Looking Back on the Iraq War

James Fallows has proposed that with the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War coming up, we should look back on where we stood at the time and consider our views.  I have the advantage of having opposed the war, although I did not get out in the street and demonstrate, or write to my Congressman, or anything else, since it seemed obvious that George Bush was going to have his war, and nothing was going to stop him.

Why did I oppose it?  Well, there wasn't just one reason, so I will break it down.

1.  I opposed George Bush's doctrine of preemptive war on general principle.
It looked to me very much like a doctrine of we get to invade anyone we want, any time we want, for any reason we want, just because we're USA.  I had serious moral problems with that idea and was going to oppose it.  And I took for granted that this was an example that doctrine at work because none of the other reasons being offered by proponents of the war seemed convincing.  Which leads to reason #2.

2.  None of the reasons being offered by proponents of the war seemed convincing.
This calls for some breakdown.

2a. Saddam obviously had nothing to do with either 9-11 or al-Qaeda.
I was therefore unswayed by any talk of "going to the source" or "taking the fight to the enemy."  To my mind, September 11 justified war against the people actually responsible, but not taking out someone we didn't like who had nothing to do with the attack.

2b.  I saw no justification for humanitarian intervention.
I favor(ed) humanitarian intervention -- as a neutral principle.  If it effectively stops the slaughter, I favor humanitarian intervention, either by us or by someone else.  But I did not see any justification for such an intervention in Iraq.  Humanitarian intervention could be justified when Saddam Hussein was actively crushing  a rebellion, but not 13 year later.

2c.  I was not afraid of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.
There were people who accurately foresaw that there were no such weapons.  I was not among them. I was convinced that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons, though not for a very good reason.  My reasoning was that following the first Gulf War, we were assured that Saddam was about to get nuclear weapons, like, tomorrow, so we had to go to war right away.  In the end, such talk scared me enough to support the war, only to find out that Saddam's army was vastly overrated.  Now, with the drums beating for a second war, suddenly he was about to get nuclear weapons any day all over again.  Fool me once, and so forth.*

But I never doubted that Saddam had chemical weapons.  After all, he had used them in the past, which I took as overwhelming evidence.  I did not realize at the time how quickly sarin and other such chemicals break down.  As for biological weapons, I had no idea and was open to persuasion either way.  But his chemical weapons did not scare me.  Saddam clearly had no delivery vehicles capable of hitting us, and it seemed most unlikely that he could hit Israel.  His supposed arsenal was only a danger to his neighbors, and if his neighbors were not concerned, why should I be?

2d.  I distrust the plural casus belli.
In other words, if a war is truly worth fighting, then there is one reason for fighting it and others need not be given.  The Bush Administration kept offering one explanation after another, and any time one was refuted simply shifted to the next.  If worst came to worst, war proponents said no one cause was sufficient, but all combined were.  I was and remain unconvinced.

3.  Finally, I feared the outcome.
To me, the worst case scenario was a Vietnam-style people's war.  What should have been second-worst was a civil war with us being dragged in.  I foolishly discounted that.  Instead, I considered the second-worst outcome piecing together a government that looked good, withdrawing, and seeing everything fall apart months later.  Third-worst was a quick and easy victory that would encourage more such wars.  As for my best case scenario, it would probably be something like what we had in Bosnia or Kosovo -- a long, weary, labor intensive but bloodless course of nation building.  Something that would be tiresome enough to discourage any further interventions, but didn't actually get people killed.

Looking back through old posts, I find that I said much the same (though in a different order) five years ago. My opinions from back then remain unchanged.

PS:  This post is brilliant.  (Not the blog post itself, but the comment at 3:33 a.m. by Heterosensible).:

[T]he secret to every analysis I've ever done of contemporary
politics has been, more or less, my expensive business school education.
. . .  Here's a few of the ones I learned which I considered relevant
to judging the advisability of the Second Iraq War.

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.
I was first made aware of this during an accounting class. We were
discussing the subject of accounting for stock options at technology
companies. There was a live debate on this subject at the time. One side
(mainly technology companies and their lobbyists) held that stock
option grants should not be treated as an expense on public policy
grounds; treating them as an expense would discourage companies from
granting them, and stock options were a vital compensation tool that
incentivised performance, rewarded dynamism and innovation and created
vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly
people like Warren Buffet) held that stock options looked awfully like a
massive blag carried out my management at the expense of shareholders,
and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L account.

Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable
point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed
the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as
many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative,
empowered and fantastic they were. Since the tech companies' point of
view appeared to be that if they were ever forced to account honestly
for their option grants, they would quickly stop making them, this
offered decent prima facie evidence that they weren't, really, all that
fantastic.

Application to Iraq. The general principle that good ideas are not
usually associated with lying like a rug[1] about their true nature
seems to have been pretty well confirmed. In particular, however, this
principle sheds light on the now quite popular claim that "WMDs were
only part of the story; the real priority was to liberate the Iraqis,
which is something that every decent person would support".

Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after
miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of
which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend
to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that
project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a
fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the
integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not
even as a "starting point". By the way, I would just love to get hold of
a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support
the war and give them a quick run through Benford's Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth
staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no
material WMD capacity would be found, rather than "some" or "some but
not enough to justify a war" or even "some derisory but not immaterial
capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs". My reasoning was
that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and
therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were
actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally
compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile,
there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever
other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have
told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not
compromised.

The Vital Importance of Audit. Emphasised over and
over again. Brealey and Myers has a section on this, in which they
remind callow students that like backing-up one's computer files, this
is a lesson that everyone seems to have to learn the hard way.
Basically, it's been shown time and again and again; companies which do
not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original
projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that
they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no
consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they
deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with
a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve.

I hope I don't have to spell out the implications of this one for
Iraq. Krugman has gone on and on about this, seemingly with some small
effect these days. The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved
with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their
untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who
long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the
fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the
past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the
benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of
avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this,
which is why audit is so important.

. . . . . . . .

[1] We also learned in accounting class that the difference between
"making a definite single false claim with provable intent to deceive"
and "creating a very false impression and allowing it to remain without
correcting it" is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of
jail. Even if your motives are noble."

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*As I say, this is not really sound reasoning.  People who fell for exaggerated stories of German atrocities during WWI were resolved not to be fooled again in WWII, and so discounted atrocity stories that turned out to be true.