Cognitive Dissidents

The Washington Post has this excrable article today that Echidne also took note of (and did it first):

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.

"Liberals' assertion that they 'knew all along' that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias," agreed Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied the hindsight bias and how to overcome it. "This is not to say that they didn't always think that the war was a bad idea."

Like Echidne, behold the power of archives...

Rising Hegemon, March 20, 2004:

Added to that, especially on say, September 12, 2001, we have supreme moral influence. We could very well have joined with our allies and even the ambivalent and come up with a global approach to dealing with the scourge of terrorism. The board was set for a long-term approach, philosophically, politically and militarily. We had a chance to really follow the Hans Morgenthau rules of international relations and create a better, more stable, safer world out of the ashes of this horrible tragedy. AND THEY F**KING BLEW IT, FROM THE START. As has been alleged by others and now reaffirmed by Richard Clarke a National Security, counter-terrorism expert during the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II Administrations, they wanted to bomb the crap out of Saddam and Iraq from the very first. Damn them, damn them all to hell

I can do more 15 second searches if you want me to WaPo.

Fuckers!