John, this is as good an assessment of bush's mental workings as any I have read. Scary.
Al
slate.msn.com
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Trust, Don't Verify
Bush's incredible definition of credibility.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004, at 3:27 AM PT
One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the
world has learned this: When I say something, I mean
it. And the credibility of the United States is incredibly
important for keeping world peace and freedom.
That's the summation President Bush delivered as he
wrapped up his press conference Tuesday night. It's the
message he emphasized throughout: Our commitment.
Our pledge. Our word. My conviction. Given the stakes
in Iraq and the war against terrorism, it would be petty to
poke fun at Bush for calling credibility "incredibly
important." His routine misuse of the word "incredible,"
while illiterate, is harmless. His misunderstanding of the
word "credible," however, isn't harmless. It's
catastrophic.
To Bush, credibility means that you keep saying today
what you said yesterday, and that you do today what you
promised yesterday. "A free Iraq will confirm to a
watching world that America's word, once given, can be
relied upon," he argued Tuesday night. When the
situation is clear and requires pure courage, this
steadfastness is Bush's most useful trait. But when the
situation is unclear, Bush's notion of credibility turns out
to be dangerously unhinged. The only words and deeds
that have to match are his. No correspondence to reality
is required. Bush can say today what he said yesterday,
and do today what he promised yesterday, even if
nothing he believes about the rest of the world is true.
Continue Article
Outside Bush's head, his statements keep crashing into
reality. Tuesday night, ABC's Terry Moran reminded
him, "Mr. President, before the war, you and members of
your administration made several claims about Iraq: that
U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets
and flowers; that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of
the reconstruction; and that Iraq not only had weapons of
mass destruction but, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
said, 'We know where they are.' How do you explain to
Americans how you got that so wrong?"
Inside Bush's head, however, all is peaceful. "The oil
revenues, they're bigger than we thought they would be,"
Bush boasted to Moran, evidently unaware that this
heightened the mystery of why the revenues weren't
covering the reconstruction. As to the WMD, Bush said
the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq had confirmed
that Iraq was "hiding things. A country that hides
something is a country that is afraid of getting caught."
See the logic? A country that hides something must be
afraid of getting caught, and a country afraid of getting
caught must be hiding something. Each statement
validates the other, sparing Bush the need to find the
WMD.
Bush does occasionally cite other people's statements to
support his credibility. Saddam Hussein "was a threat to
the region. He was a threat to the United States," Bush
told Moran. "That's … the assessment that Congress
made from the intelligence. That's the exact same
assessment that the United Nations Security Council
made with the intelligence." Actually, the Security
Council didn't say Iraq was a threat to the United States,
but never mind. The more fundamental problem with
Bush's appeal to prewar assessments by Congress and
the Security Council is that these assessments weren't
reality. They were attempts—not even independent
attempts, since the administration heavily lobbied both
bodies—to approximate reality. When they turned out not
to match reality, members of Congress (including
Republicans) and the Security Council (including U.S.
allies) repudiated them.
Not Bush. He's impervious to evidence. "I look forward
to hearing the truth as to exactly where [the WMD] are,"
he told Time's John Dickerson at the press conference. A
year after Saddam's ouster and four months after
Saddam's capture, Bush continued to insist that "people
who should know about weapons" are still "worried
about getting killed, and therefore they're not going to
talk. … We'll find out the truth about the weapons at
some point." You can agree or disagree with this theory.
But you can't falsify it.
Bush doesn't see the problem. He's too preoccupied with
self-consistency to notice whether he's consistent with
anything else. "I thought it was important for the United
Nations Security Council that when it says something, it
means something," he told Moran. "The United Nations
passed a Security Council resolution unanimously that
said, 'Disarm or face serious consequences.' And
[Saddam] refused to disarm." Never mind that the
Security Council didn't see what Bush saw in terms of
Iraqi disarmament and didn't mean what Bush meant in
terms of serious consequences. Never mind that this
difference in perception was so vast that Bush ducked a
second Security Council vote on a use-of-force
resolution. What's important is that when the Security
Council says something, it must mean something, even if
the something the council said isn't the something Bush
meant.
