Page 217 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 199

of the case against bombing in 1966 (pages 555–63 of the Pen-
tagon Papers) with the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum that disputed
his conclusion and called the bombing one of our two trump
cards, while it apparently ignored all of the facts that showed the
opposite. Yet it was the Joint Chiefs who prevailed. 20

More recently, President George W. Bush wanted to believe that
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs) that posed a threat to Americans.This led the President and
his advisors to interpret the information in CIA reports as definitive
proof of Iraq’s WMDs, even though the reports were ambiguous and
contradicted by other evidence. President Bush’s interpretation pro-
vided the justification to launch a preemptive war. He was convinced
that once our troops entered Iraq they would find these weapons.
After the invasion of Iraq, when asked “Where are the WMDs?”
administration officials said that Iraq is a big country in which the
WMDS are well hidden, but asserted that the weapons would be
found. As the months dragged on and still no WMDs were found,
the officials continued to assert that they would be uncovered. Why?
Because the administration officials were experiencing enormous
dissonance.They had to believe they would find the WMDs. Finally,
it was officially concluded that there were no such weapons, which
suggests that, at the time of our invasion, Iraq posed no immediate
threat to the United States.
Now what? American soldiers and Iraqi civilians were dying
every week, and hundreds of billions of dollars were being drained
from the U.S. treasury. How did President Bush and his staff reduce
dissonance? By adding new cognitions to justify the war. Suddenly,
we learned that the U.S. mission was to liberate the nation from a
cruel dictator and give the Iraqi people the blessings of democratic
institutions. To a neutral observer, that justification was inadequate
(after all, there are a great many brutal dictators in the world). But,
to President Bush and his advisors, who had been experiencing dis-
sonance, the justification seemed reasonable.
Several commentators have suggested that the Bush adminis-
tration was dissembling; that is, that it was deliberately trying to de-
ceive the American people. We cannot be certain what was going on
in the President’s mind. What we do know, based on 50 years of re-
search on cognitive dissonance, is that although the President and