Decision-Making By Wishful Thinking

Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, looks at the misuse of memorials to human atrocity to provide photo-ops for political purposes. He finds it as wrong today as it was when it caused him to resign. Told that Yasser Arafat had been invited to visit the Holocaust Memorial, Reich reacted in a negative fashion:

When, as the museum's director, I learned of the invitation, I immediately objected to it. I said that the visit had been set up as a photo-op, and that neither the museum nor the dead should ever be used to advance political or diplomatic ends.

Lerman changed his mind, supported my objections and disinvited Arafat. But a chorus broke out, a chorus of wishful thinking that the Palestinian would become a changed man after visiting the museum. On "Meet the Press," then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said she regretted that Arafat had been disinvited. Lerman received political pressure to restore the invitation.

He did. He and his colleagues on the museum's board of trustees, all of them presidential appointees, convinced themselves that the Palestinian leader would be educated and transformed. In a meeting, board members repeatedly asked me to escort him on a VIP tour and a wreath-laying ceremony in front of the museum's eternal flame, set atop a plinth containing soil from concentration camps and ghettos. I refused. Not long after that, I resigned.

In the end, the Arafat visit never took place. On the day he was to come, he canceled. The Monica Lewinsky scandal had just broken and the media had decamped to the White House to cover it. There would be no photo-op. And therefore no political advantage to the visit.

He is, of course, talking about the ruckus that occurred last week when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attempted to set up a visit to Ground Zero. That appears to have been avoided at this point. But Reich is quite correct: wishful thinking is not a good way to make decisions. Hoping that seeing the results of an act of terrorism would change Ahmadinejad's mind about backing terror is about as wishful as you can get and still remain unmedicated.

UPDATE: See also: Burkean Reflections, The Oxford Medievalist,