As Tuesday night's questions turned to the 9/11
investigation, Bush retreated again to the
incontrovertible truths in his head. "There was nobody in
our government, at least, and I don't think [in] the prior
government, that could envision flying airplanes into
buildings on such a massive scale," he told NBC's David
Gregory. Never mind that somebody who had worked in
Bush's administration and the prior
administration—namely, counterterrorism coordinator
Richard Clarke—had raised precisely this concern about
the 1996 Olympics. Never mind that the president's daily
intelligence brief on Aug. 6, 2001—titled "Bin Ladin
Determined To Strike in U.S."—had warned Bush, "FBI
information since [1998] indicates patterns of suspicious
activity in this country consistent with preparations for
hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent
surveillance of federal buildings in New York." These
were external phenomena and therefore irrelevant. What
mattered was that Bush couldn't "envision" the scenario.
Three times, Bush repeated the answer he gave to Edwin
Chen of the Los Angeles Times: "Had there been a threat
that required action by anybody in the government, I
would have dealt with it." Outside Bush's head, the
statement was patently false: The 9/11 threat required
action, and Bush failed to deal with it. But inside Bush's
head, the statement was tautological: If there were a
threat that required action, Bush would have dealt with
it; Bush didn't deal with it; therefore, there was no threat
that required action. The third time Bush repeated this
answer—in response to a question about whether he
owed an "apology to the American people for failing
them prior to 9/11"—he added, "The person responsible
for the attacks was Osama Bin Laden." This is how
Bush's mind works: Only a bad person can bear
responsibility for a bad thing. I am a good person.
Therefore, I bear no responsibility.
On 9/11, as on WMD, Bush mistakes affirmation for
verification, description for reality, and words for
deeds. "I was dealing with terrorism a lot as the
president when George Tenet came in to brief me," he
told Chen. "I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the
time. And we had briefings about terrorist threats." This
was Bush's notion of dealing with terrorism: being
briefed by the CIA director. The world that mattered was
the Oval Office.
Did the briefings lead to action outside the office? No,
because there was no "threat that required action." What
about the Aug. 6 brief? "I asked for the briefing," Bush
told Chen. "And that's what triggered the [Aug. 6]
report." Tuesday's Washington Post tells a different
story: "According to senior intelligence officials familiar
with the document, work on it began at the end of July, at
the initiative of the CIA analyst [who] wanted to raise
the issue" of Bin Laden's threat to the U.S. mainland. But
Bush can't believe that someone outside his head was
trying to tell him something. He's certain he "triggered"
the brief. That's why, as he explained to Chen, he "didn't
think there was anything new" in it: He assumed it was
his idea. He doesn't understand that the point of a
briefing is to be told something you hadn't already
thought of.
This explains the most amazing part of Bush's answer to
Chen: "What was interesting in [the brief] was that there
was a report that the FBI was conducting field
investigations. And that was good news, that they were
doing their job." Here is a president who reads that the
FBI has found "patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijacking" and
concludes that all is well because the FBI is
"investigating" such activity. Why does Bush make this
mistake? Because he doesn't understand that the
"suspicious activity" is the subject of the brief. He thinks
the "investigations" are the subject. He thinks he's being
told about his version of reality—the world inside his
administration—not the world of plots beyond his
awareness.
How does Bush square his obtuseness to the threat from
Bin Laden with his obtuseness to the absence of a threat
from Saddam? "After 9/11, the world changed for me,"
he explained Tuesday night. That's Bush in a nutshell:
The world changed for him. Out went the assumption of
safety, and in came the assumption of peril. In the real
world, Bin Laden was still a religious fanatic with
global reach, and Saddam was still a secular tyrant
boxed in by sanctions and no-fly zones. But in Bush's
head, everything changed.
To many Americans, the gap between Bush's statements
about the months before 9/11, on the one hand, and the
emerging evidence about those months, on the other,
raises doubts about the credibility of their government.
To other nations, the gap between Bush's statements
about Iraqi weapons, on the one hand, and the emerging
evidence about those weapons, on the other, has become
the central reason to distrust the United States in other
matters of enormous consequence, such as North Korea's
nuclear program.
To all of this, however, Bush is blind. He doesn't
measure his version of the world against anybody else's.
He measures his version against itself. He says the same
thing today that he said yesterday. That's why, when he
was asked Tuesday whether he felt any responsibility for
failing to stop the 9/11 plot, he kept shrugging that "the
country"—not the president—wasn't on the lookout. It's
also why, when he was asked to name his biggest
mistake since 9/11, he insisted, "Even knowing what I
know today about the stockpiles of weapons [not found
in Iraq], I still would've called upon the world to deal
with Saddam Hussein." Bush believes now what he
believed then. Incredible, but true. |
