Back up on that horse!

Daniel, the last is an excellent point, and the real heart of the matter.

Somebody put it like this: a friend decides to attack somebody; you warn him that (a) the victim might win/lose but put a huring on your friend and/or (b) your friend could be jailed/sued/prosecuted.

Later, your friend calls you, mocking you for predicting that the other guy was going to hurt him, and demanding that you bail him out of jail.

I think you are being both unreasonable and deliberately ignorant.

If I predict that raising cotton in Indiana won’t work, because it is too dry–and you try growing cotton in Indiana and it fails because it’s too cold–I was right that it wouldn’t work–but not in a way that would cause you to think I’m likely to be right when I predict that growing rye won’t work either, because it’s too dry.

Similarly, if you thought that the War in Iraq would fail, because the US would lose 50,000 troops taking Baghdad — you may have been right that it would fail, but not in a fashion that makes me trust your judgment next time.

Now–if you were protesting that the War would go well, but the occupation would fail because of Sunni/Shia fighting–you were right in a fashion that would make me trust your judgment next time. Some people were right in this fashion–but, in my recollection, relatively few.

I don’t have time to chase archives at the moment samchevre, but it seems to me your recollection is quite flawed.

Most people I was talking to and many people I read at the time were certain the US forces would have little trouble with the Iraqi forces in conventional engagements. I don’t think anyone expected the Iraqi army to roll up quite as fast as it did, but nobody expected a serious challenge in that sense. What they did expect was an inability to manage the country afterward, and devolvement into drawn out guerilla tactics. Large scale corporate graft and the failure of US’s `annointed’ government to be accpetable to people who actually lived there were also predicted. If you think the occupation has failed simply because of Sunni/Shia fighting, you have a, shall we say, `interesting’ take on it.

While nobody that I know of predicted the particular twists and turns we’ve seen exactly, the above scenario is broadly speaking exactly what happened.

Samchevre, please note that the war could have gone wrong by (a) major urban warfare, (b) guerrilla warfare), (c) (many other reasons, mostly unlikely).

Of (a) and (b), war supporters needed to get BOTH right. Bummer, that.

Now, I’m working from memory here (not having the ability to process the entire internet), but I don’t recall too many people saying that there would be (a), but that (b) wouldn’t happen. IIRC, it was (b) or both.

Oops–blockquote problems. That last paragraph should be in the blockquote, except for the last two sentences.

Barry and Chris,

I read to much–pro-war and anti-war–to do a good job of remembering who wrote what when; if Daniel was right on what would go wrong, I’ll happily admit that his judgment was good.

But Barry–I’m disagreeing with you. If you predicted (a) (major urban warfare) and (b), and (a) didn’t happen, then I say that whatever else you got right, your judgment was non-trivially wrong–just as non-trivially wrong as someone who predicted not (a) and not (b).

Samchevre, I won’t accuse you of not reading what I wrote, or ask you to ‘read with reading comprehension, this time’ – I’ll just point out that you’re wrong. Talk with somebody who understands logic, or better yet, an engineer with reliability training, or somebody who understands basic probability.

“Galt should have been forgotten long agao, anyway.”

Posted by John Emerson

Should have been, yes, in a better world. Megan has found her niche, and we’ll hear from her again and again. She failed as a businesswoman, twice, IIRC, even with some of the best B-School education that money can buy. But a pundit/propagandist – that, she’ll be good at. Well, as good as needed, which isn’t very good; the standards are low, and she isn’t the only person busily working to lower them.

I predict a steady career for her over the next few decades, moving around the ‘think tanks’, putting ‘resident scholar’ on her business cards, attending propaganda events disguised as conferences, etc.

But what if the chaos was pretty much what was intended?

With Iraq in total chaos and much of its oil off the market, there still seems to be way too much oil slopping around in world oil markets. What peak oil? Did we really invade Iraq to keep its oil in the ground? Prices falling, still too much oil. Hey, what about finding a pretext to attack Iran?

…the “surge” strategy of sending 20,000 more troops there now? Personally, I think it’s not going to work[2].

The “surge” has nothing to do with any surge, additional troops is a red herring; the “surge” is a change of strategy by decisively taking the Shia side in the conflict. The US troops are not going into Sadr City, because the Shia establishment is going to be dealing with Al Sadr. The US troops will be manning roadblocks in Sunni areas of Baghdad and dropping bombs there on anything that moves.

Also, of course no military coup or any collapse of the Maliki government is possible, because it exists in the Green zone, which is, in a sense, as far away from Iraq as Washington, DC.

I don’t see why this new strategy shouldn’t work, as long as the Sunni resistance is strong enough to keep on providing real danger to the Iraqi government so that it needs US support to survive. I think the odds are pretty good. Though clearly the Bushies can screw up anything.

As a matter of interest, I linked to the Fallows piece when it came out

But the more important point is not accurate prediction of detail but understanding the basic fact that few wars go well for those who start them.

John, thanks. But Jane, and I (a supporter of the invasion), need to improve our decision making process. Maybe we don’t need to predict the details, but a general statement the wars rarely go well doesn’t much help. How could we have know a priori that *this* war wasn’t going to go well?

Drats. That old John Quiggin-post that he links to in #19 links to a piece about a speech made by Al Gore in 2002. In that speech, Gore got it almost exactly right. And he does it by extrapolating from the by then unfolding negligence and incompetence demonstrated by the Bush administration in Afghanistan.

Would that the Florida debacle had gone through the sliding door. *shudder*

Let’s assume a situation where (a) and (b) and (c) are necessary for the plan it to work, and you predict not-(a), and actually get (a) and not-(b)

2) Are your predictions better than random guessing?
On this, I say that you are no better than the person who said (a) and (b); you both got one wrong.

What if all I need to predict is not-[(a) and (b) and (c)]? What if you need for some reason to flip 10 heads in a row and I predict that you won’t? Is my prediction a failure or no better than random guessing if I didn’t specify which flips would be tails?

Speaking of the Lancet, it’s time for the experts to get to work on trashing a lower number —

MR. LEHRER: Today, the United Nations issued a report that said 34,000 Iraqi civilians have died in sectarian violence in the last year. What’s the message of that, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Message is we better help this government stop the sectarian violence. I hear all kinds of different numbers, but the fact is that too many have died as the result of Shias killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shias and that I have made the decision that it is best to try to help this government stop this sectarian violence.

Wow. The line of reasoning that Megan McArdle and samchevre use, along with the revelation Ms. McArdle has concerning her failure to predict a correct outcome all underscore the amateurish mindset the proponents of this war have had all along.

To say that being right for the wrong reasons is just as bad as being wrong is only getting half the point. Even if I’m right for the right reasons, that doesn’t mean I ever knew anything at all. I keep seeing this argument that says “If you say I will fail for X reason, but I actually fail for Y reason, then you haven’t done anything to inspire me to believe in your predictions because you just lucked out” but what they don’t seem to realize is that, even if you’re right you still probably just lucked out. Just because a prediction turns out to be right doesn’t mean it was based on sound reasoning and it doesn’t mean you should give any greater weight to to future predictions.

The fact of the matter is that wisdom knows to be uncertain. The point is not that we predicted that the Iraq invasion would fail, or that it would succeed but that the occupation would fail. The point is that those of us who weren’t excited about the war knew enough to be cautious. We knew enough to recognize that it could fail.

The correct course of action for the future is not to figure out what specific act of prediction lead you astray, but to recognize that your predictive power just isn’t all that great, no matter what information you have. Be humble and recognize that all your plans could very well go wrong and consider the cost of that possibility.

And I love the revelation “Hussein was behaving exactly as I would if I had WMDs, so I assumed he had them as well.” Seriously, you did that?

By the time the Iraq war started, there was plenty of evidence from Afghanistan that the Bush admin didn’t give a toss about following up the initial stages of the invasion with anything resmbling intelligent reconstruction. No evidence of a different approach was in evidence with regard to Iraq.

What more do people need? You watch an administration in real time fuck up an important occupation and then wonder sagely whether they should be allowed to do another one just for the hell of it? Please.

It wasn’t that hard to make the right call.

McArdle’s post-mea-culpa analysis is so lame because she has failed to make clear with whom she is arguing. There are basically four flavors of people in this game.

1. Pacificists, neo-pacificsts, and internationalists. These are people who believe that war is never just, or just only when you are directly attacked, or just only when a world government gives its blessing. They will latch on to any argument against the Iraq war. They would have been disappointed to see the war go well. Their favorite war is the Vietnam war.

2. War-mongerers and the fear-motivated. These are people who are either gung-ho about war in general or so easily frightened by the mere spectre of an enemy that the war-mongeres can bring them to heel on the flimsiest pretense. The former will never admit that the Iraq (or any) war is going badly, while the latter can always be brought arround by scare tactics. Their favorite war is WWII.

3. Foreign policy realists. These are people who have no problem using military force to further immediate national interests, but are reluctant to assume military risks for more idealistic or distant goals. They thought the Iraq war was misguided from the beginning, but they are willing to contemplate changed tactics that might have immediate pay-offs. Their favorite wars are the myriad cold war scrimmages.

4. Foreign policy idealists. These are people who would like to use military force in support of idealistic goals with only a distant or tangential benefit to the national interest. They wanted the Iraq war, but realize that it has gone poorly. They would like a different leader, but would settle for a different strategy, in support of their orginal ends. Their favorite war is the Kosovo conflict.

(1) and (2) actually make up the majority of the population. Clearly (1) are Democratic party stalwarts and (2) are Republican party stalwarts. At the beginning of the war, there were a lot of (2) masquerading as (4), and now that the war has gone badly, there are a lot of (1) masquerading as (3).

But really (1) and (2) are so ridiculous as to be unworthy of debate. The reason McArdle’s case is so lame is that she imagines all doves belong to (1). The really interesting foreign policy debate is between (3) and (4). That is where the real meat of the debate is.

(3) and (4) don’t really fit well into the usual Democratic and Republican boxes. Democrats like to think of themselves as idealists, and there have been Democratic (4)s such as Clinton, but now most Democrats sound like (3). Republicans like to think of themselves as realists, and there have been Republican (3)s like Kissinger but now most Republicans sound like (4).

There were too many variables for anyone to claim they foresaw them

Exactly so. But this was itself one good and rather obvious reason to oppose the war: that there were far too many variables in play and thus no special reason to believe that only the rosy scenarios put forward by the administration would come to pass (that the reconstruction would be paid for by oil revenues, for one thing).

Sometime in in the Fall of 2002 I remember listening to NPR and hearing William Kristol saying that “the law of unintended consequences” was the one “legitimate dove argument.” Then about a week later I heard Noam Chomsky talking about “unintended consequences” on, I think, Democracy Now.

Which made me laugh. Jeez, it really wasn’t all that hard to predict that the thing would go sour, frankly. Never hire a contractor whose estimate is too rosy, whose previous work was shoddy, and who won’t or can’t tell you how he plans to clean up afterwards.

Andrew has it exactly right.

There was a different basis for opposing the war in 2002 and 2003 and it did not depend on predictions of “success,” however that was defined. A preemptive war of this sort is to international law what a lynch mob is to due process. Even if the U.S. had found canisters of ricin or a rudimentary nuclear weapons program buried outside Tikrit, the invasion was illegal from the outset.

Of course, nearly four years later we can see that it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.[1] But even if the coalition forces had used the right mixture of force and friendship, or if J. Paul Bremer had not debaathified every institution in sight, or we had not decided to allow the Shi’a militias to return in force in the first weeks after the fall of Baghdad, do we really think that the U,S, would not be sitting on the same ungrateful volcano[2]? Put another way, do we think that the forces we unleashed would accept U.S. tutelage, whether it came in the form of our man Ahmed Chalabi (assuming, of course, that he was our man) or lectures on democracy from Zalmay Khalilzad? The catastrophe we have created was made worse by the manifold incompetence of the Bush administration, but it was bound to happen in any event, given the imperial blindness that launched this crusade in the first place.

[1] Talleyrand’s words–damned if I can link to wikipedia.
[2] Churchill’s words, from the last imperialist foray into Iraq.

My position was: the U.S. shouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq, and it shouldn’t have gone to war in the ex-Yugoslavia either. I don’t remember many people agreeing with that position, but I still think it’s the correct one.

