Cognitive Dissonance and Saddam’s Capture

by John Thompson

December 20, 2003

Have you ever wondered why some people will let a good fantasy trump fact any day?

You shouldn’t wonder too much, we all do this a little bit, and the phenomenon is called "Cognitive Dissonance" in the literature of psychology and sociology. One of the clearest illustrations of this process at work has come out of the Arab World in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 12^th.

The way that cognitive dissonance works — without getting too academic — is that people will have their own preferences about how the world is, or how it works. Most of us can work with bad or contrary news, but we all can either invent or uncritically accept interpretations of events that allow us to reinterpret them to fit our views. For example, we might find excuses to rationalize why our favorite sports team didn’t win instead of admitting they were actually outplayed.

Some people go much further than this. A believer in UFOs will, in the absence of a saucer landing outside the US Capitol Building with its pilot emerging to say "take me to your leader", will rationalize that Aliens do exist, but that there is a vast cover-up to conceal evidence of their visits. Others will interpret world events to support their contention that the unseen hand of a vast conspiratorial network is at play, and everything has a hidden meaning that ‘proves’ their contentions.

While no society, our own not least, is free of people with extreme dissonant tendencies, they do seem especially prevalent outside of Western Societies — where we do have the effects of traditional rationalism and philosophy as a counterweight. However, sometimes one really has to wonder about the Arab World.

Aside from the Palestinians and others who were dancing in the streets on learning of the 9-11 attacks, the atrocity stunned a majority in the Arab World. However, it was unacceptable to believe that it could have been Arab Islamic Fundamentalists who actually delivered the attack. Several days afterwards, a Lebanese television station operated by Hizbollah said they had ‘proof’ that the attack was actually an Israeli plot to demean the Arab World in American eyes. Their main ‘evidence’ was a fabricated contention that American Jews and Israeli citizens were under-represented in the death toll -- a neat piece of reasoning, considering that it would take months to determine who actually was killed in the attack. Of course, this must have meant that Israeli intelligence (who else?) had warned Jews to stay away from the World Trade Centre.

It is hard to think of a flimsier argument than this, but a great many people in the Arab World (and even a handful of Westerners) accepted the Hizbollah allegation without a quibble and still believe it is true.

Another aspect of cognitive dissonance is that it is often possible to simultaneously hold very contradictory beliefs and know them both to be true. There are many Middle Easterners who subscribe to both the "Jewish Conspiracy" theory about the 9-11 attacks, yet are also pleased to reflect on the fact that Muslims did so much damage to the Americans.

Saddam Hussein, like so many of his ilk, had always talked a tough line and garnered an undeserved reputation as a heroic figure. In Iraq, his party machinery had elevated the botched assassination attempt the 19 year-old Saddam had participated in to mythic proportions, but most of the violence Saddam had seen as a Ba’ath party leader had been in the supervision of executions and torture. Still, his posturing with guns, making defiant speeches, and giving the finger to the Americans had created and cultivated an image of a strongman that resonated with many in the Muslim world.

When Saddam was dragged, unresisting, from his hidey-hole, without even taking his own life; many Arabs described it as a shock and a humiliation. There was the great strongman of the Arab World, taken by American soldiers. Naturally, it would only take a short period of time before cognitive dissonance kicked in.

On Sunday night, a spokesman for a Canadian Arab federation told me (and an Iraqi who was rejoicing at the capture on a television panel) that the whole event was staged, and that Saddam had actually been captured by the Americans in April and decided that they now needed the ‘propaganda value’ of announcing this. Even better was the reaction of Saddam’s daughter two days later. To her, of course, her father would have fought to the death, but that the Americans had used ‘nerve gas’ to sap his willpower and disorient him. The story has been eagerly seized upon and reprinted throughout the Islamic world.

The third story is that the wily Saddam is still free and that the Americans only captured a stunt double. A press release from a Ba’athist party HQ hidden (presumably) in Iraq is that the Americans never would have captured Saddam except that they used ‘Biological Agents’ of some unspecified kind to locate the hidden site where Saddam was hiding — implying somehow that that the US was cheating.

Each of the tales represents an attempt to rob the Americans of the value of the capture of Saddam, and will be eventually be believed by tens of millions of people in preference to the truth. After all, with cognitive dissonance, the fantasy is always much more preferable than reality.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca