Iraq and Global Warming [BRD]
Well, one of the posts has (surprisingly enough) veered off into questions about intelligence, warfighting, and preemption. And, predictably enough, the conversation, in large part, reflects the fact that people have worn a lot of their comfortable, faded, broken-in arguments to the fight. In general, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve been thinking a bit over the last few days about stuff in general and have come to a couple of conclusions, the most important of which is this:
The Iraq War debate is, at its heart, equivalent to the arguments over Global Warming.
Both the doctrine of preemption and the reduction of carbon emissions are predicated on the assessment that in both cases, a false positive is of much, much greater consequence than a false negative, such that the downside potential of a false positive in either scenario is far too high to accept and completely overwhelms the consequences of a false negative.
Granted, this evaluation doesn’t place great emphasis on true positives and true negatives, but that’s beside the point. In both instances, we’re using incredibly imprecise and unreliable forecasting methods, for which we can get little substantive supporting proof. Even worse, it’s not the weaknesses of the methodologies themselves, but rather the looming specter of the “unknown unknowns†that compels close examination of the costs of incorrect outcomes. This is because the expectation value of a risk is the likelyhood of the outcome times the consequence of the outcome, and with high variability in this case, the value of the true positives and true negatives becomes much less significant, given the way that policy debate is conducted in the US.
Now, before we get off on the particular merits of Iraq and Kyoto, let’s take a quick look at the consequences of cognitive (particularly confirmation and disconfirmation) biases. Without getting into the hairy details of the mechanics of the biases, let us just simply note that nobody ever has as strong a grasp of political issues as the strength of their opinions would lead them to believe. The vast majority of people have a strong command of a specific issue area, but their outlook outside of their focus tends to be more heavily informed by the projection of their own narrative framework projected onto a given set of facts. In particular, this is manifested through cognitive bias behaviors.
At this point, many folks are going to note “Hah! The other guys, who are axiomatically wrong about this-that-and-the-other-thing have fallen prey to some sort of cognitive bias!â€
Not so fast.
What it tends to mean most often is that the positions drawn by both sides are often only loosely related to the actual issue under contention, but are simply a showcase for a preexisting set of conclusions. In practice, the more detailed circumstances surrounding a contentious topic are almost always more complex and greyer than generally imagined.
In the case of Iraq, what it all, essentially, boils down to is that a number of reasons were given for war with Iraq (what Cynn so delightfully refers to in a similar case as “mixed messages and rhetorical moonwalkingâ€, or as Kerry put it “nuanceâ€). These reasons were pretty broad and covered as many bases as possible. However, since the debate today centers around WMD and proliferation, I’m going to restrict myself to that family of considerations.
Was Iraq in violation of the letter of the law regarding WMD? Absolutely.
Was he substantially in violation of the spirit of the law regarding WMD? Tough call.
Was there any way to know, short of war, whether or not the technical violation was simply the only a trace of a substantive violation that he managed to conceal? None at all.
If you all go in the wayback machine, the crux of the debate in early 2003 was whether or not the trigger for implementation of UN 1441 was a technical or substantive violation of the resolution. (Of course, I’m not touching the other two-thirds of the argumentation of the Iraq War, despite the fact that those who have argued most loudly about Bush’s Manichean worldview and lack of nuance seem to be remarkably simplistic on causation here.)
Internationally, everyone pretty much agreed that a substantive violation merited a massive military response, while a purely technical violation (particularly one that was not in bad faith) did not require a full military response.
But, here’s the kicker. Arms negotiations and disarmament are essentially based on the principle of “trust, but verify†– the exercise here is for the party that has given up their capability must demonstrate to the inspecting party a good faith effort on their part to remove or neutralize the capability in question. If the disarming party is hiding something, then that is basically a failure to disarm according to the agreement – whether or not they actually have retained the capability. It sounds odd, but it is essentially the only way to tackle the problem of “I swear to Allah, I really did give up my nuclear program, and I really, really, mean it this time. Really!â€
This then puts us in a rather odd situation. Hussein, after the 1991 Gulf War was commanded to get rid of all of his WMD capacity. And the west had verified, to its satisfaction that the WMD programs, in particular, the nuclear program had been gotten rid of. However, once a Hussein son-in-law skipped the country and dropped the dime on Hussein, the west discovered that there was a huge capability that had not been turned over and had been concealed.
So folks went around and inspected and verified and did all that kind of stuff, but Iraq couldn’t at any point, ever bring themselves to come completely clean. If we fast forward to 1998, the west was still certain he had something up his sleeve. If we then go all the way to the UN Clusters Working Document, Iraq still hadn’t come completely clean. They were still found in violation of UN resolutions.
So, the only way on earth that Iraq could have been in compliance with requirements is if they went off, scrapped all their kit, lied about it, didn’t tell anyone, and destroyed all the records. This, as it turns out, seems to be pretty close to what happened – although it will be another couple decades before the rest of that story plays out.
But, to turn this around, did it make any sense, whatsoever, in any way shape or form, to go to war over a clerical mistake? Clearly not.
But to turn it a bit further, we had no way of verifying it to be a clerical error, given the behavior of the actors at the time, short of war.
So the question of WMD really boils down to how one chooses to manage the consequences of a false negative versus the downside potential of a false positive.
Kind of like the Global Warming debate.
So, now that we’ve looked at two cases of managing downside risk potential for false positives and false negatives, does anyone have anything productive to suggest about Iran, other than doing nothing and watching from the sidelines as the worst case scenario unfolds?
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