In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That’s not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-Ron Suskind, Without A Doubt

If you read nothing else this weekend, you should read this article by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books.  Reprinted with permission by Tom Engelhardt on his blog, TomDispatch, it’s the best account I’ve seen yet of how that right wing separate reality that Ron Suskind was writing about in that New York Times Magazine article above, dragged this country into the war in Iraq.  Read it if for nothing else, to understand that the people responsible for the worst military debacle in U.S. history are Still living in that fantasyland.

…the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination — built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run" — began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality. 

Why was there no plan for what to do After Saddam fell?  The only figment of a plan existed at the Pentagon, and that was simply to install Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles as the new Iraqi government.  But President Junior vetoed that plan as running too Obviously counter to his professed goal of spreading democracy in the region.  It just wouldn’t do to be Seen imposing a new set of rulers on the Iraqi people.  So plan A was discarded, and they never came up with a plan B. 

And if you’re asking why Junior didn’t notice that there was no plan B, you probably weren’t paying attention back when he was running for president in 2000 either.  This entire debacle is what happens when you give a pampered jackass who never learned the value of a dollar and never had to fix anything he ever broke, responsibility for something.  His entire skill set in 2000 consisted of knowing how to bully people into giving him what he wanted, and getting them to clean up after the messes he made.  That’s all there was on his resume, because that’s all he’s ever had to do in his life to get by.  And when the republicans on the Supreme Court short circuited the electoral process to get him in, Bush brought his skill set right into the White House with him.  That he’s made an unmitigated mess of everything he could get his hands on in the Executive branch since, plus everything he could bully his rubber stamp republican congress into giving him, should surprise no one.  There was no plan B for Iraq, not because of overconfidence, but because in Bush’s entire life failure was always someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.

Subtract Iraq from the books, and you have a disaster.  There’s the wreckage he’s left in the constitutional balance of powers.  There’s the wreckage he’s left of the rule of law.  There’s the wreckage in the arts and sciences.  There’s the wreckage of the City of New Orleans.  We Lost A City On His Term.  This Thanksgiving nearly one-hundred thousand refugees from an American City were still living in FEMA trailors.  There’s the staggering debt he’s piled up in just six years, dispensing favors to cronies.  There’s the wreckage of the health care system.  And not just domestically.  In Africa, the rates of HIV infection have started to rise as a consequence of Bush’s ideological opposition to condom use.  And there is the wreckage of the American political landscape.  Republican scorched earth politics have made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk with each other across the isle.  The cold war has turned inward.  Subtract Iraq and you still have a disaster of mind boggling scale.  Factor it back in and you have an unmitigated nightmare.  And that nightmare will be running its course long after he is out of office.

We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration’s "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity.

Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope — in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

How did it come to this?  The blame for it cannot rest entirely on Junior’s stooped shoulders alone.  It isn’t as though anyone with half a brain couldn’t see him for what he was back in 2000.  There’s talk since the election about how Bush fooled a lot of people.  Perhaps.  But not the majority of those who voted for him.  It is worth bearing in mind that the changes that swept through congress and the statehouses last election day, came largely on very thin margins of victory.  In the face of one major Bush administration scandal, one disaster after another after another, these voters simply cannot be taken for chumps.  No.  They know what they’re voting for.  

The politics of resentment has a large constituency.  The fact that Al Gore was the more qualified candidate in 2000 counted against him with that voting block.  His intelligence and wonkish grasp of the issues was like nails on a blackboard to them.  They liked Bush precisely for his know-nothing sense of entitlement, his cheapness of spirit, and all his simmering resentments which were theirs too.  He was their ideal man, living the good life they’d always dreamed of.  A life of power over others, new toys every day, and the canned respect of doting sycophants who always have to smile at you, and do whatever you tell them, and never ever ever tell you that you’re wrong about anything, because you never are, everyone else is.

The support the Bush republicans have today now rests on nothing more profound then a desire to put a thumb in the eye of everyone who can deal with the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. The more their imaginary world collapses around them, the more they’ll be blaming the reality based community for it.  And when the bills come due, the constituency of resentment will blame everyone else for the mess it made, probably including Bush too. 

Government teeters amid Iraq bloodshed

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs across the country engaged in retaliatory attacks following coordinated car bombings that killed 215 people in a Shiite slum the previous day.

They’ll say Bush deceived them.  He didn’t.  He promised them their dreams would come true.  They have.