French commentators are comparing the behaviour of U.S. military leaders in Iraq with that of the fictive figures in Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy of militarism and nuclear age ‘Dr Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb’.

The U.S. war against Iraq has also led to a revival of Kubrick’s film, now being shown in several movie theatres in Paris.

Jean-Marie Colombani, publisher of the daily newspaper ‘Le Monde’, was the one of the first French commentators to compare U.S. President George W. Bush and his closest military aides with ‘Dr. Strangelove’. In a leading article on the Iraq war, Colombani wrote: ”George Bush, viewed from Europe, looks very much like a Dr. Strangelove of our times.”

In his film, released in 1964, Stanley Kubrick depicted a foolish, fascist U.S. military leadership that, by tinkering with nuclear weapons, provokes the ”ultimate war” with the Soviet Union, and pave the way for the destruction of planet earth.
Further, Francois de Bernard, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, argued that since the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency more than two years ago, the U.S. has become ”a republic ruled both theologically and pathologically”.

”Now, the U.S. government, composed of a band of psychopaths, takes all its decisions in the name of God,” De Bernard claims. To prove his thesis, de Bernard analysed the interventions of the U.S. leadership during the Iraqi crisis.

”In these interventions, we can see emerging, without any apparent goal, a paranoid vision of the world, immersed in a delirium of the most reactionary crusades, with imprints of a frightening symbolism,” De Bernard said. ”In this vicious vision of the World all external contestation becomes a crime, and all internal decisions, all internal actions, are sealed by a revengeful divinity.”