Sunday, February 23, 2014

Disinformation, Distorted facts, Self-deception, choosing to be ignorant

How did the Bush administration decide to invade Iraq? By choosing to be ignorant! --

BBC News - A Point of View: See no evil: " . . . Much has been alleged about disinformation in the run-up to the invasion. But if some of those who launched the war were presenting a distorted picture of the facts, they were also deceiving themselves. Contrary to a common view, it wasn't that Rumsfeld and his fellow war-planners failed to prepare for the situation that would come about in the country after the invasion. If they'd known the chaos and conflict that would follow, they might not have been able to launch the war. So rather than confront the facts, they chose to remain ignorant of them. For Rumsfeld and others who thought like him, the risks of the invasion weren't unknown unknowns. They belonged in another category of human ignorance: that of unknown knowns - things they decided weren't worth thinking about. It's an attitude that hasn't gone away. A similar denial of reality prevails today in Britain and many other countries in connection with the financial crisis and its aftermath. The bankers and politicians seem genuinely to have believed that a new type of capitalism had been invented in which booms and busts would no longer occur. In the new era we'd entered, they were convinced, a level of prosperity had been reached that would only increase for the foreseeable future. . . ."





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