Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [1]
It goes further than that: Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for “tenacious clinging to a discredited belief” was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
At that time, the two of us watched with fascination as commentators from the right and left began fantasizing in print about what it would be like to have a president who admitted mistakes. The conservative columnist George Will and the liberal columnist Paul Krugman both called for Bush to admit he had been wrong, but the president remained intransigent. In 2006, with Iraq sliding into civil war and sixteen American intelligence agencies having issued a report that the occupation of Iraq had increased Islamic radicalism and the risk of terrorism, Bush said to a delegation of conservative columnists, “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.”1 Of course, Bush had to justify the war his administration pursued in Iraq; he had too much invested in that course of action to do otherwise—thousands of deaths and, according to a conservative estimate from the American Enterprise Institute in 2006, at least a trillion dollars. Accordingly, when he was proved wrong in his original reasons for the war, he found new ones: getting rid of a “very bad guy,” fighting terrorists, promoting peace in the Middle East, bringing democracy to Iraq, increasing the security of the United States, and finishing “the task [our troops] gave their lives for.” In other words, we must continue the war because we began the war.
Politicians are the most visible of self-justifiers, which is why they provide such juicy examples. They have refined the art of speaking in the passive voice; when their backs are to the wall they will reluctantly acknowledge error, but not responsibility. Oh all right, mistakes were made, but not by me; by someone else, who shall remain nameless.2 When Henry Kissinger said that the “administration” may have made mistakes, he was sidestepping the fact that as national security adviser and secretary of state (simultaneously) he, in effect, was the administration. This self-justification allowed him to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with a straight face and a clear conscience.
We look at the behavior of politicians with amusement or alarm or horror, but, psychologically, what they do is no different in kind, though certainly in consequence, from what most of us have done at one time or another in our private lives. We stay in an unhappy relationship or merely one that is going nowhere because, after all, we invested so much time in making it work. We stay in a deadening job way too long because we look for all the reasons to justify staying and are unable to clearly assess the benefits of leaving. We