Faulty Premises and Simple Constructs™

It is very tempting to just dismiss George W. Bush as a commander-in-chief who simply lacks critical thinking skills. The lack of rational thought has poisoned many of his decisions; in fact, when one starts from a faulty premise, all resulting decisions based on that premise can be wrong (and they often ARE all wrong). For those that prefer the simplicity of cliche, let's say "two wrongs don't make a right." Or "you know a tree by its trunk."

Bush certainly is a True Believer™, somebody who appears so convinced of a course of action that no amount of contrary information or collisions with reality can change his convictions. Because a True Believer™ is the president of Iran, our media take short snippets of his comments and portray him as a dangerous lunatic. Even though Ahmadinejad has spewed myriad ridiculous comments over the past eighteen months, our media still insist on quoting him out of context or just plain misquoting him. This is a hare-brained deceit, since Ahmadinejad could be judged harshly based on what he actually says. But the media's laziness and perniciousness are not relevant to this point: the True Believer™ that leads Iran is held up as a danger and a menace and an imminent threat, BECAUSE OF HIS IRRATIONAL REMARKS. In large part, the smoking gun is Ahmadinejad's lack of critical thinking.

Now, the president of Iran doesn't have any real power, thankfully. He is generally a mouthpiece (albeit a disposable one) for the archconservative clerics that run Iran's Supreme Council. The True Believer™ in charge of our country, however, appears to be unbound by those same restraints. As Keith Olbermann indicated last night before the President's speech, Bush is able to pursue a course opposed by generals, a majority of servicemen and servicewomen, the U. S.'s allies, former presidents and secretaries of state, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, the voters last November, and a wicked-big majority of Americans right now. So, although Bush the True Believer™ looked wan and uncomfortable last night, sputtering his way through a greatest-misses speech on Iraq without even the customary swagger and smirk, he is still able, as President, to continue largely unabated on this doomed path.

In fact, the path seems to have gotten much bigger (and doom-ier?) last night, at least the acknowledged size and scope of the path. Here's a quick exchange between Bush and one of his faithful mouthpieces, Sean Hannity, from an interview on Fox late last year:

Hannity: Is this a struggle literally between good and evil?

Bush: I think it is.

Hannity: This is what it is? Do you think most people understand that? I mean, when you see the vacillating poll numbers, does it discourage you in that sense?

Bush: Well, first of all, you can't make decisions on polls, Sean. You've got to do what you think is right. The reason I say it's good versus evil is that evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives. And that's what Al Qaeda and people like Al Qaeda do.


And here's something I wrote almost a year ago on this blog, wrapping up a long post about the folly of military confrontation with Iran:

"Well, anyway, Iran isn't a threat. They can't invade us. They can't bomb us from where they live. And they don't want to. In normal times, that might be the end of the worry..."

Here's why it isn't normal times, and here's why our situation is probably much more dire than simply having an uncurious hack president who is convinced is terrible decisions are actually wise and his infantile instincts are actually profound: we are now led by a guy who is mixing the worst elements of his "I'm the decider" foreign policy with the worst elements of the "everything-is-politics" methods that Karl Rove and his party have been using for years. Here are two Simple Constructs™ (believe me, they haven't gotten any more complex than this in the Oval Office):

1) This is a good-and-evil battle. "We" are good, of course, which means that whoever we're fighting is evil.

2) It is politically impossible for this president to admit defeat and pull out of Iraq, even though most everyday people in this country want him to do that. It's also politically impossible to appear to be "staying the course." So, the only political option is to escalate.

