On the anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, a common refrain has been to attack the administration's overly optimistic take on the Iraq war as delusional. The ability to hold beliefs in spite of facts and to convince oneself of the truth of things that are apparently untrue--self-deception--is unfortunately all too common in the human species. As Shankar Vedantam writes in the Washington Post, Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers found that "four in five high school seniors believe they have exceptional leadership ability, and nearly every single professor in the country believes he or she is above average."
Trivers holds that self-deception evolved in order to help an individual deceive others and to reduce the stresses of holding contradictory beliefs in one's mind. This may be why Bush and others can continue to assert that we are winning the war, despite the objections of Congress and the people. But it seems that our system of checks and balances is no match for the powerful genetic legacy found in the DNA of our President.
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I disgaree. I think our system of checks and balances is a formidable match for the DNA of our president. Although Madison didn't know about DNA, he knew that human nature wasn't to be trusted in government. Our system of seperated powers for the most part does counteract the bad tendencies of one, of few, or of the many, for that matter. And it will on this issue too. If the Democrats in Congress could convince some Republicans to jump ship and support veto-proof meaningful change on this doomed course in Iraq, Bush's DNA will be overruled. Otherwise, we will just have to wait until 2008 for Madion's foresight to work out this Iraq problem with a regime change. A year and a half may seem like a long time when lives are being lost, but it's a mere fraction of history. The American system slowly but surely works, perhaps better than most (parlimentary systems or Latin American overly-strong presidental democracies which tend to concentrate power) to combat bad genetic tendencies.
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