Dick Cheney and John McCain Illustrate the Brain Block Conundrum — Namely, “We Could Not Possibly Be Wrong, so You Have to Be — No Matter What Reality Says” — A Good Illustration of Why Experience Is Wasted on Human Beings

© 2014 Peter Free

 

18 June 2014

 

 

Stupidity interests me, because so many people are

 

Bad judgments and flawed analyses usually result from inflated egos and clouding emotions, rather than from completely deficient brain circuits.

 

Take former Vice President Dick Cheney’s witlessly self-absolving excoriation of President Obama for the coming civil war in Iraq:

 

 

Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.

 

Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.

 

It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.

 

President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.

 

© 2014 Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, The Collapsing Obama Doctrine, Wall Street Journal (17 June 2014) (extracts)

 

In an identical vein:

 

 

Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama’s entire national security team should resign over the resurgence of Islamic militants in Iraq.

 

“Everybody in his national security team, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ought to be replaced . . . It’s a colossal failure of American security policy.”

 

© 2014 Jeremy Herb and Burgess Everett, GOP on Iraq: We told you so, Politico (12 June 2014)

 

This is analytical stupidity on both men’s parts.

 

Rather than confront the fact that he and President George W. Bush made a mistake in toppling the Middle Eastern apple cart by giving its many warring segments a single enemy to focus on, the former Vice President is now trying to persuade everyone that his Administration’s warmongering strategic idiocy in Iraq and Afghanistan did not set History on its present day course.

 

Cheney’s errant analysis is like a kid — who pushes a ball off the peak of a lumpy, rock strewn hill —  and then blames people far down the hillside for the ball’s increasing speed and wildly erratic bounces.

 

 

Cheney and McCain miss two of History’s primary lessons

 

(i) Cultural and religious disputes tend to be historical currents that cannot be fixed quickly.

 

(ii) Empires fall — always (at least indirectly) as a result of overreach and the poor treatment of those they subjugate.

 

For example, one cannot slam millennia-old Shia and Sunni heads together and expect them to come to immediate peace.  Expecting Kurdish separatism to go away under the weight of artificially imposed national borders is similarly misguided.

 

American ignorance (and arrogance) about long-standing religious and cultural antagonisms around the world led the George W. Bush administration to impose foreseeably self-destructive, imperialistic policies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Today, instead of accepting responsibility for errors in their geopolitical judgment, at least two of the three blame President Obama for trying to extricate American forces and national wealth from unwinnable situations — which can probably be better coped with via alternative (though less spectacular) means.

 

 

The moral? — People, who were aggressively dumb once, are likely to be majorly stupid again

 

The American media, airhead-making organism that much of it is, keeps these perennial blood-lusters alive in our consciousness.  No foolish policy is ever so obviously wrong that it cannot be breathlessly revived and spread forward in time.

 

Like defecations from wraiths, reality-killed zombies thrive among us — mouth-farting into cultural winds that worship self-destruction’s cloying stench.