Truth - Al Franken [94]
To justify the war, they decided upon a set of terrifying “facts”: that Saddam was poised to slip Osama a suitcase containing a nuclear bomb coated in anthrax. A second set of terrifying facts, which inconveniently were true, they rejected. Because those facts didn’t fit. Since those facts suggested that the war and its aftermath would be difficult, they didn’t want to hear about them.
To those of us who believe in objective reality, planning for every possible scenario is something you should do even if you’re in favor of a war. In fact, it’s something that you do especially if you’re for a war. But for them, anyone who seemed to be contradicting their message of a cakewalk, followed by sweets and flowers, followed by the free and democratic election of the handpicked Ahmed Chalabi—anyone questioning that story wasn’t merely the bearer of bad news. He was an enemy. Facts, like nations, were either for us or against us.
A senior Bush adviser summarized the Bush team’s way of thinking to journalist Ron Suskind in the summer of 2002:
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.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Doesn’t that sound like the kind of speech a Bond villain would make just before falling into his own shark tank? Bad screenwriters get paid good money to come up with monologues like that. But this is real. The Bush inner circle sees the world as having spectators and participants. Almost everybody—you, me, Scott McClellan—is a mere spectator, trapped in the reality-based universe. The participants, “history’s actors,” aren’t constrained by the rules of evidence and consequence that govern us mere mortals. And there aren’t many participants. As an administration official who’d been involved in the planning for the Iraq war told James Fallows:
There was absolutely no debate in the normal sense. There are only six or eight of them who make the decisions, and they only talk to each other. And if you disagree with them in public, they’ll come after you, the way they did with Shinseki.
Once your divorce from reality is final, you can choose whatever fantasy world it is you want to inhabit. Bush seems to have chosen the world of B-movie heroics. In Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, which could easily be the title of the movie George Bush thinks he’s starring in, we see Bush fully inhabiting his role with Stanislavskian élan:
“Are you with me on this?” the president asked [Colin Powell]. “I think I have to do this. I want you with me.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” Powell answered. “Yes, sir, I will support you. I’m with you, Mr. President.”
“Time to put your war uniform on,” the president said to the former general.
Powell, of course, was the only one in the inner circle who actually owned a war uniform. Which perhaps explained why his attitude to the entire enterprise was lukewarm.
It would not be that long before the President would put on a war uniform of his own (a flight suit with a noticeably bulbous codpiece), and strut manfully across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. It would be the first time Bush had worn a flight suit since the years, months, or perhaps only days he spent in the Alabama Air National Guard.
George W. Bush’s B movie wasn’t the only thing showing at the imaginary multiplex where he seemed to spend so much of his time. There was also Donald Rumsfeld’s movie, Plan of Attack II: The Army You Got. Here, the secretary of