And apparently Bin Laden is the queen bee. At least that's the implication from President Bush's metaphor, in an odd exchange with NBC's Richard Engel, taped yesterday in Egypt and aired this morning on "The Today Show."
MR. ENGEL: If you look back over the last several years, the Middle East that you'll be handing over to the next president is deeply problematic. You have Hamas in power, Hezbollah empowered, taking to the streets, Iran empowered, Iraq still at war. What region --
PRESIDENT BUSH: Richard, those folks were always around. They were here. What we're handing over is a Middle East that, one, recognizes the problems and the world recognizes them. There's clarity as to what their problems are.
MR. ENGEL: The war on terrorism has been the centerpiece of your presidency. Many people say that it has not made the world safer, that it has created more radicals, that there are more people in this part of the world who want to attack the United States.
PRESIDENT BUSH: This is the beehive theory. We should have just let the beehive sit there and hope the bees don't come out of the hive? My attitude is the United States must stay on the offense against al Qaeda, two ways.
MR. ENGEL: (But have you ?) smashed the bees?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Excuse me for a minute, Richard -- two ways. One, find them and bring them to justice, what we're doing; and two, offer freedom as an alternative for their vision. And somehow to suggest the bees would stay in the hive is naive. They didn't stay in the hive when they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.
It brings back bad memories of Joaquin Phoenix in his creepy role as a roman emperor in "Gladiator."
Watch the full interview below.
— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times
Comments (7)
If President Bush would have said that the terrorist world was a closed trajectory in socio-cultural phase space having the property that at least one other trajectory spirals into it either as time approaches infinity or as time approaches minus-infinity which was destabilized (escalated) by actions on 911 which resulted from a series of bifurcations of the global social system, do you think Mr. Engel would have understood clearly? I understand the beehive metaphor.
Posted by Larry Stone | May 19, 2008 11:16 AM
Funny Larry.
Are you trying to pretend Bush is any more capable of uttering those words, than he is at understanding the basic nature of bees?
HAHAHA!
BTW
"In a dynamical system, a bifurcation is a period doubling, quadrupling, etc., that accompanies the onset of chaos. It represents the sudden appearance of a qualitatively different solution for a nonlinear system as some parameter is varied. "
Have you figured out a qualified different solution to swatting bees yet? Or is bombing beehives still the only plan you can calculate?
Are you SURE you understand the beehive? Because Engel seems to understand what happens when you smash a hive.
Posted by Christy | May 19, 2008 12:43 PM
Bush repeatedly makes false statements such as:
"They came and killed 3,000 of OUR CITIZENS."
THE TRUTH:
2,464 Americans died, and 532 people died from 80 other countries for a total of 2,996 people.
Official American patriotic 9/11 propaganda has been incessantly driven into American's heads by their devious and morally deficient leaders, leading most people to be ignorant of the truth.
I find it disgusting that Bush doesn't even have the decency to honor the lives of people lost on 9/11 who were not from America, by not even acknowledging them. Enough with the 9/11 chip on America's shoulder!
Posted by D. | May 19, 2008 4:32 PM
Good, you know about limit cycles. A swarm or a hive is a stable limit cycle. You take out enough nodes to breakdown communications the swarm begins oscillation for a direction and yes that is what we want, chaos among the swarm. President Bush may not have said that way but that is what he is pursuing. You want a real lesson in complexity talk with General Petraeus.
Posted by Larry Stone | May 19, 2008 5:02 PM
Any biologist knows that bees do not swarm against other creatures unless they are being attacked or they think that they are being attacked. If you go and poke a stick into a bee hive or a hornets nest, yes, they will come out and attack. And if you do decide to wipe them out, you'd better be willing to do the complete job and not take half measures, or you're wasting your time.
But since in reality we're dealing with human beings and not insects, we may have other alternatives. The US Government has yet to negotiate with Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran. We have not negotiated in good faith with the Palestinians. We have not negotiated with any firmness or clarity in purpose with the Israelis or the Saudis. Consequently, we have yet to achieve any serious level of cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to curtail funding of terrorism by their private citizens nor have we achieved any serious level of cooperation from Israel in cutting back on outposts and settlement blocks in the West Bank. All of these things are something to be achieved by negotiations. Only Al Qaeda has renounced negotiations with the US; all of the other groups seem willing to talk if we are willing to engage in good faith negotiations.
Posted by George Robertson | May 19, 2008 7:49 PM
I agree,the beehive theory was a metaphor, not reality. I just get tired of the mainstream media using sarcasm as a tool to establish their social intellect and interrupt communications. We do need to finish what we started, that is essential. However negotiations in the Middle East are too complex for good faith. If they were a monoculture, good faith would be appropriate. Their differences go back further than our own history. when you combine Israel and western influence in the mix you, good faith seems to evolve into corruption as it did with Arafat and the Oil for Food debacle.
Posted by Larry Stone | May 20, 2008 1:38 AM
Seems to me bees are most productive when left well enough alone.
To extend the metaphor, the Bush cartel were after the Middle East's "honey", and, instead of fostering a healthy hive (building moral, multilateral relations), they decided smashing it and jamming both hands in greedily was the sensible course of action.
I applaud Engel's courage in taking Mr. Bush seriously to task (been awhile since ANY journalist's had the guts to do THAT!), but would have been a whole lot happier if he'd cut short Mr. Bush's "we're there to bring everyone freedom" claptrap.
Posted by Eric Smith | May 20, 2008 11:43 AM