Middle East Politics

More correspondence, this time from a soldier stationed in Iraq who saw my “recent post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003185.html about the terrible shooting in Tal Afar. I reproduce the post below the fold. I should say that I can’t verify the identify of my correspondent, but I have no reason to doubt what he says about himself.

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“Michael Totten”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html recounts his night out with Christopher Hitchens and a couple of Iraqis that they talked to. Some of the latter weren’t too happy. Totten reflects:

bq. Maybe there was no way to avoid the tension wrought by invasion and occupation, and the air just had to be cleared. Perhaps our Iraqi guests … really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.

He goes on to say that “Friendly Arabs are the easiest people to bond with I’ve ever met.” It’s the unfriendly ones that cause everyone such problems. And, he continues,

bq. I respected them more, too, because they stood up to me and Christopher Hitchens. They are not servile people. They will never, _ever_, be anyone’s puppets.

They’ve got spirit, the little buggers. Me ‘n’ Hitch are quite the team, but when you’re trying your best to tell them the way things are, they will be interrupting and getting annoyed and saying unreasonable things like “Who are you to tell us what to do!?” What’s that phrase again? “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” But dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, we can’t permit them to pick the wrong government for themselves. “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power” (Hitchens). The invasion force would consist of “the US and Britain … along with — hopefully — everyone here at this table” (Totten). Or, as Tom Lehrer put it “more succinctly”:http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/marines.htm some years ago, “They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we like can be elected.”

“Read the whole thing”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is. Like Hitchens’ schoolboy-debater habit of calling people “Sir” as he talks down at them (as in “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought”). Or Totten’s heartfelt comment that “Something I said must have got through to him, and thank God for that. He and I — truly — were on the same side. I knew it, and I’m pretty certain he knew it too.” Or Hitchens saying that he has to leave because “I have to get up in the morning and continue the fight on CNN.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, mate.

(Via “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_02_06.html#005890.)

Somehow I missed “this appalling sequence of photographs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/1.stm of a shooting in Iraq a few days ago, probably because they were running in newspapers outside the U.S. on inauguration day. I want to know whether any of them — especially “this one”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/html/3.stm — ran anywhere in the U.S. media?

Look, I know I’m asking for trouble. I don’t want the comments to degenerate into angry whataboutery. All kinds of terrible things happen — purposely and by accident — in war zones. These photos are just awful. That’s all.

I suppose I should have expected the likes of “Michelle Malkin”:http://www.michellemalkin.com/ to treat the Iraqi elections as an opportunity to take a pot shot at “the Left.” As you know, we on The Left^TM are all for for more death and suffering in Iraq because it improves our case for universal health care and better prescription drug coverage. Like an excited kid on Christmas morning, Malkin wasn’t able to wait all day. She restrained herself till lunchtime (U.S. east coast time) on Sunday before indicting us along with a few other blogs: “Left goes into Hibernation”, “Crooked Timber is Silent on the Iraqi Elections“. “Silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003167.html, “silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003169.html, “silent”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003170.html. You can practically hear the wind whistling through the trees around here. An excerpt from our non-existent commentary on the election appears on the Op-Ed page of Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News¹, presumably as a big ole chunk of white space. I suppose we were hibernating, really, as long as you think “Hibernation” means “Doing some other things on Sunday (in our own time zones) before catching up on the news.”

fn1. Irritatingly detailed registration required. Try “bugmenot”:http://www.bugmenot.com/.

The “Iraqi elections”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4220551.stm have gone off successfully, in the sense that the turnout was good and the violence relatively contained. That’s very good news. Now comes the hard business of establishing a real government. I’m sympathetic with “John’s view”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003167.html that it might not be such a bad thing if the U.S. took a “Declare Victory and Go Home” attitude, even though that’s one of the scenarios people were most worried by before the invasion. Getting out would leave the government in a position to at least try to run its own country, instead of inevitably playing second-fiddle to the U.S. occupying forces. I’m not sure any more that this is likely to happen, though.

