[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Blinkers

Fri Oct 22 19:03:03 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Blinkers

October 22, 2004
 By BOB HERBERT 

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. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22herbert.html?ex=1099496983&ei=1&en=cd9c18743a051928

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