Faith-Based Initiatives

Bush turns democracy on its head

By COLLEEN TUITE

What happens when an event precedes its happening? What happens when people believe an event has happened, when in fact it has not? If enough people believe it has happened, does it even need to occur? If enough people predict an event will happen, will it?

The good folks at the Pentagon seem to think so. At least, they sank $3 million into a project called the Policy Analysis Market, which would allow investors to buy, trade, and sell “terrorism futures” — basically, wagers on speculations like “al-Qaeda will attack a major U.S. city next month,” or “Saddam Hussein will be found in a cave in Yemen.”

The program, spawned by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), operates around the idea that the futures market will reflect the actual future. If people are willing to invest a substantial amount of monetary funds in a prediction, they may have knowledge of its veracity.

The “terrorism futures” market, then, was to serve as an information-gathering service for the Pentagon — that is, until the media got a whiff of this stinker and Congress promptly shut the lunatic idea down. (Actually, this whole fiasco will probably end on a good note: DARPA’s head, John Poindexter, a convicted criminal for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, yet still able to pull a paycheck from your taxes, is expected to resign within a few weeks of this writing).

While nearly anyone can see that the Policy Analysis Market would have been disasterous in practice (as John Lacny notes on ZNet, “if someone stands to gain $50 million from a coup in Thailand, what’s to stop them from spending $30 million to foment a coup in Thailand?”), the idea of tying together peoples’ beliefs, money, fears, and politics goes strangely hand-in-hand with the rest of the Bush administration’s actions.

Instead of observing the traditional role of elected officials in a democracy (i.e., you get elected, you make decisions which positively effect your constituents and reflect their concerns, you get reelected), the administration instead focuses on making people believe that their actions are positively affecting Americans and reflecting their concerns. Bush’s policies are not shaped to fit the needs of the American public; the American public opinion is instead manipulated to serve the needs of the policy.

From the economy to the war in Iraq, this mode of operation can be seen again and again. And why should it be surprising? George W. Bush is a businessman, not a politician. He sells his policies to the public by capitalizing on their fears and what they want to believe. In his pitch for the war in Iraq, Bush built his argument by manipulating the public’s fear of terrorism, and by making people believe that overthrowing Hussein was the noble and right thing to do. Much of his argument was built around lies and distorted information, but why does that matter now? Who cares if you’ve sold a car that’s a lemon once it’s off the lot?

We’re in a recession, unemployment is steadily growing, and nearly every state is experiencing a major budget crisis, yet what does Bush say? “[The] economy is vibrant and strong,” (AP, 8/3/03) a remark which, first, makes one wonder if he was actually speaking about the U.S. economy (he was), and second, just why he continues to deny reality. The answer is almost touching: he does it for you, the average, trusting, unconcerned (he hopes) American who casts a ballot and (he also hopes) considers writing checks to reelection campaigns.

The same story is played out in Bush’s way of spinning the war in Iraq. After Baghdad was captured by American forces, Bush hailed the war as a victory. Troops were (and still are) dying nearly every day, but if the American people believed that war was over, we had won, and Good had triumphed over Evil, then why is the truth important? The truth plays no role in the electoral college. If people believe that Bush’s lies are true, the truth becomes irrelevant.

In May, a poll conducted by Knight-Ridder found that a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 22 percent believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. in the war. Why? Because they had been fed the war before it happened — we would invade, a few 19-year-olds would die in the service of their great nation, we’d get Saddam, we’d be heroes, we’d secure our oil supply, we’d discover the massive stockpiles of weapons the UN inspectors were too dumb to find, we’d spread democracy to the people who couldn’t do it themselves, and soldiers would come home to ticker-tape parades.

According to this predicted version of the war, it made sense for people to think that by May l, we had to have found those WMDs. For those who accepted this version, the war was finished before it even began. This explains the confusion that has arisen now as people learn that Bush proffered false information in his January State of the Union address, and as they witness a version of the war which has deviated from the neatly packaged one delivered by the Bush Administration. But watch now as Bush alters his story to tailor it slightly to reality: “Weapons of Mass Destruction” has been replaced by “Weapons Programs,” and “Iraqi freedom” is heard much more often than “links to al-Qaeda.”

One of the first things Bush did when he became president was to create an Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, intended to aid religious charities. After a media frenzy in Washington, it was nipped in the bud by Congress because of the obvious church-state issue. But the Faith-Based Initiative lives on in the White House. It lives on every time Bush announces that we’re winning the War on Terrorism, every time he says the economy’s doing just great, every time he relies on the blind faith of Americans to make his lies become truth enough.