Bush and the Black Swan

For eight years, George W. Bush has tortured the axis-of-information – language, truth, and logic – yet reality steadfastly refuses to yield to his delusions. Bush has overseen the destruction of New Orleans, Iraq, the U.S. economy, America's credibility, and the Republican Party, but he ludicrously clings to the vain hope that history will overturn the verdict the American people have arrived at: namely, that the Bush administration has been a colossal failure.

Bush admits no doubt. His absolute certainty is façade that conceals his ignorance. This admixture of arrogance and ignorance has proven to be central to Bush's downfall. For Bush, doubt is a weakness. For the wise, embracing doubt and uncertainty is the beginning of wisdom. After all, Socrates was the wisest man in Athens precisely because he acknowledged the gaps in his knowledge.

Bush's confidence that he'll be vindicated by history is shallow, self-serving, and incoherent. Bush has been parroting the lame talking point that if historians are still debating George Washington's legacy, then it's way too early to speculate about Forty-three's legacy. Bush has a point; it is within the realm of possibility that future historians will view Bush's mishandling of Katrina, the botched reconstruction of Iraq, and the economic meltdown as an axis-of-triumphs, but the odds of this are vanishingly small.

We recognize Washington as a great leader who made many wise decisions: 1) He adamantly rejected torture. 2) He wisely recognized that the best way to defeat the British was to avoid engaging them directly. And 3) he harbored a deep suspicion towards unfettered executive power. Simply put, Washington's instincts seem diametrically opposed to Bush's (and the results appear to speak for themselves).

Another of Bush's feeble talking points is the notion that at least he's kept us safe since 9/11. "Since 9/11," of course, happens to be one heck of a qualifier, especially given that Bush spent the weeks prior to the worst terror attacks on American soil blissfully ensconced at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, dismissing and ignoring intelligence briefings warning that al-Qaeda was preparing to strike the homeland.

9/11, of course, is a prime example of what the philosopher/statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb terms a black swan
– a highly improbable event that entails massive consequences. By their nature, black swans are singular, seismic, unpredictable, and history altering occurrences. As a species, humans are not particularly good at forecasting and preparing for the unexpected. We tend to assume that tomorrow will be like today and that next week will be like this week, and so on. In other words, we infer that the future will resemble the past.

We also tend to deduce, incorrectly, that the next black swan will resemble a previous black swan. After a rare but devastating earthquake, for instance, it's only human nature to expect the next disaster will be an earthquake. However, the next black swan is invariably something nobody anticipated.

The Bush administration never saw the black swan of 9/11 coming, at least in part, because so many of its key figures were trapped in a tunnel vision mindset that was incapable of imagining that non-state actors could pose a significant national security threat. It then assumed that the United States was facing a new wave of unconventional attacks from rogue states like Iraq. In other words, it failed to connect the dots that might have prevented 9/11. And then it connected dots where it shouldn't have – i.e., between Iraq and a future 9/11.

Bush and his defenders claim that everyone expected that we'd be hit again following 9/11, but since we haven't then it can't be an accident. Therefore, the syllogism concludes, Bush deserves extraordinary credit. In fairness, the president and his national security team undoubtedly devote a great deal of time and effort trying to safeguard the public from a variety of threats. One of Bush's far-sighted initiatives is a program to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which is a sensible way of reducing the chances of an international pandemic while simultaneously mitigating the kind of misery that breeds the chaos that feeds civil wars, terrorism, etc.

By and large, however, Bush's gloating about preventing another attack falls into the same category as "mission accomplished" and "bring em' on" – it's premature and irresponsible in so far as it practically invites an attack. Al-Qaeda does not operate according to a Western timeframe; eight years is an eternity according to America's political calendar, but the jihadists are thinking in terms of decades and centuries. The invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo has probably helped recruit more terrorists than the Bush administration has been able to kill. Bush as almost certainly inadvertently helped spawn a new generation of dark birds of prey bent on devising the kind of monstrous surprises narrow-minded men and conventional thinkers can scarcely imagine.

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