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You Can Make It With PlatoBush's difficult relationship with reality.

By William SaletanPosted Sunday, Feb. 8, 2004, at 5:19 PM ET

"The American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is."

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That's the message President Bush conveyed this morning on Meet the Press. He sees things as they are, not as liberals wish they were. As Bush put it:

That's very important for, I think, the people to understand where I'm coming from—to know that this is a dangerous world. I wish it wasn't. I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind. Again, I wish it wasn't true, but it is true. And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is. And I see dangers that exist, and it's important for us to deal with them. … The policy of this administration is … to be realistic about the different threats that we face.

Realistic. Dangers that exist. The world the way it is. These are strange words to hear from a president whose prewar descriptions of Iraqi weapons programs are so starkly at odds with the postwar findings of his own inspectors. A week ago, David Kay, the man picked by Bush to supervise the inspections, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his team had found almost none of the threats Bush had advertised. No chemical and biological weapons stockpiles. No evidence of a renewed nuclear weapons program. No evidence of illicit weapons delivered to terrorists. "We were all wrong," said Kay.

Again and again on the Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Bush to explain the discrepancies. Again and again, Bush replied that such questions had to be viewed in the "context" of a larger reality: I see the world as it is. Threats exist. We must be realistic.

This big-picture notion of reality, existence, and the world as it is dates back 2,400 years to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato believed that what's real isn't the things you can touch and see: your computer, your desk, those empty barrels in Iraq that Bush thought were full of chemical weapons. What's real is the general idea of these things. The idea of a computer. The idea of a desk. The idea of an Iraqi threat to the United States. Whether you actually have a computer or a desk, or whether Saddam Hussein actually had chemical weapons, is less important than the larger truth. The abstraction is the reality.

Plato's successor, Aristotle, took a different view. He thought reality was measured by what you could touch and see. That's the definition of reality on which modern science was founded. It's the definition Colin Powell used when he told the world Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It's the definition David Kay used when he set out to find the weapons. Kay and Powell are dismayed by our inability to see and touch the weapons. But Bush isn't. He isn't going to let Aristotle's reality distract him from Plato's.

In Bush's Platonic reality, the world is dangerous, threats exist, and the evidence of our senses must be interpreted to fit that larger truth. On the night he launched the war, for example, Bush told the nation, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Russert asked Bush whether, in retrospect, that statement was false. Bush replied, "I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be reanalyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror."

You can hear the gears turning in Bush's mind. We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. That attack exposed a new reality. That new reality changed the context for interpreting intelligence. Or, as Howard Dean less charitably puts it, if Bush and his administration "have a theory and a fact, and [the two] don't coincide, they get rid of the fact instead of the theory."

The more you study Bush's responses to unpleasant facts, the clearer this pattern becomes. A year and a half ago, the unpleasant facts had to do with his sale of stock in Harken Energy, a company on whose board of directors he served, shortly before the company disclosed that its books were far worse than publicly advertised. Bush dismissed all queries by noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission had declined to prosecute him. "All these questions that you're asking were looked into by the SEC," Bush shrugged. That conclusion was his measure of reality. As to the different version of reality suggested by the evidence, Bush scoffed with metaphysical certainty, "There's no 'there' there."

On Meet the Press, Bush handled questions about his service in the National Guard during Vietnam the same way. Russert reminded Bush, "The Boston Globe and the Associated Press have gone through some of their records and said there's no evidence that you reported to duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972." Bush replied, "Yeah, they're just wrong. There may be no evidence, but I did report. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been honorably discharged." That's the Bush syllogism: The evidence says one thing; the conclusion says another; therefore, the evidence is false.

Why did Americans elect a president who thinks this way? Because they wanted a leader different from Bill Clinton. They liked some things about Clinton, but they were sick of his dishonesty in the Monica Lewinsky affair and his constant shifting in the political winds. Bush promised that he would say what he believed and stick to it.

