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Will he, like Shoup, say a million men will be needed to accomplish anything useful? I will know when Gen. Zinni reports back to me next month. Meanwhile, as you will understand, I will not approve any escalation in Afghanistan or the sending of any additional troops there.
You will hear loud complaints that my reluctance to go the route of foolish consistency will make our country less safe. To that I say simply that this is not what our intelligence is telling me. The adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have made our country less, not more safe.
I do not wish to follow the example of my predecessor who attempted to make a virtue of never changing his mind.
Wooden Heads
In her classic book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset:
"Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs " acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.
Tuchman pointed succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
"Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it. " Adjustment is painful. " Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ˜cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for ˜Don't confuse me with the facts.'
It is somehow fitting that Barbara Tuchman's daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against "cognitive dissonance.
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