OK well I have read the original article linked to. May I just point out that it is the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard in my life?

To begin with ‘philosophically’ it presupposes that there is an objective, value neutral way of saying that something is ‘like’ something else. Otherwise we have no ‘objective’ ‘value neutral’ way of saying something is NOT like something. But this is nonsense. It’s obvious that the way the question is framed there will always be ‘wriggle room’ for the pro-invasioners to get out. For example if someone predicted that the Americans would lose 55,000 soldiers then the pro-invasioner could always reply back (after this whole holocaust is over)…’ah! But we actually only lost 50,000! So you were completely wrong weren’t you?’.

Second: (this is a minor point) like most pro-invasioners, Megan wants to draw a strict and hard and fast line between the ‘war’ (which, allegedly, was a triumphant success) and the ‘occupation’ (which, everyone now admits, has now failed). But in reality there is no such division. If you invade a country, unless you leave immediately (and by immediately I mean ten minutes after the cessation of hostilities) then self-evidently there will be an occupation. It is in integral part of a war in which you seize territory. Pro-warriors claim that many anti-war predictions (i.e. of casualties) were ‘false’ because they did not occur during the ‘war’, only during the ‘occupation’. But not only is this dichotomy not tenable, it also ignores the fact that the occupation is ongoing. As a matter of fact it would not at all surprise me if, in 20 years time, when this is all over, American casualties exceed 50,000. Because the ‘war’ never ended. It is still ongoing. And it, therefore, has not been a success.

Third: As a matter of fact in the real world, you DO get brownie points for being right even if your reasoning was wrong. Copernicus’ arguments for heliocentrism were mainly nonsense (being mainly neo-Platonic assumptions about the heavenly spheres) but we still give him the credit for proposing heliocentrism. This goes doubly in a war situation. If someone had told Hitler in 1939: ‘look, you will succeed in conquering Russia, but Britain will hold out, and when the Americans come into the war, eventually the two of them combined, they will beat you’….he would have been ‘wrong’ about the mechanism for defeat, but right about the salient point, that Hitler would lose the war. Likewise, some (maybe all, who knows or cares?) might have been wrong about the precise ‘mechanism’ by which America lost Vietnam. But everyone could see, by about 1969, that the salient point was that American would lose the Vietnamese war. How precisely it would happen was of less consequence.

Fourth: as has been pointed out, the pro-invasioners are pretty careful about who they quote from the ‘anti-war’ side, tending to choose the wackiest and most bizarre predictions. In fact, as I well recall, large numbers of people did in fact make accurate predictions about what would happen in Iraq: e.g. that there would be civil war, that there would be an insurgency etc.

Fifth: again as has been pointed out, the vast majority of wars fail, and the vast majority of invasions fail given enough time. This might of course be a very long period of time indeed. The British held Ireland (well parts of it ) for between 400 and 1000 years (depending on who you listen to) but eventually they were kicked out, because in the loooooong term occupations tend to fail. The Romans held an Empire for 1000 years. The British held India for centuries. But eventually, these powers were kicked out.

And so, eventually, I know that the Iraqis will succeed in kicking out the Americans (the British are already leaving). This might take a much longer time than anybody thinks at present. But in the loooong term it is almost certain that the occupation will fail. And again this could have been predicted (and was) before the invasion. And it was known with as much certainty as anything can be in international affairs.

the vast majority of wars fail, and the vast majority of invasions fail given enough time. This might of course be a very long period of time indeed. The British held Ireland (well parts of it ) for between 400 and 1000 years (depending on who you listen to) but eventually they were kicked out, because in the loooooong term occupations tend to fail. The Romans held an Empire for 1000 years. The British held India for centuries. But eventually, these powers were kicked out.

On the other hand, the Americans still occupy America, and I don’t see much risk of the First Nations uniting to throw them back off the beach at Massachusetts. Nor would I bet much on the Russians being kicked out of Siberia, or the Turks abandoning Constantinople and Anatolia, or the Australians leaving Australia in the face of an aboriginal insurgency, or the Maori kicking the pahe out of New Zealand.

Get the picture?

‘Get the picture?’

