Why the Denial? Upward Inflection on "Denial"

I know this is a little late, especially because I read Bob Woodward's book State of Denial a couple of years ago, but it just donned on me recently to ask the question, why? It's something I often ask my college students to do, yet here I am, years later and ostensibly at my wits end, wondering why Bush is in such denial over the obvious in Iraq; it's a total failure!


Understanding denial is as easy as understanding why people become so quickly addicted to heroine. It makes one feel good, especially when it seems the whole world is crumbling. Understanding Bush's denial of the war in Iraq is just as easy, and is partly due to alcoholism. In order to cope with their addiction, alcoholics train themselves to see the world in black and white terms. They understand alcohol to be bad and transition themselves from one extreme to the other. Instead of getting "hammered" everyday, Bush quit drinking altogether. No more alcohol. In fact, there are times when he completely expresses an inability and even refusal to see shades of gray. For most people, alcohol is safe in moderation, and in some cases healthy. But for Bush, "it's bad, very bad" (said with a Dana Carvey impression of Bush Sr.) His views on the War on Terror uniquely express this also; "You're either for or against us." If you're critical of his decisions in Iraq, you're "unpatriotic."


However, I will defer to the experts when it comes to psychology. In their book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)," renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson postulate that when mistakes clash with self worth, believing one is competent yet making a mistake, denial becomes a coping factor. And so, "we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. We create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong." In essence, we deny the mistake in order to solve that dissonance.

On the otherhand, direct evidence for Bush's denial of the failures of Iraq is his "perpetual optimism," a pathological absolute that all is well when in fact all is not well. The Iraqi military is embedded with insurgents, the Iraqi parliament is going on a month-long vacation in the middle of tempestuous times, Al Quaeda in Iraq is growing stronger and wasn't even in Iraq until we showed up, and now the NIE declares that AlQuaeda is close to striking again within the continental U.S. Well, if we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, but they're going to attack us here anyway, what is any normal person going to think of that? The war in Iraq is a failure and will continue to be as long as Bush denies it. Time for another AA meeting, George!