Liberal Talk Radio

Believe Bush’s lies (damn lies) or not if you will [I don't], but in truth there are people out there plotting to kill us. Put that in your hookah and smoke it.

Once you’ve accepted this basic truth, it’s time to get a grip on your expectations. Bush and his cronies persist in the fallacy that it’s possible always and everywhere to create a perfect outcome (i.e., no future terror incidents in the U.S.). But this outcome is not possible. As I’ve argued previously, terrorism, like the plague, can be analyzed from a statistical perspective. Even if you can stop 99.99% of terrorists, you’ve still got to worry about terrorist 10,000. If, indeed, there are the thousands of evil doers monkey man would have you see lurking behind every brown-skinned face, then even a 1 in 10,000 chance of an incident means that it’s highly likely an incident of some kind will happen.

So let’s identify (yet another) failure of the Bush administration: failure to properly set expectations regarding the statistical likelihood of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Now, maybe it’s a bit odd that I can simultaneously decry Bush’s “Intelligence” Estimate on the grounds that it overstates the threat coming from one direction, while also pointing out that the threat is probably much greater than Bush himself is letting on. The reason I can get away with that is that Bush is trying to overstate the likelihood of a terrorist incident originating from a certain situation (Iraq) in order to continue justifying The Worst Decision in American History — the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s highly concerning to me that Bush is more interested in justifying the crap he took on our collective lawn than he is in providing real security, an effort which, as Michael Rose pointed out in the New York Times, would be greatly aided by a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

Instead of doing his best CYA (”cover your ass” … a skill he undoubtedly learned from his time at Harvard Business School) on Iraq, Bush SHOULD be providing leadership by correctly setting the expectations of the American people.

A friend of mine who works in the Seattle policy community (it’s small, but there is one here) introduced me yesterday to the concept of “resilience.” Resilience accepts the inevitability of a future terrorist incident (or natural disaster) and — instead of setting the impossible goal of 100% protection — seeks to mitigate the damage from any such incident. Thus we have a focus on overcoming and preparedness, rather than a false sense of security and invisible boogeymen.

Strength, fortitude, and determination in the face of gathering darkness, or smoke, mirrors, and invisible terror with collective self-delusion? I ask you — which set of values represents the America of your aspirations? How do you want to live?