I was acting on the assumption that the Americans did not plan that kind of invasion: i.e. a colonial invasion in which you swamp the invaded territory with settlers and then push the indigenous inhabitants off to smaller and smaller areas of land, where they can be ‘dealt with’ at a later date.

Looking at things even now, there’s no evidence that the USA wants to do that. There are no waves of American settlers zooming off to Baghdad. Au contraire.

As far as I can recall, most of us dirty f*cking hippies thought invading Iraq was wrong because war is a very, very bad idea. War is unhealthy for children and other living things and all that. The war mongers thought it would be fun; get to fly jets and land on aircraft carriers. I am amazed that the discussion assumes that war is okay, instead of a last desperate option when all else fails. Someone pass me a joint.

Of course some people have even more innovative arguments as to why, even though they were wrong, they weren’t wrong.

‘In my own mind, I believe my support of the war was based on two things: The assumption that the CIA would have a better ability to predict the presence of WMD than I would, and the belief that the Iraqis would value freedom.

Both of those are clearly wrong. The latter, tragically so. Primarily, it’s clear to me that:

a) many people who don’t earn their freedom themselves don’t value it.

b) If a country’s citizens don’t value their freedom enough to try to rebel against their tyrants, they aren’t worthy of our aid.’

Golly.

(From the comments section in the link above).

I thought Jane Galt and David Wright (#35) are agreeing.

In other words, the fact that the pacifists were right this time, and the war-mongers were right the last time, doesn’t add to their credibility much. The key is to sort out the realists who are actually realistic, and the idealistists who are sufficiently-grounded-in-reality-to-be-useful, from the war-mongers and the pacifists.

I do find it funny that people think I was/am a supporter of the Iraq War.

TheIrie #44 has a good point. Everyone says that this war is a disaster, yet the Bushies now have an internationally accepted client Iraqi government that’s totally dependent on them. Exxon is likely to get pretty much unlimited rights to the Iraqi oil for a few decades, the US government will probably get basing rights in Iraq for a hundred years, plus pan-Arab nationalism is dead, the Arabs are fighting each other like crazy. Not too shabby, I must say, and for just a trillion of mostly someone else’s dollars.

“If a country’s citizens don’t value their freedom enough to try to rebel against their tyrants, they aren’t worthy of our aid.”

There’s a good argument to be made that the record of other people installing democratic governments isn’t as good as the record of people installing their own. The former has basically 2 successes (Germany; Japan) and any number of failures.

“For the first time since 1492 South American Indigenous people are gaining some political power and the Monroe Doctrine lies in tatters”.

In tatters? Really? Which European power has been interfering in the Americas? Surely not Spain again?

I think Daniel’s missed off the most likely mechanism for failure: the Big Push* simply won’t make much difference. Even at the height of this Big Push, US troop numbers will still be lower than they were at the peak of the occupation. The mess of competing militias and external influences is not going to be resolved by any swift method.

There’s no good outcome from here, alas. The three basic options are:
a) Pull out in despair

b) Throw in silly numbers of troops and install a repressive government that’s willing and able to squash ethnic conflict with an iron fist (traditionally a dictator, but perhaps a nominally democratic head for form’s sake) over many years
c) Leave things dragging on interminably, with the death and misery toll rising, until you cave in and do either (a) or (b).

And I did say that before the war. But I’m a pacifist so never worth listening to, apparently.

* I still have trouble believing that Bush himself used the phrase “Big Push”, given that the previously most famous military action bearing that name was the Somme in 1916. It seems to me much more the sort of piss-takey label that sneaky pacifists like me would try to make stick for the propaganda edge.

Posted by ajay: “There’s a good argument to be made that the record of other people installing democratic governments isn’t as good as the record of people installing their own. The former has basically 2 successes (Germany; Japan) and any number of failures.”

That would assume that, in those other cases, the intervening government was actually trying to install a democracy, rather than ‘our SOB’, with a democratic facade.

Is there a more dishonest hack on the net than Megan McArdle? This one is pretty intense even for her, though.

The current Iraqi government leans as much to Iran as it does to the US

Maybe they like Iran more, but there’s hardly any doubt that in the end of the day the US – not Iran – will build permanent military bases all over the place and US businesses will reap oil profits, even if they have to build 10-meter-high walls around the oil fields and pipe lines.

