Iraq War: Why do war fans still believe?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

With the justifications that the Bush administration put forward for the Iraq War - the alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons program and other WMDs, packaged with constant reference to the 9/11 attacks - having been disproven, it has been genuinely surprising to me that more Republican war supporters weren't more outraged by it.

After all, the Republicans who supported the war so faithfully and believed the administration's claims so willingly, were the people who were suckered the worst.  The Bush administration played them for rubes and fools.  Why aren't they more upset about it?

I finally saw something lasts weekend that didn't entirely explain it, but did make me think there was no reason I should be so surprised.  It was from Jessica Stern, one of the US' leading experts on terrorism, in her book Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003).  One of the people she interviewed for her book was Kerry Noble, a former member of a Christian terrorist group in Arkansas:

Before talking to Kerry Noble, I had read that when prophecy fails, people can come to believe even more strongly in a false Messiah or that the prognosticated events will eventually come to pass.  In the seventeenth century, for example, a handsome, charismatic young man named Shabbtai Tzvi was banished from Turkey for outlandish behavior.  He came to Jerusalem. A well-known seer who lived in Gaza became convinced that Shabbtai Tzvi was the Messiah.  Tzvi was prepared to play the part.  He announced that the time of redemption had come and revealed a plan to rebuild the Temple.  The Jews of Gaza fell entirely under  his sway, and the movement spread quickly to the rest of the Jewish world. Word of the miracles performed by the prophet and his Messiah spread worldwide.  The pope sent a delegation to Jerusalem to investigate.  The two were expelled from Jerusalem and were gone by the time the pope's emissaries arrived.  When the sultan demanded that Shabbtai Tzvi convert to Islam on pain of death, he chose conversion, telling his followers that this was a stage in the redemption process.  Many of his followers converted with him.  Decades after his death, followers continued to believe that Shabbtai Tzvi was the Messiah.

It is one thing to read about how this happened among seventeenth-century followers of a charismatic false Messiah.  It is another to hear the story from a person who himself fell under the sway of apocalyptic prophecy, who admits that his faith grew stronger when prophecy failed.

Something like this process must be going on among hardline Republican true believers in the Iraq War.  It must be an unwillingness to accept that something a person so passionately believes and wants to believe could be so spectacularly wrong.