President George W. Bush delivered last week’s veto address while nestled comfortably in a cocoon of mothers and their in vitro babies born from discarded embryos. Rhetoric is as much symbology as language. And Bush’s speech was rife with eerie symbols. In vitro, from Latin, literally means “in glass.” Today, the phrase can refer to the kind of experiments that take place in artificial settings like a laboratory or Petri dish.Ironically, this particular veto comes as Bush’s own democratic experiment is on the verge of self-abortion. The veto was wrong, but we should all be more concerned about the crisis in Bush’s own in vitro experiment in the Middle East – in Iraq, that erstwhile “laboratory of democracy.”The Bush administration inherited a foreign policy focused on order and almost Hippocratic in its status quo approach to the Middle East. But Bush wasn’t satisfied with do-no-harm. He wanted democracy, stat. So armed with a circular theory and a Pentagon, he set about executing his own seminal experiment in nation building.Fitting for an administration that spurns science, what the Bush team failed to account for in the Iraqi Petri dish was cultures. The President didn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Kurd before he plunged into Iraq. You could say he didn’t know Shiite, and now he’s buried in it.But who’s surprised? This administration has always treated science as an organized conspiracy against faith. State-building, like any experiment, requires flexibility and a willingness to learn from mistakes. Could we honestly expect the White House to apply abroad the very scientific standards that it ignores at home?In his stem cell veto speech, Bush spoke of the need for restraint in government. He advocated the kind of methodical consideration one might expect an elected representative to use in any experiment, whether it involved millions of people or primordial goo. “Crossing this line would be a mistake,” Bush said, that “would needlessly encourage a conflict.” Bush was talking about stem cells, not Iraq. Consistency, it would seem, is a scientific concept.Unfortunately, the Bush administration is plenty consistent in choosing ideology over information. The White House “war on science” goes beyond moral values. The conviction that feelings and faith are more important than facts infects administration policy from stem cells to terrorist cells. That’s why Bush watches Iraq freefall into civil war, and resolves to “stay the course.” That’s why, even if discarded embryos are used to save lives, Bush chooses the goo and thinks he’s choosing life.And that’s why Bush’s faith-first version of governance belongs out of government and in a museum of ancient history, a place where we can learn from it without reviving it. In that transparent dustbin of history where it might rest in peace, in isolation and in vitro.Derek Thompson is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].