The Certainty Principle

I’m sorry to bring up a subject that makes some of the most trenchant and intelligent commentators around here groan, but I do think there is an important issue at stake. I’ve expanded and clarified my own thought as well, so while we await the Plame verdicts, if any (I’m reverse jinxing here!), please once again, lend an eyeball or two.

Matt Yglesias has tried to clarify his position regarding Bush/Iraq. I can’t help but think that the discussions engendered by this post and this post may have had something to do with Matt’s clarification. What follows is the comment that I left on Matt’s message board in response (I’ve edited it slightly):

Matt, Tristero here. Thank you for addressing this issue again. Unfortunately, you really seem to miss the point of those who are criticizing you, like myself. Please hear me out:

The mistake you made, along with all the liberal hawks, was that by accepting [pro war Iraqi refugee] Makiya’s odds [of 5%] as more or less reasonable, you rhetorically opened a door to discussion. It was permitting that door to open that was the error.

From the point of view of a speech to the troops, 5% looks immoral. From the point of view of a country traumatized by 911, the Bush administration calculated that 5% might very well be a risk well worth taking, if it could prevent more attacks. Having accepted the proposition that there was a small but real chance of success, all those American myths about risk taking and doing good kick in, which made Bush/Iraq an easier sell than it should have been.

But the truth is that Makiya was a hopeless optimist. The goals of Bush/Iraq were impossible to achieve. Only in an abstruse, technically mathematical sense was there a probability of success. Why was Bush/Iraq utterly impossible?

Because nothing is certain. Again, please hear me out:

The success of Bush/Iraq depended, with absolute certainty, that just about everything the neocons predicted would, in fact actually, happen. An unbiased study of the full range of opinions and research on foreign affairs -one not skewed to the right and the far right, one not skewed towards naive optimism – would make it abundantly clear that at best, less than 1/3 of the neocons’ predictions about the course of the war could ever possibly come true. That fact, based on a genuine understanding of uncertainty,exponentially increased the odds that the alternative scenario, an unmitigated disaster, would occur.

The actual odds of success were closer to .00000000000000005% than 5%. That was patently obvious to anyone who was doing research that wasn’t biased.

But part of the marketing of the “new product” was to turn the notion of doubt on its head. We, who knew how utterly beyond reason a successful outcome was – because we understood the full extent of the sheer improbability of Perle/Wolfowitz’s scenarios, which depended on a near-absolute certain unfolding of events – were accused of not taking into account how uncertain things are in the real world!

Bush/Iraq should never have been taken seriously, anymore than Curtis Lemay’s suggestion to use nuclear bombs in Vietnam or during the Missile Crisis should have been taken seriously. The problem was that not only did Bush take Wolfowitz seriously. So did the media and the liberal hawks. Had they been laughed off the stage – as those opposed to the gutting of Social Security have laughed Bush off the stage – the chances of a Bush/Iraq war would have fallen close to zero.

But the idea was taken seriously by people far more influential than you. And that gave them the opening to make their fallacious case. What disturbs me is that you don’t seem to recognize what the mistake was:

Not all arguments are worth the status of intellectual consideration. Bush/Iraq was one of them, even though a former John Hopkins professor like Wolfowitz and the president of the United States thought otherwise.

Bush/Iraq was no more realistic than the arguments for a UFO behind the Hale/Bopp comet and it should have been treated accordingly. Again, not recognizing that immediately was your mistake and that is what you need to come to grips with. Not the morality of the war, but the extent to which you and so many of your colleagues were bamboozled and provided Bush with an opening to tap into American mythologies.