On Iraq, Bush fulfilled both promises. "What I do want to share with you is my sentiment at the time," he told Russert. "There was no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a danger to America." Note Bush's emphasis on his subjective reality: "my sentiment," "no doubt in my mind." When Russert asked Bush about his unpopularity abroad, Bush answered, "I'm not going to change, see? I'm not trying to accommodate. I won't change my philosophy or my point of view. I believe I owe it to the American people to say what I'm going to do and do it, and to speak as clearly as I can, try to articulate as best I can why I make decisions I make. But I'm not going to change because of polls. That's just not my nature."

No, it isn't. Bush isn't Clinton. He doesn't change his mind for anything, whether it's polls or facts. And he always tells the truth about what's in his mind, whether or not what's in his mind corresponds to what's in the visible world.

What are the consequences of such a Platonic presidency? The immediate risk is the replacement of Saddam with a more dangerous fundamentalist regime. Bush is certain this won't happen. "They're not going to develop that, because right here in the Oval Office, I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of [Iraq] that have made the firm commitment that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion," Bush told Russert. "I said [to Mr. al-Hakim], 'You know, I'm a Methodist. What are my chances of success in your country and your vision?' And he said, 'It's going to be a free society where you can worship freely.' "

There you have it: The regime will be pluralistic, because Bush believes it, because nice men came to the Oval Office and told him so.

Beyond Iraq, the risk is that the rest of the world won't believe anything the U.S. government says. Bush explained to Russert that he invaded Iraq in part because "when the United States says there will be serious consequences" and those consequences don't follow, "people look at us and say, 'They don't mean what they say.' " True enough. But meaning what you say won't get other nations to join you in policing the world, if what you think and say bears no relationship to reality.

The punch line is that Bush accomplished exactly what he set out to do in this interview: He showed you how his mind works. Republicans used to observe derisively that Clinton had a difficult relationship with the truth. Bush has a difficult relationship with the truth, too. It's just a different—and perhaps more grave—kind of difficulty.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photograph on Slate's home page from Meet the Press by NBC/Agence France-Presse.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

As if I don't have enough problems as a philosophy professor. Please, Mr. Saletan, do not do Plato the injustice of likening his theory of Forms to Bush's unresponsiveness to the force of evidence. Plato's analogy of our position in the world to that of someone observing shadows in cave is meant only to illustrate that we do not, from the human point of view, ever get to experience things as they really are. Bush expresses no such humility or recognition of the limitations of our intelligence (forgive me, but the pun is apt here). Perhaps Saletan, you were drawing on the idea that for Plato, we understand the world through certain Ideas (not ideas) or Forms which are the pure concepts, as it were, which allow us to make sense of our experience. But here too, Bush refuses to acknowledge that he approaches the world through a particular theoretical lens. Plato at least aims to justify his position, whereas Bush blindly goes forward.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, thinks we can have knowledge of the world, directly, through our senses. And he does not require that this sensory information be filtered through some theoretical lens. But last I heard, Aristotle wasn't exactly the founder of modern science. Robert Boyle is a more likely candidate, or Francis Bacon. While both are empiricist, like Aristotle, both are also mechanists, like us. Aristotle, after all, thought jaundiced folk saw everything to be yellowish because the eye's fluid was tinted yellow, and that objects transmitted phantasma of themselves through our sensory organs. Not very modern really.
And Bush ain't like either of them.

--Lshape

(To reply, click here)

I think it's just a stylistic embellishment for Saleteen to invoke this Aristotelian/Platonic dichotomy, and then flesh the article out by saying that the problem is that Bush is a Platonist, or like one. That is so evidently NOT the problem.

Of course it is the problem, as is also stated with less flourish, that Bush lacks a rugged empiricism to guide him in these difficult times...

This is part of the problem with being stupid: You have a really hard time getting a handle on the facts, and without them it's very difficult indeed to either come up with a good theory or test it. But being stupid and uninformed is not the OPPOSITE of Aristotelianism or Empiricism. It is the negation of these things. But Not-Black does not mean Is-White.

