Modal Realism In Iraq

George Bush's manly poses have not only not succeeded in bringing republican democracy to Iraq, but as the substance of this NYT report should make clear, his policies since the idiotic "Mission Accomplished" moment have been an utter failure. I realize that there are metrics of success that don't necessarily entail western-style democratic parliamentary government, but I'd like to know which metric, precisely, allows for the interim Iraqi government to be losing ground in Baghdad to the insurgents.

But perhaps I haven't taken enough of a meta-view about the war. As I learned in a metaphysics seminar last year, there is a theory of modality (i.e., the study of possibility, impossibility, necessity, and actuality) according to which all possible worlds are in some sense "real"---just not spatio-temporally connected to the other possible worlds. The actual world, far from being the only reality, is simply the possible world that we happen to inhabit. This theory, called "modal realism," proposed most famously by the great Princeton philosopher David Lewis, might well have been the court ontology of the Bush administration all along, and we didn't know it.

If so, then we can at least make sense of the bizarre Republican re-election campaign, which is premised on successful conduct of a war in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, et al., in keeping with their standard tactic of saying things that are technically true but enormously misleading, have all along been talking about the real possible world W', in which Iraq is a vibrant, burgeoning democracy whose citizens regularly send care packages of flowers and candy directly to the White House, while in Afghanistan, the Karzai government has secure control of the country and the upcoming elections are not subject to massive fraud.

Blinkered modal actualists like me and John Kerry (and almost everyone who isn't a trained philosopher) have been stupidly constricting our perspective to possible world W, the actual world, when all along, we should have expanded our minds to take in the full field of modalities. Fool me once....

But now that I think about it some more, the number of possible worlds in which George Bush presided over an invasion of Iraq and Iraq became a flourishing democracy occupies a tiny fraction of the wave function. Indeed, there are, by a large factor, more possible worlds, including the actual world, in which Bush's Iraq policy is a failure. And there are still more possible worlds in which Iraq doesn't exist at all.