We Will Be Welcomed with Open Arms: The Folly of Wishful Thinking

I just finished reading "The Zimmerman Telegram", an informative book by Barbara Tuchman explaining in detail the events leading up to the U.S. entering World War One. The author describes the German efforts to enlist Mexico and Japan in making war on the U.S., so as to keep the U.S. armed forces occupied fighting to defend its homeland instead of fighting the Germans. But the factor in the German thinking that is relevant for this post is the idea that there were millions of German-Americans living in the U.S. who would be opposed to their adopted country making war on their homeland. In actuality, once the German plans were revealed by the relase of the infamous Zimmerman telegram, followed by Zimmerman's admission that the telegram was authentic, opposition to the U.S. getting involved in the war evaporated, even among German-Americans.

This got me to thinking about how this type of error has been repeated over and over by invading countries. For example, Russia is currently making war on neighboring Ukraine, with much of the rationale being that Ukraine has many ethnic Russians who would welcome the invasion with open arms. This has proven not to be the case.

The first infamous case of relying on false intelligence was in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which was planned by the CIA based on the false information that the Cuban people would rise up in support of the invaders. This proved not to be the case; in fact, Castro had such good intelligence, in contrast to our bad intelligence, that he knew in advance (and successfully thwarted) every step the CIA was planning, including some two dozen assassination attempts on his life.

The most despicable example of wishful thinking was in the run-up to the 2003 war on Iraq. We now know that this was was based on false information provided by an informant code-named "Curveball". Curveball was a character who defected from Iraq to Germany in 1999, and started provideding German authoriites with information claiming that he had first-hand knowledge of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons. German intelligence was so leery of him that they concluded he was totally untrustworthy, being as he was a congenital liar and an alcoholic. Nevertheless, American and British authorites chose to believe him and invaded Iraq based on this misinformation, ignoring German concerns about his reliability, and never undertaking to verify his information from other sources. Years later Curveball admitted that his information had been totally fabricated, and he claimed to have been totally flabbergasted to discover that the U.S. and Britain were taking his lies seriously.

The whole Vietnam debacle was filled with one example of wishful thinking after another. We went to war to prop up a corrupt South Vietnamese government, a government which never had the support of its people.

An example of a different sort, one in which our president disbelieved intelligence which he should have believed, was Jimmy Carter's huge blunder in letting the former Shah of Iran into this country. Carter was told that letting the Shah into the country would put our embassy in Tehran in jeopardy, but he chose to ignore this intelligence, on the false rationale that there was medical treatment available here that was not available in Mexico. This excuse was later proven to be false when the U.S. doctors spoke up and said that they had been willing to go down to Mexico to treat the Shah, and he could indeed have gotten the same treatment there. This one mistake isn't why I hold Carter in such low esteen, as every president makes mistakes. Rather, this is part of a pattern of total incompetence that characterized Carter's entire bleak term in office.