The best possible outcome of the weekend’s election is a successful completion of the present government’s term followed by another real election. It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because — as Adam Przeworski says somewhere — a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state.

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As commenters and my last post, and others, have pointed out, there’s a logical gap in my argument that, given imperfect knowledge and the recognition that we tend to overestimate our own capabilities, we should adopt a rule-based version of consequentialism which would include rules against pre-emptive or preventive wars[1]. The problem of imperfect knowledge also applies to the consequences of deciding not to start a pre-emptive war. As I’ll argue though, the symmetry is only apparent and the case for caution is strong.

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Now that, thanks to Kieran and the Medium Lobster, we’ve all had our fun with Richard Posner’s case for pre-emptive war, complete with toy numerical example, it’s time for me to play straight man.

Posner’s starting assumption is consequentialism: that we should evaluate an action based on whether its probable consequences are, on balance, good or bad. I broadly agree with this, so I’ll try to explain why it shouldn’t lead to conclusions like those derived by Posner.

I’ll ignore a range of more complex objections and come straight to the first distinction learned by beginning students of the subject. Should we evaluate the consequences of general rules such as “don’t engage in pre-emptive wars” (rule-consequentialism) or should we evaluate each action on a case by case basis (act-consequentialism)

For perfectly rational decision makers, following the rules of Bayesian decision theory, the answer is easy and, in fact, trivial. It’s best to make the optimal decision on a case by case basis, and an optimal set of rules would be so detailed and precise as to yield the optimal decision in every case. Posner routinely assumes this kind of perfect rationality, which is why he doesn’t see any big problems with toy examples, or with claiming that this kind of reasoning can usefully be applied to improbable catastrophes with incalculable consequences.

There are two objections that can be made here

* Human beings are not perfectly rational and do not follow the rules of Bayesian decision theory

* Since war is a negative sum game, rational decision makers do not fight wars[1]

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As the American ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer had the amazing knack of being able to pick the worst possible decision on every occasion[1]. From the dissolution of the Iraqi army to his refusal to hold elections in 2003, when there was some chance they could have worked, he did everything wrong he possibly could. Now he’s gone, and most of his policies have been abandoned, but he’s left one last gift, which may turn out to be the most poisonous of the lot.

When Bremer set up the electoral system for the elections that are supposed to be held in January, he went for a single nationwide electorate, rather than having representatives of provinces or individual constituencies[2].

In any case, what this means is that, to the extent that fighting depresses the turnout in Sunni areas, Sunnis get less seats. Being a minority, they’re bound to lose most of the power they’ve traditionally held in any case, but under Bremer’s rules, they could be excluded almost completely. By contrast, under a constituency system, provided some sort of ballot could be held, Sunni candidates would be elected from Sunni areas.

To address this problem, Juan Cole is suggesting an emergency intervention, setting aside 25 per cent of the seats for Sunni candidates. It’s probably about the best that can be done in the circumstances, but the outlook is not that good.

Meanwhile, the onset of civil war has been announced, not by leftist opponents of the war, but by arch-hawk Charles Krauthammer who complains (haven’t we heard this before) about the unreliability of our native allies

People keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side is fighting it. The other side, the Shiites and the Kurds, are largely watching as their part of the fight is borne primarily by the United States.

I don’t recall Krauthammer mentioning civil war as part of the plan in 2003. But maybe this is one of those four-war things.

fn1. I don’t think this was simple stupidity. His orders were, as far as I can see, to establish a secular free-market democracy that would be a reliable ally of the US and Israel. Any halfway realistic policy would have required him to abandon these objectives, and settle for a moderately theocratic, semi-socialist and imperfectly democratic state, on the “Iran-lite” model, because that’s what a majority of Iraqis want. Instead, he followed the dream.

fn2. My guess is that his motive was to allow votes for Iraqi exiles who could be presumed to be more favorable to the occupation than the people who were actually experiencing it.

