Absence of evidence for WMDs did not deter advocates of invading Iraq

Evidence

The chief weapons inspectors in Iraq, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, could find no “smoking guns,” either chemical or nuclear. Some strong advocates of a military invasion continued to cling to the belief that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq possessed lethal weapons but had hidden them, so it might take a long time to find them. A companion justification was that the September 11 attacks were supposedly linked to Saddam, whom President Bush called “the guy that wanted to kill my dad” (Kinzer, 2006). The administration pressured its national security staff to search for evidence that would implicate Saddam. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2311

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern of motivated reasoning and belief perseverance studied in cognitive dissonance literature.