They Do Get Fooled Again

March 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Times, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, asked nine “experts” to “reflect on their attitudes” then and say what most “surprised them or that they wish they had considered in the prewar debate.”

These were all war supporters (the American Enterprise Institute is well represented), and basically, the Times was giving them a chance to say why they were wrong and how they got fooled. Did they take the Times’s bait? Of course not. They all still say in one way or another that they were right in 2003.

I was reminded of something else that came around on the Internet today. (Hat tip to Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage)









SPOILER ALERT. Watch the video now – it’s only a minute long – because otherwise the next paragraph may spoil it for you.

After you see the scene the second time, you say, “Of course, it was there all the time, and I never saw it.” But these military and foreign policy experts in the Times are still insisting that their first perceptions were correct. There was never any bear, and the people who say there is a bear are wrong. It’s only because of the incompetence of the Bush Administration and the repeated mantras of the left that people even think there is a bear.

It’s dejà- Kuhn all over again. The adherents of a paradigm don’t abandon it for a new one just because it no longer fits with the facts. And the new paradigm succeeds not because it convinces the old guard, but because the old paradigm loses its power to draw new believers. If that’s true in the hard sciences, how much more it must apply in government policy.

That’s why I found it particularly impressive when Barack Obama said, “I don’t just want to end the war. I want to end the mentality that got us into the war.” Of course you don’t do that by trying to convince the Perles and Kagans of the world – these men who spurred us on and who still seem to be praying that they do get fooled again. You just make sure that your advisors have a much different mentality.

(I was going to give this post the title “The Bear That Wasn’t” – a wonderful fable about people enforcing their ideas upon recalcitrant facts. But I didn’t want to give too much away.)