March 2, 2007 - One thing that you cannot accuse the Bush administration of is uncertainty. Remember that day that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld squarely faced the camera and told us all in no uncertain terms that he knew where Saddam’s fearful arsenal of unconventional weapons was located. When he said it the UN Inspectors had not been able to find any such weapons and we wondered just why the Secretary did not just call Hans Blix and tell him where they were. The Secretary’s expression of certainty was not the first such declaration to issue from the Bush administration. The G.W. Bush Presidency was barely 30 days old when the United States broke off talks with North Korea and suspended energy and food aid to Pyongyang. The Bush Administration justified its action by claiming that North Korea had broken its agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program by secretly working on an enriched uranium program.

We all know how accurate Secretary Rumsfeld’s certainty turned out. At least only few true-believers who live in the political faith based community now believe that there were WMD’s stored in Iraq. The rest of us live in the reality based community. That is not just a clever turn of a phrase. Early on a highly placed Bush aide told Ron Suskind that Bush critics 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.'' The aide went on, ''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.'' The Bush loyalists take it on faith that only facts that support the President’s policies are not just reality but are the only reality. And that faith is so strong that even when the President admits that WMDs were not present in Iraq the loyalists become the more adamant in their insistence that Don Rumsfeld was correct and even that WMDs have been found.

Now it emerges that Iraq is not the only case in which faith based reality drove Bush administration policy. The conclusion that North Korea was violating the Agreed Framework that Jimmy Carter hammered out during the Clinton administration seems to have been based upon the same sort of massaged intelligence that justified the invasion of Iraq. The syllogism went like this: A. Negotiations with the North Korean regime are bad policy. B. You cannot trust the North Korean regime to keep its word. C. Therefore the North Korean Regime must not be complying with the Agreed Framework. The extension of the argument, and the Bush administration’s rationale for pulling out of the Agreed Framework and further talks, is that North Korea must be enriching uranium to construct nuclear weapons. That suspicion became the Bush administration’s reality. When Bush policy reacted to Bush reality North Korea resumed its suspended plutonium production and exploded a nuclear device.

In Iraq the faith based policy demanded that the American installed regime would be a pro-American responsive democracy in the classical mode. That is what the policy called for so that is what the reality became and the administration could not see as American forces became increasingly embroiled in a sectarian civil war. After six years some of his military leadership have finally joined the reality based community in testimony before Democratic Congressional committees. The President is learning a valuable if long overdue lesson. Reality bites!