As Eszter notes, the “Becker/Posner Blog”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from “Becker”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_war.html and one from “Posner”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. How else to explain stuff like this:

bq. Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation. … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified. A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936 …

The real Richard Posner is one of the preeminent legal minds of our time, so he can hardly be responsible for this. For one thing, parody of this quality is pretty difficult to write and I don’t think he has the time to devote to the task. Notice how the eminently reasonable introduction by “Posner” (as we shall call him) leads the reader to expect some sort of informed analysis — “a comparison of costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms).” But once this hook has been swallowed, within a paragraph we are in a fantasy world — “the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), … can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further …” Suppose further! Quite brilliant stuff. The sudden _non-sequitur_ about the Nazi occupation of the Rhine caps the piece with Godwinesque cheek. After the lead-in sentence, “Posner” is careful not to mention again the war being prosecuted in Iraq. This is a nice move, reminiscent of the best UseNet trolls. When angry bloggers complain that neither the cost-benefit thing nor the analogy to Hitler make any contact with present reality whatsoever, or suggest that the post sounds like it was written in the Autumn of 2002 — or maybe the Winter of 1990 — they’ll have unwittingly set themselves up for a fall: after all, “Posner” was only considering the justifiability of preventive war _sub specie aeternitas_, not the actual costs and benefits of any particular war the U.S. might or might not be engaged in at present.

Speaking of which, “Posner’s” strategy neatly avoids the sticky business of having to work out a real cost-benefit calculation using available numbers — ones like, e.g., the cost of war to date in real dollars, N Combat Fatalities to date, skill-adjusted dollar value of Generic U.S. service person, “QALY”:http://www.evidence-based-medicine.co.uk/ebmfiles/WhatisaQALY.pdf adjustment for each of N Injuries sustained by U.S. service people, Expected Number of Fatalities in an Iraqi-sponsored WMD attack on the U.S. Mainland, productivity losses to an Iraqi WMD attack, probability that Saddam Hussein had WMDs of any sort, likelihood that they could have been delivered to the U.S., etc, etc. Those last two quantities are now known with a high degree of confidence to approximately equal zero, by the way. This might make it easier to calculate the right-hand side of the equation after the fact. (If you worry that having this calculation _before_ the fact would have been more useful, but think it would have been extremely difficult to do in any precise but still sensible way, congratulations on your perspicuity.)

Elsewhere on the blog, the “absurd suck-up comments”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html#trackbacks from law students are a further indication that the reader is being gamed. Take this one from “Charles”, for instance:

bq. Dear Justice Posner, I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.

Part letter to Santa, part backhanded swipe at Gary Becker — guess you’re the second string econ guy, Gary! — I’m surprised he didn’t mention he’d been a good boy all year and go on to ask for a Train Set and a copy of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. But that might have been painting the lily. All in all, I look forward to future entries, which may provide further clues as to who the deadpan genius behind this blog really is. The “Medium Lobster”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ perhaps? The “PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ maybe? I await further developments with interest.

Update: Sentence edited for clarity about probabilities.

Brian Gifford of “Pub Sociology”:http://pubsociology.typepad.com/pub/ has an “Op-Ed piece”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18882-2004Nov28.html in todays _Washington Post_ arguing that the pressure on the U.S. military in Iraq is much greater than simple comparison to casualty rates in previous wars would suggest:

To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15. Compared with two per day so far in Iraq, the daily grinds of those earlier conflicts were worse than what our forces are currently experiencing.

On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. Adjusted for the size of the armed forces, the average daily number of killed and wounded was 4.8 times as many in World War II than in Iraq, but it was only 0.25 times greater in Vietnam — or one-fourth more.

These figures suggest that our forces in Iraq face a far more serious threat than the public, the media and the political establishment typically acknowledge or understand. Man for man, a soldier or Marine in Iraq faces a mission nearly as difficult as that in Vietnam a generation earlier. This is in spite of the fact that his contemporary enemies do not field heavy armored vehicles or aircraft and do not enjoy the support and patronage of a superpower such as the Soviet Union. …

The focus on how “light” casualties have been so far rather than on what those casualties signify serves to rationalize the continued conduct of the war and prevents us as a nation from confronting the realities of conditions in Iraq. Even more troubling, daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April. Conditions are getting worse, not improving. To be sure, American forces are winning the body count. That the insurgency is nonetheless growing more effective in the face of heavier losses makes it difficult to imagine an exit strategy that any reasonable person would recognize as a “victory.”