It's not like Aristotelians are perfect; Aristotle famously refused to count the number of teeth in the human mouth, and so was always wrong about the number. If only Bush WERE an Aristotelian OR a Platonist, possessing in either case a respect for philosophy and knowledge; the capacity to engage in a dialectic of ideas (as he so obviously was not with Russert); a willingness to submit his own views to the light of the sun.

It is true that Bush seems loftily above the facts. One hypothesis supposed more and more frequently in the fray is that Bush is delusional. When I watched him with Russet, his delivery, his manner of speaking, his facial expressions, all seemed truly bizarre. I though first that he seemed remarkably child-like, both lacking a sense of external reality, and a sense that he and it were each separate entities. It is an axiom of child-psychology that the idea of separateness from the mother and the world is something DEVELOPED. The idea itself seems axiomatic to a normal adult, but it seems as if Bush is developmentally delayed in this very way, unable to realize that his ideas are in his head, are not the world itself (if anything he seems like a Hegelian). He seems also to speak like a child, both in the degree of sophistication and coherence his speach has, and its arrested style:

"According to Piaget, preoperational thinking not only lacks logic but it is also egocentric. This kind of self-centeredness is characterized by a 4-year old's statement; 'Look Mommy, the moon follows me wherever I go.'"

and

"This egocentrism leads children to endless self-reporting and the assumption that other people know what they themselves know. They frequently conduct a conversation as though it were a monologue, changing the subject without seeming to be aware of the listener's response...."

Bush seems to me not so much of a Platonist as a big baby.

--starterkit

(To reply, click here)

…Will Saletan uses Kay's testimony to demonstrate that George Bush is in denial of reality when he says

And I see dangers that exist, and it's important for us to deal with them. … The policy of this administration is … to be realistic about the different threats that we face.

Hmmm... well, as we all know the Kay report disproved that right? Well...

I must say, I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.

Gee, funny how Will couldn't find any space for THAT quote. No room I guess, used up all his pixels. And then there's this

I personally think we're going to find program activities, and some of them are quite substantial, as in the missile area.

No room for that one either, huh? Oh, and then there was this little bit from his October report

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.

So, basically, George Bush is saying, Saddam was dangerous, He had bad intentions, and it wasn't safe to leave him there with our new awareness and sensitivity towards possible threats. Seems pretty well supported by evidence…

--Toroid

(To reply, click here)

Saletan offers Greek roots for Bush behaviors, but I suggest it's not quite so complicated or entangled. Russert's interview with the President merely outlines contact with reality or its lack. Once taking office, Bush determined he had all the means and power to do something his dad didn't by following international protocols and that was to eliminate Saddam Hussein.

Now that Saddam has been eliminated, the realities continue to prevail. The invasion, conquest and occupation turned out ill conceived and poorly thought through. The military execution of the war turned out brilliant, but the DOD had a lot of time to prepare for this sort of exercise and aligned their forces on a very temporary effort, quick in and quick out, just as Rumsfeld conceived and ordered his forces to behave.

Unfortunately, the whole basis of Rumseld's contentions and force of order was based on the uncertain and unreliable words of Chalabi who suggested this one set of reality post-war and the actual set of circumstances. When Chalabi turned out a false prophet, not only he but the whole DOD was left with exposed asses for public exam and international ridicule.

But the new order of facts don't cause any turn of thinking on Bush's part because he had a self-imposed mandate to accomplish. With the Taliban and their terrorist forces soon to be dismantled in Afghanistan, he instead chose to pursue his main course of thinking, dumping Saddam. He spent every credible coin of influence to get this deal done, but he was conned, just as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, Powell and Rice were conned. Saddam knew his territory, his allies and the situation where none in the Bush administration knew squat.

Thus, Bush is left defending his original position about Iraq while Iraq remains this sinkhole for U.S. money and soldiers and still he's putting up this brave front that this war effort was necessary…

--Robes

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