Posted at
Economists for Dean
Rooting for Success in Iraq and Probabilistic Thinking
By Lerxst
I've been wanting to write a piece about the decision making behind the Iraq war for sometime and I think today's piece by James Traub on the Democrats and foreign policy gives me some more motivation to write this. In particular I have in mind this excerpt:
When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ''I'm not betting on it, and I'm hoping against it, but there's no indication that I should be expecting anything else.''
I think whether we like to admit it or not there is sometimes a tension between how we feel about whether or not the decision to go to war in Iraq was a good one, and how the war and the occupation actually plays out in reality.
While the political costs/benefits to Dean or the Dems will obviously depend on the reality on the ground, an honest evaluation of whether or not
Bush's judgement on Iraq was correct is really independent of how things turn out. In order to explain my thinking, its worth going back and analyzing the decision to go to war in terms of the quality of the decision making.
Before the Iraq war began it seemed to me that the basic argument for the war (I'm ignoring all the other after-the-fact rationalizations) was that there was some probability --albeit very low-- that Iraq may actually be able to harm the U.S. either directly or covertly through a terrorist group. But how should we have gone about making a sensible judgement about what to do? I think implicitly what underlies such a decision (or should) is something akin to Robert Rubin's probabilistic framework.
Let's start by being charitable to the Administration and just pretend (despite evidence to the contrary) that we really knew little about Iraq's true WMD capabilities and their ties to Al Qaida. Applying the Rubin framework would go something like this: 1. We do not know what the future has in store with any kind of certainty. 2. There are both positive and negative possible outcomes associated with either invading or not invading Iraq. 3. Therefore, we should assign probabilities to the different possible states of the world along with the associated "payoffs" and figure out, on balance, what makes sense.
The real case for invading Iraq then rested on the idea that even though the possibility of an Iraqi sponsored attack on the US was probably low, the negative effects of such an attack was sufficiently high (e.g. nuclear suitcase scenario), that, overall, it was worth eliminating the Iraqi regime. That is, the "expected value" of invading Iraq, if you added up the negative and positive effects weighted by their probabilities, was positive.
The reason why I never bought this reasoning was that it was clear to me that this calculation really was no different after 9/11 than before 9/11. Obviously, there was a huge emotional effect from 9/11 but were there really any new facts that ought to have changed our judgements about Iraq? You can easily find the quotes from Poppy, Cheney, Powell or Scowcroft as to why it made no sense from a "realpolitik" point of view (essentially a Rubin-type framework) to invade Iraq in the first Gulf War, and there was no real evidence that the Administration ever publicly provided to show why we should believe anything changed with respect to Iraq after 9/11. (Powell's speech at the U.N was really a legal case for Iraqi violations of UN resolutions, which might justify the multilateral use of force. He did not present any good evidence of a direct threat to the U.S. that would justify a unilateral invasion. Powell lost any credibility with me when he later held a press conference in which he used an audiotape of Bin Laden urging AQ followers to fight in Iraq, as serious evidence of Iraqi ties to AQ.)
One of the many things that was constant both pre- and post- 9/11 was the worldview of the neoconservatives. What changed after 9/11 was that this group, which had plotted to overthrow Saddam during most of the 1990s, finally had power to do so through their positions in the Bush Administration and an excuse in 9/11 to implement their ideological aims.
In any case, there was no good reason to think that the probabilities or outcomes associated with going to war in Iraq changed because of 9/11. Most of the evidence that was presented (e.g. steel rods) was either refuted by independent experts or came from non-credible sources (e.g. Ahmed Chalabi). There were also reasonable arguments as to why the terrorist threat was likely to be exacerbated by invading Iraq (e.g. losing focus on AQ, losing track of any actual Iraqi WMD, increasing enmity to the US).
The real point I want to make, though, is that the decision to go to war (at least at that point in time and in that context) was not a sensible one --irrespective of the outcome. IN OTHER WORDS, EVEN IF ALL GOES WELL IN IRAQ FROM THIS POINT ON, AND BUSH GETS A HUGE POLITICAL BOOST, IT DOESN"T MEAN THAT GOING TO WAR WAS THE RIGHT DECISION.
This is especially true since we now know from many sources that contrary evidence was deliberately ignored and intelligence was cherry picked on the basis of pre-ordained decisions. Any good decision-maker knows that it is critical to factor in and be prepared for the worst case scenarios and to not belittle those with opposing views.
There is another lesson from examining the decision-making approach. Once you see the world in terms of uncertainty and a probabilistic framework, it is perfectly consistent to support our efforts in Iraq, cheer for Saddam's capture, and hope/pray for the best for US soldiers and Iraqi civilians even if you disagreed with the war.
Obviously, even low probability events sometimes happen, and if Iraq miraculously, quickly emerges as a stable democratic model for the Middle East it is good news even if it results in Dean's defeat. Regardless of what happens in Iraq, we now know enough to know that both the decision that was made and the way in which it was made, were-ill advised.
That's another reason why Fareed Zakaria's view, that since Dean was against the war it is now inconsistent for him to support the building of a democratic Iraq, is deeply flawed.