is just as urgent for those of us on the left who side with Iraqi democrats in supporting this war to make clear that we recoil in horror from the US President. No single article could count the ways in which he has made the world a worse place – and America a far worse country – since his inauguration, so let's just look at some highlights of his awfulness.

Let's begin with the 151 people he killed. When he was governor of Texas, it was his job to oversee the biggest rise in the state-authorised injection of poisons into living human beings ever seen in the US. Not only did it fail to disturb his conscience; he actually laughs about it. He was asked by the Talk magazine writer Tucker Carlson about his last conversation with Karla Faye Tucker. She was a woman who had been horribly abused since childhood, and had undoubtedly repented of her crimes during her long stay on death row; she had a five-minute conversation with the President to plead for her life the day before she was put down. George Bush recalled their chat by laughing, sinking to his knees and imitating Karla in a squealing, high-pitched voice. Carlson reports: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'"

The President's chilling (or, to be accurate, globally warming) approach towards the environment has been pushed back on to the news agenda today because the US Senate has voted to block his plan to drill for oil in Alaska. His plan would have had a literally poisonous effect, both on one of America's last great wildernesses and on the world's poor, who are already disproportionately suffering the effects of climate change.

The picture gets worse and worse the more you examine it. In a country with the most vertiginous chasm between rich and poor in the developed world, George Bush has acted to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer. He has proposed repealing all capital gains tax, which would benefit the top 0.5 per cent of US taxpayers – the multi-millionaires and billionaires – with a $600bn tax cut. The tax cut he has already put in place handed vast sums of money to the rich, at a time when the poorest Americans pay a higher proportion of their income to the government than the people at the opposite end of the scale.

In a country where 40 million poor people – equivalent to the entire population of Spain – have no health-care insurance at all, Mr Bush thinks it is a priority to redistribute more money to the US aristocracy. The number of deaths caused by this situation is uncounted – that is how much Bush cares about even the American poor – but it will exceed even the number he had executed.

He is also – most crucially – a liability as Commander-in-Chief. His cack-handed diplomacy meant that this war is being fought with a narrower coalition and more dispirited troops than if, say, Bill Clinton were still in power. Bush badly miscalculated on his strategy for wooing world opinion. As Yassir al-Askaly, an Iraqi exile friend of mine, told me yesterday: "The great mistake Bush made was to play to people's fears and not their hearts. It should not have been about terrifying Americans into supporting the war. It should have been about freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam. Thank God it will all have the same result in the end."

But these errors are the least of our worries. George Bush is a dry alcoholic: that is, he simply quit one day, without going through Alcoholics Anonymous or any similar group. All the evidence shows that dry alcoholics are at far greater risk of falling off the wagon, especially at times of stress. Anybody who has known a dry alcoholic will recognise the symptoms in George Bush: the aggression, the tetchiness, the transference of the addiction to other behaviours, such as fanatical exercise and obsessively acquiring more and more personal power.

The thought of the President losing the plot suddenly and drastically is frightening – and not implausible. Speculation that he may be dealing with the stress by using Xanax, a popular valium-like drug, is common in the US; Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has even dubbed him "the Xanax cowboy".

So why do I trust George Bush on Iraq? The simple answer is: I don't. I trust the Iraqi people to build democracy in their country; and they cannot do that until Saddam Hussein is removed. Even if President Bush fights a war that is more vicious than necessary, and fails in the reconstruction to build a more egalitarian society, the Iraqi people will benefit from the removal of their psychopathic dictator. So will the millions of exiles now planning to return home. And at least President Bush believes loosely in democracy (he lost the vote in Congress and, unlike Saddam, he isn't going to gun them all down). If he listens to the people around him pressing for Iraqi democracy, not least our own Prime Minister, then even those of us who detest him will toast him (with a non-alcoholic beverage, of course).

johann@johannhari.com