A shocking thumbsucker in the WaPo this morning, under the rubric "DISPATCH FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR," accusing Iraq war critics of "hindsight bias."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
This is the last brick in Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's firewall: "Everybody Was Wrong."
That's what they said about the WMD case, and when they lose Iraq for good, that will be their last ditch defense.
But it's bullshit. We all know it. I know it. And it's not a trick of psychology, as I prove after the jump. Because I took notes.
Here's Shankar Vedantam in the WaPo:
Antiwar liberals last week got to savor the four most satisfying words in the English language: "I told you so."
This was after a declassified National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq was creating more terrorists than it was eliminating. For millions of people who opposed President Bush's mission in Iraq from the start, this was proof positive that they had been right all along. Yes, they told themselves, we saw this disaster coming.
Only . . . that isn't quite true.
One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.
This is not to say that no one predicted the war in Iraq would go badly, or that the insurgency would last so long. Many did. But where people might once have called such scenarios possible, or even likely, many will now be certain that they had known for sure that this was the only possible outcome.
Before the fatal invasion of Iraq I marched against the war twice in New York and once in Washington D.C. On the train from New York to Washington for the March 15, 2003 march, I wrote the following notes.
You tell me if I have hindsight bias.
The war is a few days away. The culmination of the failure of American democracy that came to a boil in November 2000, but was foreshadowed by the stalking and bagging of Clinton. As goes America, so goes the world -- plunged now into a world war against all reason, against the informed judgment of the vast majority of the world population. Driven by a tiny cabal of greedy, lying religious fanatics -- will they ever be held accountable? Will Bush, Cheney, Perle, et. al ever stand in shackles in the dock, made to answer for their crimes?
Signs of hope: the UN, towering over the situation, refused to be bribed, bullied, or cowed by the Bush cabal. It performed precisely the function it was intended to perform: it branded America's coming act of aggression as unlawful and unjustified.
Put to the test, Bush's case for immediate war was reduced to a risible shambles of transparent lies, distortions, and forgeries. "We'll go ahead anyway." But that does not make the UN irrelevant, it makes Bush and Blair war criminals, albeit unpunished for now.
Bush is Hitler without the concentration camps, at least not yet. September 11 was America's Reichstag fire, the obscuring excuse for Bush's seizure of absolute power. The American public, having been systematically lied to by Bush and a cowed and opportunistic corporate media, backs the war by a slight majority. As Goebbels said, it is easy to get the public to support a war: tell them they are being attacked, and impugn the patriotism of anyone who questions the warmongers. America 2003 = Germany 1939.
A poll I would like to see taken: of those who support the war, how many get most or all of their information from television? How many think Iraq was behind 9/11? If Iraq was not behind 9/11, would you still think the conquest is justified?
Will we see Bush and Blair destroyed by the juggernaut they have set in motion? Blair, almost certainly. If there were a credible alternative leader for the Labor party, Blair would be out by now. He's single-handedly waging an illegal war against the wishes of 80% of the population -- if democracy and law have any force at all, he can't last long. His reward for backing Bush will be destruction.
As for America, the house of cards holding Bush up is beginning to tremble. But a swift "victory" in Iraq is certain, like our "victory" in Afghanistan, when Iraq's army surrenders rather than fights. And America loves a winner, expect to see 75%+ of the public backing the war after Bagdhad falls.
And outside of America's elites, who will be aware of the inevitable turmoil and disaster that will follow in Iraq? Who is aware of the current situation in "liberated" Afghanistan? Bush will control the American media with an iron fist. The foreign press will report the truth as well as they can, but who in America will listen? "We won" will be all the fat part of the bell curve will understand.
The UN should have a monitoring role after the conquest, to guard against a humanitarian disaster, to preclude violation of Iraqi human rights by the occupying forces, to get America out of Iraq as soon as possible. The UN should also consider what sanctions should be brought against the warmongers. Bush and his puppetmasters, and poor betrayed Blair in the dock at Nuremberg, would be the only justice.
Of course, I don't believe for a moment that Bush will set up a democratic form of government in Iraq. They'll get a Shah of Iran-like figure, controlled from Washington. (Remember how well that worked in Iran.) We'll still have thousands of troops there twenty years from now.
And of course, Iraq's low-cost oil will go to fatten the bank accounts of Bush's cronies. It's too obvious to discuss.
If there are further major terrorist attacks in the US, will be public blame Bush or will he take encouragement from them for further conquests?