Bush lives in a small child's fantasy world. If he wants to believe something, he believes it. If he doesn't want to believe something, he doesn't believe it.
Want evidence? Go see Kevin Drum.
Politically if he wants something to happen and is told that it can't be done or is extremely unlikely to be successful, he thinks that his decision and stubbornness will change the landscape and that what he wants to have happen will happen. Much of his administration believes this to be true. It explains the decision to invade Iraq.
They didn't like Saddam, so they wanted to believe that overthrowing him would change the face of the Middle East in a pro-Western, pro-laissez-faire economics direction. Because of their desire to believe that, Ahmed Chalabi was able to play them for chumps and get the U.S. to overthrow the Iraqi government and install him as the new leader.
The strong belief in what they wanted led them to also believe that the real Intelligence Agencies were out to politically undercut them, so they set up Douglas Feith's operation in the Pentagon to stove-pipe cherry-picked Intelligence tidbits that appeared to support their beliefs to Dick Cheney. It also led Douglass Feith to refuse to make invasion plans for unwelcome contingencies (see Ltc. Kwiatowski) because such plans were not only a waste of time, they were invitations to have the very things they considered actually happen.
All of this is a form of group-think that occurred because the presiding triumverate of Bush/Rove/Cheney all live in the same small child's fantasy world. They were drawn together by similar beliefs, and they are an echo chamber for those beliefs. The result is that no one dares present facts that don't conform to what the triumverate believes, and were someone to actually be so lacking in taste as present them with disagreeing facts, they would ignore them and relegate the messenger to the nether reached of Hell.
So that is how the U.S. got to where we are today.
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