There is a tension in warblogger rhetoric between the wish to emphasize the great sacrifices that soldiers are making in Iraq and the desire to deride those who worry about the casualties. The former leads them to emphasize the hellish nature of battling guerilla forces in urban settings, but the latter demands they argue that fatality rates are trivial compared to Vietnam or other much larger wars. Brian treats the fact that the U.S. military is the best-equipped, best-trained and best-supported ground fighting force in the world as more than just rhetoric. As he argues, this should force us to see the casualty numbers in a new light.

MEMRI makes an “inept attempt to intimidate”:http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/intimidation-by-israeli-linked.html Juan Cole.

bq. Dear Professor Cole,

bq. I write in response to your article “Osama Threatening Red States?” published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. … As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of.

MEMRI’s threat is strongly reminiscent of Donald Luskin’s threat of legal action against Atrios a while back. It seems to me (though I note that I’m not a lawyer) that the purported complaint is completely, utterly and entirely bogus. But like Luskin’s supposed complaint, the threat isn’t so much in the possibility of a successful action, as in outcomes related to that action. In Atrios’ case, the real threat was that his identity would be revealed, possibly landing him in difficulty with the university that employed him. Similarly, MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves. Cole urges

bq. all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.

Now that Arafat is dead, it’s at least possible that Israel and the Palestinians will recommence negotiations. One important question is how the US can best try to encourage peace. During the election campaign, both Kerry and Bush tried to make clear their unconditional support for Israel. However, on one reasonable reading of the situation in the Middle East, promises of unconditional support may not be in Israel’s best interests.

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One of the things that I find most depressing about discussions on Crooked Timber and elsewhere is that it seems to be absolutely impossible to have a civil argument about Israel and the Palestinians. I’m now very reluctant to post on Israeli or Palestinian politics, as, I suspect, are my co-bloggers (and very probably bloggers elsewhere). For some reason, it seems to be difficult for supporters and critics of Israel’s policy to argue reasonably with each other – or at the least, the unreasonable voices very quickly swamp the reasonable ones. Why? And why do arguments on this issue become so much more heated more quickly than on other issues, given there is at least some potential for agreement (barring the crazies on both sides, most people seem to be prepared to accept some kind of two state solution)?

NB – lest this post become an example of what it’s seeking to criticize, I’m going to be especially ruthless in deleting comments that I think are unhelpful or that lay the blame all on one side in an overheated way.

Update: to be clear about my deletion policy for this post – if all you have to say is that (a) the treatment of Palestinians is part and parcel of the plot to oppress brown-skinned peoples everywhere, or (b) that Palestinians are inherently untrustworthy and all bent on destroying Israel, or anything even vaguely along these lines then please take your comments as already stipulated – whatever their intrinsic merits, they’re part of the dialogue of the deaf that I’m complaining about, and will be deleted.

The provisional Iraqi government has declared a 60-day state of emergency in the run-up to an all-out assault on Falluja (pop. 300,000) by US Marines.

Heavy explosions were heard in Baghdad as government spokesman Thair Hassan al-Naqeeb announced the state of emergency over the entire country except Kurdish areas in the north.

“It is going to be a curfew. It is going to be so many things, but tomorrow the prime minister will mention it,” he said. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi will give more details Monday, he said.

Al-Naqeeb declined to say whether the announcement signaled an imminent attack on the insurgent stronghold Fallujah, saying, “We have seen the situation is worsening in this area. Any obstacle will be removed.”

“So many things.” I can hardly wait to hear more. For some reason this reminds me of the quote from Arafat when asked why he had to have eight different security services: he looked surprised and answered, “Why, Hosni Mubarak has 12.” Middle Eastern politics are so reassuring. Here’s to hoping the state of emergency lasts only 60 days.