Determined to be wrong

Hume's Ghost says that the Bush Administration was determined to be wrong. In an article in the Wapo today, Joby Warrick tells of veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller (whom I wrote about here) and his struggle to warn the administration before the invasion of Iraq that they had their facts wrong -- that the aptly named Curveball couldn't be trusted. In spite of his efforts, he was ignored, the fiasco was unleashed and... the rest is history.

It has become pretty clear to everyone that these weren't innocent mistakes but, rather, they were deliberate efforts to have facts suppressed if they conflicted with their pre-determined course of action (I can't bring myself to say: plans).

This seems to be a recurring theme for this administration. It just doesn't seem to hear objections until it's too late. It has an uncanny ability to not hear information that discredits its beliefs.

[...]

But this is part of an even larger pattern of not being able to confront reality which conflicts with its political ideology. This is why it might be the most anti-scientific administration is US history, since science is the best method that humanity has to investigate and determine objective truth. But wishful thinking does not change inconvenient truths, and eventually reality must be confronted.

He then ends with a quote from an article by Dylan Otto Krider called The Politicization Of Science in the Bush Administration.

The troubles in Iraq are not so much proof of the failure of the neocon vision for democratizing the Middle East, as they are a reminder of the disastrous consequences of removing empiricism from deliberation. All the problems that have popped up in Iraq were predicted long ago—from troop strength to the resilience of the insurgents—and available to anyone who cared to look. The administration not only chose to look away but actively swept them under the rug. When CIA war games were discovered to be training personnel to deal with the eventuality of civil disorder after the fall of Baghdad, The Atlantic Monthly reported the Pentagon forbad representatives from the Defense Department from participating because “detailed thought about the postwar situation meant facing costs and potential problems.” 29 Our refusal to face reality hasn’t been giving democracy much of a chance.

“Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue,” George Will wrote recently. “Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.” 30 Bush has finally met his match. The Universe is the one foe more steadfast than he is. It cannot be bullied or intimidated. The laws of physics know no compromise. This is a game of chicken Bush will lose. If he doesn’t take his foot off the accelerator, then the only question is: how will we recover from the crash?