Now, "escalate" might be too strong a word. We're only sending 21,500 more troops, and, although the president singled out Iran and Syria for ominous threats again, none of the troops are going to the Iranian or Syrian border areas. We ARE sending 4,000 of those troops to Al-Anbar province, which is between Baghdad and JORDAN, but we didn't mention Jordan as a threat, because our True Believer™ and his too-clever-by-half advisors don't want to blow up Jordan. And the "clear-and-hold" strategy being touted as a bold new direction for Iraq is wrong on two counts: it was previously used as a name for what we tried last time we attempted to pacify Baghdad (and failed), and to do it right, according to military commanders, it would take a quarter of a million troops. In Baghdad alone. Never mind that when the insurgency started to really wreak havoc, there were more U. S. troops in Iraq than there will be AFTER the 21,500 troops are added to the number currently in Iraq. Never mind that nobody thinks it will work except Bush and some of his advisors and press lapdogs. Never mind that the decision was almost exclusively political and contains an almost sublime lack of military insight.

See, what I was doing there was applying some critical thought to Simple Construct No. 2™. And because I wasn't starting from the same faulty premise as Bush, I wasn't going to find a way to make any sense out of it. Similarly, Simple Construct No. 1™ is a strange nut to crack. Who are we fighting? Really, who are we fighting? The president says al-Qaeda, which is silly. They aren't in Iraq, not Osama's al-Qaeda. Zarqawi was the head of the small and generally ineffectual Iraq component of al-Qaeda. Did his capture and death rein in the violence? Either the president knows how small the actual "terrorist" component in Iraq is and he's lying about it, or he honestly doesn't know. I'm not sure which option is worse.

So who are we fighting? Is it Sunnis? The Shia, with our backing, run the government (or what passes for a government) and make up the majority of the Iraqi troops we are training. Other than Iran and part of Yemen, the Shia have no major influence... anywhere. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Oman, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the rest of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc., all prefer Sunni Islam. By executing Saddam on a Sunni holy day, for Herod-like crimes in a Dawa (radical Shia) village in 1982, makes it look like we're fighting the Sunnis. The fact that al-Maliki, who as prime minister was presumably heading the Iraqi government's execution of Saddam, is the leader of the Dawa party, doesn't dissuade those BILLION or so Muslims from finding a new and totally avoidable reason for despising U. S. foreign policy.

But I don't think we're fighting the Sunnis, which is a bummer since we've made them all quite angry. I think we're fighting the Shia. And because our Pentagon thinkers are hopelessly stuck in 20th-century conventional warfare models, we need a state to represent the "evil" George Bush is so sure and True Believin'™ about. That's where Iran comes in. Iran must surely be a threat, because they have nuclear weapons and they invaded the neighboring country and are forcing religious rule and fomenting sectarian violence that hasn't been seen in Iraq in a century. And they've caused the conditions that have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and world opinion is so solidly against them...

...actually, all that last stuff is about the U. S. But if you start from a faulty enough premise, it's not a stretch to attribute all of your undesirable characteristics to your next enemy. "He hit me first," claims the bully.

Lastly, concerning the president's Declam assignment last night. A commenter on Glenn Greenwald's blog rightly points out that there were two glaring mistakes in the first twenty lines of the speech. One, the president claimed that in 2005, twelve million Iraqis voted for "a unified and democratic nation." In fact, they voted for almost the opposite. It was a sectarian vote, straight down religious and ethnic lines, and the resulting Constitution looked more like Iran's rules than anything Jeffersonian. The vote's divides neatly predicted all the sectarian strife that followed in 2006. The only thing unifying these groups is a willingness to get the U. S. and its troops out of there. Two, the president again dipped into the well, like the creep at the party that keeps hitting on women using the one dirty joke he remembers, by referring yet again to September 11, and the need to fight them there so they don't fight us here. If he means Iraqis (he must; it was a speech about the very unpopular war in Iraq), he is really deluded. And of course, al-Qaeda is about as extreme a Sunni cult as can be imagined, so lumping them in with Iran and Syria boggles the mind. The critically-thinking mind, anyway. In the Simple Construct™ world, good-vs.-evil and all that, everything can be fixed by wearing a flag pin on your lapel.

"Weekend At Bernie's" is a good example of the Faulty Premise genre, where bad decision follows bad decision in an attempt to fix the original faulty premise WITHOUT admitting the fault. At least "Weekend At Bernie's" is sorta funny. And it didn't cost half a trillion dollars to make.