And, like I said, perhaps the most important result is general unrest in the region, sectarian tension and clashes; every group will be trying to please the Americans to get some advantage. Iran is simply one of these groups; so what if it’s somewhat stronger now. That’ll just make Saudi and Jordan (and perhaps even Syria) more obedient. It’s a simple game: as long as they keep fighting among each other you can’t lose.

Nasserism is the greatest danger to US imperial interests there, not Iran; and Nasserism is completely gone now.

Many of us who supported (and currently support) the war also expected a longer and bloodier occupation. We considered that it might work. But giving the circumstances, a failed occupation was still better than ineffective weapons inspections, looking weak, and leaving Iran protected due to the Iraqi threat should we engage Iran (and don’t forget all the great intelligence we have access to due to the invasion). Even a failed occupation would be a win for us (I’m not willing to call it failed, right now it’s stagnating at worst).

ps – one of the advantages of having a blog is that you can see if you really got things right, or if you were wrong, and why. We wrote this on March 31, 2003, and, except for the names – this was when Garner was in charge, before Bremer – it pretty much stands on its own:

… we are seeing the war split into two. One is the war against Saddam the Horrific. The other is the war against the post-Saddam guerrilla. The latter has no name, yet; the incipient program is simply, repel the invader. As the invader triumphs, setting up a state run by Rumsfeld’s creepy buddy, Jay Garner (who has a first class ticket to Bushs monster ball, being one of the numerous hawks who have day jobs as Perlish vultures), we will have a new war. In this one, the Iraqi state will be our ally against Iraqi “terrorists” — that is, the people who are firing on American forces and their Iraqi collaborators. In the new war, the goal will be a lot clearer — it will be to repel the occupiers. As the krewe of Iraqi exiles preferred by the Pentagon are installed (over the resistance of other Iraqis) get set up, the traditional lines of the conflict will become clear a client state, an imperialist sponsor, and the usual poisonous symbiosis between them, with the client depending on the sponsor to sustain it at the same time that that dependence renders it illegitimate.”

Not very hard to foresee.

PS – oops. I should have said zero percent. “The pro-war arguments at the time, and now, almost have to be at least 50 percent correct, since they always involve affirming mutually inconsistent, and indeed contradictory, conditions.” Pro war predictions, to be even close to being correct, had to ignore at least one of their conditioning claims.

Interestingly, the more an anti-war person thought that Bush was sincere or that the administration was honest, the more wrong they would be – only those who premised that the president is a pompous, swaggering incompetent, his v.p. a thug, and his secretary of defense was suffered from a form of mad cow syndrome – mad vanity syndrome, perhaps – would have had a chance of predicting the course of this war.

Failure was overdetermined.

SamChevre, you make a mistake with disjunctive probability and conditional events.

What if I offered ten possible reasons for failure, and got one right? Would I be 90% wrong and unreliable?

Suppose I argue the plan is a bad idea – success is highly unlikely because it there are too many uncertainties, and if “success” happens, it will cost too much. I reject a priori any argument that the plan can achieve success at a reasonable cost. I then posit ten possible reasons for failure (A thru J). I further argue that I suspect (A) may happen, and if not(A), then that (B) will occur. As events transpire, (A) does not happen, (B) happens, and the plan fails. Am I “wrong”?

Do I become “right” if I add the trivial observation that, because I think success is only possible at an exorbitant cost, I necessarily predict that efforts to cut corners in plan implementation will result in failure, probably in ways I cannot now predict?

The burden of proof is on the advocate of the plan. It is not the opponents of the war who must prove they were right to find fault, it is the supporters who must prove they were right to launch such an ill-advised campaign.

I got it: If you say you’re going to spit a petunia out of your mouth which will turn into a bird and fly away, and I say you won’t, then unless I can predict what you actually are going to do, I’m just as loony as you are.

But I don’t see how that works. How did you get there, again?

I believe one should never fight a land war in Asia and never deal with a Sicilan when death is on the line. Does that make me right for the right reasons or or for wrong reason. Even if it is a push I am still smarter than Jane Galt.