Bush Kept us Safe?

Osama bin Laden once noted, "Americans may have the watches, but Arabs have the time." As the clock wound down on President Bush's tenure many of the administration's apologists were quick note that there were no further attacks on American soil in the 2,688 days following 9/11. This is a welcome fact. And I hope historians and future generations will find that for all his faults, President Bush did do some things right. However, it is dangerously simplistic to assume that 2,688 without an attack should count as evidence in favor of Bush's counter terrorism policies.

In his book The Black Swan authorNassim Taleb, a philosopher and statistician who studies improbable events, relates the parable of the turkey who takes each day he is fed and cared as further evidence that the farmer loves him. The turkey's inductive reasoning seems sounder and sounder every day of the year, until Thanksgiving.

Marc A. Thiessen, chief speechwriter for President Bush, is the kind of figure Taleb would likely call a turkey. Writing in the Washington Post, Thiessen cites the 2,688 day figure and then fallaciously deduces that if there is another attack it will be because an Obama Administration weakened the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" policy and other counterterrorism methods.

Thiessen's logic fails on so many levels that it's easy to see how such defective thinking contributed to one of the worst administration's in American history. To begin with, al-Qaeda and other Arab terror organizations operate according to a vastly different time-frame than we do in the West. Put simply, al-Qaeda and it like-minded affiliates are thinking in terms of generations and centuries, while much of America's political class are thinking in terms of election cycles. Insisting a relatively narrow sliver of time without an attack constitutes evidence of success (in a war that Bush himself said will be a generational affair) is not all that different from a turkey crowing "Mission Accomplished" right after feeding time.

Basically, the 2,688 days without an attack spiel is little more than a demagogic ploy, the political equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. A more accurate slogan might go like this: At least Bush kept us safe and secure, excepting for 9/11, Katrina, and the financial meltdown.

Arguing that "enhanced interrogation" methods have kept America safe is patently bogus too. To begin with, "enhanced interrogation" is nothing but a euphemism for torture. The Bush administration resorted to legal sophistry in its Alice in Wonderland interpretation of the Constitution, leading it to define torture in terms so narrow that the concept no longer had any practical meaning. President Obama has brought some much needed moral clarity to the issue by insisting that the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions will govern how detainees in U.S. custody are treated.

Thiessen claims torture works. Undoubtedly, in some cases this is true. But most counterterrorism experts agree that torture frequently leads to false confessions. When torture is involved, it is exceedingly difficult to sort out good information from bad. Indeed, some of the "evidence" the Bush administration used to substantiate its case that Saddam possessed WMD was gleaned through torture. It may be true that torture has prevented attacks, but torture also helped lead to the foolish war with Iraq. Ironically, the subsequent torture and abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib will in all likelihood help breed a new generation of jihadists determined to attack the United States.

Torture also brutalizes, desensitizes, and corrupts the personnel and the institutions that resort to barbarism to extract information. The America people correctly sensed that dispensing with our values, as the Bush administration most assuredly did, would not lead to greater security over the long haul. Put simply, the Bush administration's radical departure from America's traditional ideals regarding the humane treatment of prisoners sapped American morale and expanded the ranks of our enemies.

Theissen's most outrageous fallacy is his claim that if there is a future attack during Obama's tenure, then the fault will lay with his administration. This is typical of the divisive fear mongering the American people are rightly revolted with following eight years of Bush's political demagoguery. If there is another attack, then the blame will lie with those who carried out the attack. America will need to come together to work towards the common purpose of defeating our enemies. Pointing fingers to score political points will be a recipe for self-defeat. There was a moment after 9/11 when President Bush had the goodwill and trust of the American people behind him, but he blew it.

The claim that Bush's extra-legal policies kept the polis safe are not dissimilar to an athlete using steroids who insists a great run is proof of his fitness. Over time, the extra legal techniques of torture will weaken the body politic, just as steroids will weaken the athlete's body. America is a less resilient country because of Bush's policies. The American people were right to reject the self-defeating policies of Bush/Cheney

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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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