No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

First Paul O'Neill, Now Richard Clark. The Bush administration does not let reality effect their actions.

Richard Clark, the career civil servant in charge of anti-terrorist activities, tried to get the new Bush administration to go after Osama bin Laden before 9/11, but they had their agenda. Getting Saddam was on the agenda, getting Osama bin Laden was not.

Even after 9/11, Bush and Rumsfeld wanted to go after Saddam. The only problem was finding justification to do what they had wanted to do even before Bush was appointed to office.

From the March 29 issue of Newsweek:

"It was the day after 9/11, and President Bush, like many Americans, was looking for someone to bomb. Wandering into the White House Situation Room, the president pulled aside Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff who had been held over from the Clinton years. According to Clarke, Bush asked: was Iraq responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged."

The real issue pointed out by this anecdote is not that Bush failed to set adequate priority on the war against terrorism prior to 9/11. As Newsweek points out, Clinton didn't set a lot priority on getting Osama, either, even after the bombing of the two embassies in Africa. The real issue is that, even when faced by the immediate and clear problem presented by the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was still so set on getting Saddam that they ignored any facts which contradicted what they already wanted to do! Instead, they were searching for justification to do what they already wanted to do even before 9/11.

This is a classic example of people out of touch with reality, folks. They consistently know what they want to do, and facts that contradict what they want are to be ignored, hidden, and kept away from both decision makers and the public. Only those facts which conform to what they already want to do are acceptable. Those conforming facts are repeatedly loud and long in hopes that they will drown out reality.

This is why they cooked the intelligence books to justify their preemptive war against Saddam. They used Chalabi because he told them what they wanted to hear. They even paid him to do it and set up the special Intelligence Analysis unit in the Department of Defense to massage his data. As Seymour Hersh pointed out, they "stove-piped" the intelligence which supported what they wanted to do.

This is why they were unable to present a clear and compelling reason for going into Iraq before the war or provide an adequate defense of their action since. Only repetition, accusing those who knew and tried to present the real facts of being unpatriotic, and political arm-twisting got the Congress to support the war against Iraq, and nothing worked on the rest of the world.

The difference between attacking Iraq as the key in the war on terror, and their failure to act to any degree to improve the American job situation are both based in their refusal to accept facts which disagree with their strongly-held beliefs. The difference is that their strongly-held beliefs led them to actively conduct an unnecessary and overly expensive war in the first case, while their beliefs have led them to extreme passivity in the face of the loss of American jobs.

Their only reactions to the loss of jobs have been to first blame the recession on Clinton, and second to tout the tax cuts as a stimulus tool to bring the economy back into growth. Since the recession very awkwardly did not officially start until March 2001 in Bush's administration, they have tried to lie about when it started (see the recent President's Economic Report to the Congress, February 2004).

The tax cuts were proposed to return a portion of the predicted surplus from the Clinton administration period to the taxpayers, and only after the recession cut the surplus was it transformed into the primary anti-recessionary program of the Bush administration.

Once again, in economics as in war, the Bush administration has had their intentions for government from the beginning, and when the facts show that what they wanted to do was not responsive, then the PR campaign was changed to reposition the justification for what they already intended to do.

The problem with the Bush administration is not that they are so often wrong, even though they are. That could be defensible. The problem is that they are so disconnected from the reality of how real people live they their behavior amounts to a collective mental illness.

For the sake of both America and the World, Bush needs to be replaced as soon as possible.

Addendum:
See Josh Marshal on the subject of the Bush administrations' inability to learn from reality. The key point in his article is:

The first months of the Bush administration were based on a fundamental strategic miscalculation about the source of the greatest threats to the United States. They were, as Clark suggests, stuck in a Cold War mindset, focused on Cold War problems, though the terms of debate were superficially reordered to make them appear to address a post-Cold War world.

That screw up is a reality -- their inability to come clean about it is, I suspect, is at the root of all the covering up and stonewalling of the 9/11 commission. And Democrats are both right and within their rights to call the White House on it. But screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them.

Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it.

In essence, the Bush administration claims to already know everything that is important to know about running this country, and when something new comes along, their reaction will be to continue to act as they were before it came along, but to repackage the PR so that the old actions appear to be responses to the new conditions.

It was similar ideologues using Marxist ideology who ran the Soviet Union into the ground and had to be replaced by Gorbachev. You would really think that such strong anti-Communists as are running the Bush administration would have enough good sense not to let ideology override practicality. But Bush himself ran every business he ever operated into the ground in a similar manner and had to be bailed out by his fathers' friends. That isn't going to work this time.

Bush needs to go back to Crawford to the toy ranch his fathers' friends gave him and quit screwing up America and the rest of the world.

posted by Richard at 11:46 PM