Originally Posted by
World's End Stella
On September 24, 2002, Tony Blair made a speech to the House of Commons about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. “His WMD programme is active, detailed and growing,” Blair said. “Saddam has existing and active military plans . . . which could be activated within 45 minutes . . .”
This was emphatic stuff. The prime minister at the time was resolute and convincing. He was also wrong. During the invasion of Iraq not long afterwards, Saddam didn’t use these supposedly awesome weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to repel western forces. To most people, this provided clear evidence that Iraq didn’t possess WMD after all.
But not to Blair. In another speech to the Commons, he re-emphasised his conviction: “There are literally thousands of sites, but it is only now that the Iraq Survey Group has been put together that a dedicated team of people . . . will be able to go in and do the job properly,” he said. “I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam’s WMD.”
To many, this seemed odd, but psychologists recognised the symptoms of cognitive dissonance. When our reputation is on the line, when a belief has become central to our identity, we tend to respond to disconfirming evidence not by altering our opinion, but by reframing the evidence. We latch hold of excuses, selectively cite statistics, anything to protect the ego from admitting to error.
A few months later, when the Iraq Survey Group couldn’t find evidence of WMD either, Blair hardly blinked. Speaking to the House of Commons liaison committee, he said: “We don’t know what has happened to them . . . they could have been removed, hidden or destroyed.” So now, the non-discovery of WMD didn’t mean they weren’t there; it meant they had been spirited out of existence.
This “evidential dance” continued for many months. Blair was not, in my view, insincere. It is just that he had so much on the line, and so much to lose, that he couldn’t see the evidence for what it was. Long after the press, public and most of his closest advisers had seen the light, the prime minister was still insisting on the existence of WMD, as the psychologists Jeff Stone and Nicholas Fernandez have documented.
I was thinking of all this in the context of Arsčne Wenger. The Arsenal manager, like Blair, is highly intelligent. Like the former prime minister, he burst on to the scene like a breath of fresh air. He had lots of new ideas, articulated them in a convincing way and gained remarkable early success. There was something almost messianic about him. Over the course of his tenure, however, he appears to have become ever more seduced by his own core belief; namely, his own infallibility. The longer he has remained at the helm, and the more the Arsenal board has genuflected, the more convinced of his powers he has become. As a consequence, the excuses he offers to account for the gap between perception and reality have become ever more convoluted.
The danger signs were visible as early as 2006 when Arsenal fans were beginning to see the structural weaknesses in the side. Wenger, meanwhile, was witnessing a wholly different reality. After a defeat by Chelsea in the 2007 League Cup final, the Frenchman didn’t blame defensive defects, or a lack of decent signings, but a refereeing conspiracy. “We commit the lowest fouls in the league but we are the most punished,” he said. “The whole system is not honest.”
After a 3-2 defeat by Tottenham Hotspur at home in November 2010, Wenger seemed to think that Arsenal had somehow claimed a moral victory. “It’s a mystery how we lost a game like that,” he said. “Overall, we had the quality you would expect of us, but when you look at the stats and numbers it is difficult to understand how we lost.” After an 8-2 thrashing by Manchester United in August 2011, Wenger didn’t see institutional decline driven by one man’s inability to adapt, but a one-off. “I do feel it was under special circumstances,” he said. “We had a lot of players out . . .”
After a 4-0 defeat by AC Milan in 2012 in the first leg of a Champions League round-of-16 tie, the problem was not his disastrous tactics, but the grass at the San Siro. “It is unacceptable for Uefa to accept pitches like the one in Milan,” he said. After a 10-2 pounding by Bayern Munich over two legs in the last 16 of the Champions League last year, Wenger saw little wrong in his own methods, but a great deal wrong with the referee. He described the decision to send off Laurent Koscielny as revolting.
In some ways, it is unfair to characterise Wenger as a one-man excuse-generating machine, for many managers are adept in the dark arts of post-match manipulation. The difference, however, is that while Sir Alex Ferguson and other serial winners make excuses publicly, they make changes privately. Ferguson was brutally honest about United’s deficiencies, which is why he made crucial alterations to playing personnel, tactics and backroom staff (not least the role of assistant manager).
Wenger, on the other hand, is just as obdurate at Arsenal’s London Colney training ground as he is in those agonising post-match interviews. He appears to see the world through a fine-meshed filter, one that carefully sifts out any evidence of his own inadequacies. He cannot be challenged by staff, players or any data corroborating Arsenal’s decline. His animating belief is that he is always right and therefore any defeat must be attributed to unfairness, bad luck or some covert disadvantage.
Indeed, after a 2-0 defeat by Chelsea in 2014, Wenger had the gall to rail against Roman Abramovich’s chequebook. “At the end of the day, they have a financial power and they used it in a very efficient way,” he said. This from a man who rules one of the world’s richest clubs, with revenues larger than those of Paris Saint-Germain, Liverpool, Juventus, Tottenham and, er, Chelsea. Arsenal also have income about six times that of Burnley, a club who could move above them in the table tomorrow night.
Yesterday, there was a story about Arsenal fans recently staying away from the Emirates, with empty seats across the stadium. I have little doubt that Wenger will interpret this differently to everyone else. The fans are staying away not because they have lost faith in him, but because they are angry about a minority chanting “Wenger Out!” Either that, or they don’t have the requisite intelligence to comprehend his methods.
Conviction is a powerful thing, but it can become perilous when impervious to the evidence. Wenger has, in this sense, become antiscientific, dancing around the truth, but never quite seeing it. As for Blair, he did many positive things as prime minister, but the Iraq intervention became quasi-ideological, an article of faith rather than reason. Even today, he sticks by the decision, even while finally conceding that Iraq didn’t have WMD. I doubt he will ever change his mind. As he put it: “I’ll always believe it was the right thing do to.”
