BUSH'S BLINKERS

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Bush's Blinkers

By BOB HERBERT

 

Published: October 22, 2004

 

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Bush, George W

Woodward, Bob

Suskind, Ron

 

Iraq

 

Does President Bush even tip his hat to reality as he goes breezing by?

 

He often behaves as if he sees - or is in touch with - things that

are inaccessible to those who are grounded in the reality most of us

have come to know. For example, with more than 1,000 American troops

and more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians dead, many people see the

ongoing war in Iraq as a disaster, if not a catastrophe. Mr. Bush

sees freedom on the march.

 

Many thoughtful analysts see a fiscal disaster developing here at

home, with the president's tax cuts being the primary contributor to

the radical transformation of a $236 billion budget surplus into a

$415 billion deficit. The president sees, incredibly, a need for

still more tax cuts.

 

The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Osama bin Laden

and Al Qaeda. The president responded by turning most of the nation's

firepower on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. When Mr. Bush was asked by the

journalist Bob Woodward if he had consulted with former President

Bush about the decision to invade Iraq, the president replied: " He is

the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher

father that I appeal to. "

 

Last week the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv

University said in a report:

 

" During the past year Iraq has become a major distraction from the

global war on terrorism. Iraq has now become a convenient arena for

jihad, which has helped Al Qaeda to recover from the setback it

suffered as a result of the war in Afghanistan. With the growing

phenomenon of suicide bombing, the U.S. presence in Iraq now demands

more and more assets that might have otherwise been deployed against

various dimensions of the global terrorist threat. "

 

There are consequences, often powerful consequences, to turning one's

back on reality. The president may believe that freedom's on the

march, and that freedom is God's gift to every man and woman in the

world, and perhaps even that he is the vessel through which that gift

is transmitted. But when he is crafting policy decisions that put

people by the hundreds of thousands into harm's way, he needs to rely

on more than the perceived good wishes of the Almighty. He needs to

submit those policy decisions to a good hard reality check.

 

Here's one good reason why:

 

Dr. Gene Bolles spent two years as the chief of neurosurgery at the

Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, which is where most of

the soldiers wounded in Iraq are taken. Among his patients was Pfc.

Jessica Lynch. In an interview posted this week on the Web site

AlterNet.org, Dr. Bolles was asked: " What kind of cases did you treat

in Landstuhl? And these were mostly kids, right? "

 

He said: " Well, I call them that since I'm 62 years old. And they

were 18, 19, maybe 21. They all seemed young. Certainly younger than

my children. As a neurosurgeon I mostly dealt with injuries to the

brain, the spinal cord, or the spine itself. The injuries were all

fairly horrific, anywhere from the loss of extremities, multiple

extremities, to severe burns. It just goes on and on and on. ... As a

doctor myself who has seen trauma throughout his career, I've never

seen it to this degree. The numbers, the degree of injuries. It

really kind of caught me off guard. "

 

If you're the president and you're contemplating a war in which

thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of these kinds of injuries

will take place, you have an obligation to seek out the best sources

of information and the wisest advice from the widest possible array

of counselors. And you have an absolute obligation to exercise sound

judgment based upon facts, and not simply faith.

 

In a disturbing article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the

writer Ron Suskind told of a meeting he'd had with a senior adviser

to the president. The White House at the time was unhappy about an

article Mr. Suskind had written.

 

According to Mr. Suskind, " The aide said that guys like me were 'in

what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people

who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of

discernible reality.' " The aide told Mr. Suskind, " That's not the

way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we

act we create our own reality. "

 

Got that? We may think there are real-world consequences to the

policies of the president, real pain and real grief for real people.

But to the White House, that kind of thinking is passé. The White

House doesn't even recognize that kind of reality.