Gilbert disagreed with Goering's analysis. "There is one difference," he answered. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." But Goering held his ground: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Which may explain why Americans overwhelmingly supported the Iraq war, even though most of the rest of the world was willing to let the U.N. inspectors ferret out any weapons of mass destruction. But now that the war is over and our fear is, presumably, eased, why do we still believe Bush? Once again, it's our human nature.

Homo sapiens are built to obstinately hold on to their beliefs, even in the face of conflicting evidence. Which means Americans who believed Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks and posed a threat to the world with his WMD will sift through all the information being presented to them and choose to heed only that which confirms their preexisting point of view. They will chose to believe administration speculations that Saddam may have moved his deadly arsenal to Syria before the war or perhaps hid it in obscure places around the country. (That may indeed be the case, but, so far, there's no evidence to support those theories.) This is consistent with dissonance theory, says Douglas Raybeck, a professor of anthropology at Hamilton College in upstate New York.

"If we supported the war initially, then we are invested in that decision," Raybeck says. "If you encounter information showing that the reasons for the war were not well founded, or were exaggerated, you have two choices: the war was indeed worthwhile, or we were took. We either acted wisely or were damned fools." And few, understandably, want to think of themselves as fools.

A similar, if less glaring, example of denial took place over the Vietnam War. Americans were loath to condemn the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, even after it become known that President Lyndon Johnson had trumped up the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. As it turned out, the "unprovoked attack" on a U.S. destroyer on a "routine patrol" was a lie the Johnson administration used to ramp up military involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict. The war didn't end until almost a decade and 50,000 American deaths later. Of course, the administration advanced many other Cold War arguments for the war, but nonetheless the episode shows that facts cannot always dissuade people from their original beliefs.

As the world becomes more complex and frightening, cognitive dissonance becomes even more prevalent, Raybeck says. People filter out more and more information in order to hold on to their beliefs. "Dissonance theory appears part of general human psychology," he says, "but cultures, such as our own, that place a premium on individuality, are particularly subject to its influence."

This trend in the United States toward less thoughtful and less objective reasoning will be hard to reverse -- with ominous consequences for our democracy. Human behavior reinforces habits. Once people adjust their behavior to accommodate subtle deception or blatant lying from their leaders, it will be difficult for them to become more discerning or skeptical in the future, Raybeck says. It's similar to when someone's finger hurts when he bends it. If he avoids moving his finger, eventually the muscle will atrophy and he may lose all movement. Just as the body makes adjustments, so does the mind. Which may also explain why Americans didn't seem to care that the Bush administration lied, or at the very least egregiously distorted the truth, when it declared that the new $350 billion tax cuts would benefit all.

"To the extent that American people abandon a critical and observant stance toward those in power," Raybeck says, "it is more difficult to reverse this trend, especially since those in power will, or can, use their leverage to inhibit a change. One can anticipate more sound bites and 30-second political ads designed to associate the power holder with important symbols, but not a substantive treatment of issues."

Sullivan, author of "The Concise Book of Lying," believes the media may play a large role in determining which lies Americans care about and which ones they don't. Perhaps, she surmises, we're more concerned with Stewart's coverup because that is the story presented to us day after day in newspapers, magazines and TV shows. Conversely, she says, we may not be as concerned about Bush's prevarication, because the media hasn't played it up. "I find that alarming," Sullivan says. "If you package something right, you can get away with anything ... If this administration has figured that out, then they can do anything. That strikes me as sinister."

The British press, in fact, is giving Prime Minister Tony Blair a much harder time about the coalition's assertion that Saddam had WMD.

Michael Wolff, in his column in the June 30 issue of New York magazine, theorizes that the media may even have aided the administration in its packaging of the war. When coalition forces were in Iraq, U.S. media giants were gunning for relaxed FCC rules, so they had an incentive to give the Bush administration glowing, heroic coverage of the Iraq war.

Maybe the bigger question for American democracy is: Did the Bush administration intentionally use our evolutionary weakness against us? Did it use orange alerts, duct tape and scary tales of WMDs to create an atmosphere in which Americans would be so frightened and feel so vulnerable that they would believe almost anything they were told and ignore all conflicting evidence?

Perhaps, though, our inbred desire for truth and honesty will eventually prevail. If history is any indication, our denial may weaken as evidence and more evidence surfaces that the Bush administration may not have been as truthful with us as we once thought. It took the White House tapes to bring down Nixon after Watergate. Unfortunately, it took thousands and thousands of Americans lives before the United States left Vietnam.

A Fox News opinion poll conducted on June 30 and July 1 shows that 60 percent of the respondents approved of how Bush is handling Iraq, and 30 percent disapproved. That's a sharp decline from the time of Baghdad's fall, when 75 percent approved and 19 percent disapproved.

But Americans, like all other humans, are susceptible to fooling themselves. "We are highly self-deceptive as a species," Keating says. "Self-deception allows you to get behind the wheel of a car after an accident, or live at the foot of an active volcano. That's how human beings deal with stress that they can't control."

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