George Bush is gone but the Iraq War lingers. President Obama wants to expand the war in Afghanistan with an Iraq-style surge. We will be thinking about these things a while longer, and we might as well think thoughtfully.
That requires abandoning the sloganeering and false certainties that have disfigured our debate. To try to show you what I mean, I will try to show you the complexity of a particular view of Iraq, namely my own. I won’t be able fully to defend it, but that’s all right–first because I hold it quite tentatively (this will be part of my point), and second because my purpose is not to persuade you to accept my view so much as to offer an evaluative framework from which you might arrive at many views.
When I hear people talking about Iraq, what strikes me is that they just know they’re right. What’s more, they can prove that they’re right in a few sentences. Our nation, founded by geniuses and statesmen, has evolved to the point where every third person is a genius and a statesman. It is impressively democratic.
My message to every third person is: Renounce your hubris! Foreign policy is not a matter of making obviously sound inferences after examination of incontrovertible facts from a temporally fixed viewpoint. It’s not a science. It’s not even a social science.
What it is is a poker game.
Consider the following about poker games:
Your view of important facts is blocked. You don’t know which cards the other players hold. You don’t know which cards are still to be dealt. You work with the information you have, and it’s always changing.
You have to do psychological guesswork. “Was that a bluff or does he have pocket aces?” “What will he do if I make a big bet?” “If I re-raise, will he go all-in?” You can be better or worse at reading other players, but even the pros make mistakes.
You can’t take counterfactual analyses too seriously. “If I’d raised instead of called, would he have folded?” “If I’d drawn for that flush, would I have made it?” You have no idea; such are the uncertainties of poker. Besides which, poker is not an event but a series of events; change one and you have to rethink all the ones that followed.
You assess risk relative to reward. Say you’re pretty sure you’d win if you made a flush, but you have to draw for it, and that means calling another player’s bet. Whether to call depends not only on the odds of making the flush, but on the size of the pot in relation to the size of the bet. The more chips you stand to win, the more you’re justified in risking (but of course you should not take risks from which you can’t recover if things go badly).
Your risk/reward assessment must take stock of all possible outcomes. If you have a high pair and are pretty sure it’s the best hand, this justifies a certain kind of betting; if on top of it you have a flush draw and a straight draw, this justifies a more aggressive kind of betting.
You play as long as you think you can win. You’re going to suffer losses in any game, and sometimes they’ll be large. But if you’re in a position to recover, it would be dumb to walk away.
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Now let me describe how Iraq looks to me, with reference to these principles.
Your view of important facts is blocked. That is the nature of intelligence. Analysts take the available facts, which are far from a complete picture, and write a story about them. The story about Saddam Hussein, written collectively by the world’s intelligence agencies, was that he had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was trying to build an atomic bomb. The story turned out to be wrong. It wasn’t just Bush who believed the wrong story; it was most politicians, most journalists, most of the world’s governments, and most Americans.
That the story was wrong does not mean the war did no good. You must take stock of all possible outcomes. We now know that Saddam Hussein wasn’t in the WMD business after the Gulf War, but there is good reason–as reported by the Iraq Study Group; remember, though, theirs is only another story–to think he planned to restart his WMD programs after the lifting of U.N. sanctions, which were already crumbling.
On the other hand, you can’t take counterfactual analyses too seriously.
That the WMD story was wrong relates to the fact that you have to do psychological guesswork. Sometimes you’ll face a bluffer. If he’s good, he’ll bluff in a way that’s supported by known facts and existing perceptions, such as that he’s a ruthless S.O.B. who murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians with his chemical weapons. If he’s really good, he might fool everybody. This does not make everybody stupid. And if you say of the bluffer: “He possesses such-and-such” or “He intends this-and-that” and it turns out not to be so, you do not thereby become a liar. (I reject the blood-for-oil slander as straightforwardly outlandish: Had Bush’s goal been access to Iraqi oil, he could have gotten that very easily, and at much lower cost, simply by restoring our ’80s alliance with Hussein. Besides, even if we assume that Bush had a secret, petroleum-based agenda, the question remains whether the Iraq War can be justified on other grounds, and that is the question which interests us here.)
The psychological guesswork in the Iraq War was especially complicated because it concerned millions of psyches. It tried to answer two broad groups of questions. First: “How would Iraqis react to the removal of Saddam? Could they coexist without a dictator forcing them to submit? Could democracy work?” Second: “Suppose democracy worked. How would that affect life beyond Iraq? What would it do to the Middle East and Muslim society generally? Would its influence be salubrious?”
The first group of questions Bush answered poorly. Most of us did. Most of us had no idea how horrible the occupation would be. The commander-in-chief is the proper target of blame, but his naïveté reflected a much wider American naïveté. This naïveté was, I think, a result of our blessedness. If we weren’t so very fortunate, if we too had a history of Balkanization and tribalism, we might better have anticipated the Iraqi horror show.
But the show now has a chance of ending other than horribly, and for this Bush deserves credit. The surge ought to have happened earlier, but history might praise him for correcting his error more than damn him for not correcting it faster. A hundred years from now, the period between the Golden Mosque bombing and successful implementation of the surge might look like Lincoln’s shuffling through generals–if Iraq succeeds.
Will Iraq succeed? Don’t be naïve, but don’t be dogmatically skeptical. Your view is blocked, and you are engaged in psychological guesswork. It’s possible hell will break loose when American troops go home, but this assumes there has been no change of attitude on the part of Iraqis since the worst days of the insurgency. Hell can be instructive.
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Bush’s answers to the second group of psychological questions–“If Iraq works, what will that do beyond Iraq?”–have been denounced left and right, but especially right. The Right’s critique reduces to the idea that culture matters: “A democracy is only as good as the society in which you find it”; “You give them democracy and they elect Hamas”; etc.
That is true but incomplete. The Bush administration’s rhetoric was at times simplistic, but it approximated a defensible insight. The rhetoric was simplistic when it failed sufficiently to distinguish between democratic procedure and the substance of liberal-democratic society, the values and beliefs that the procedure expresses. What really needed to be said was that large numbers of Muslims think indemonstrable dogmas about matters of conscience should be enforced by the sword. A smaller number support the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians to advance religious ends. The interconnectedness of our societies affords ample opportunity for non-state actors to achieve that. We will not be safe until they are Enlightened.
In other words: Culture matters. This insight is what lies beneath the fear of WMD. Proliferation by stable, conventionally self-interested states–even states that are enemies of the United States–is much less dangerous than proliferation by unstable states whose leaders have sympathy for or dealings with the Islamic terror groups in their midst. Hussein himself lacked the religio-ideological dimension of e.g. the Iranian mullahs, but had had a long history of such dealings (which is why “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11” misses the point). To the extent that the Iraq War was a super-aggressive counterproliferation policy, such aggression seemed necessary only because of the Middle East’s cultural psychoses.
Critics of Bush’s “democracy agenda” tend to make a caricature of it. They speak as though his idea had been to socially engineer the Middle East; they accuse him of forgetting that culture does not change in mass epiphany. This is not a fair interpretation. I take Bush’s idea to be: Open societies tend to liberalize themselves. The more open a society, the more efficiently it distributes information and resources. Culturally and intellectually, the result is cross-pollination, the spread of good ideas and the correction of bad ones. Economically, the result is greater wealth more evenly distributed. These things in turn create pressures toward further opening.
In other words, the procedures of democratic governance and market economics establish a feedback mechanism that conduces to the substance of liberalism. This is the best case for trying to set up a new kind of government in Iraq. You can’t force liberalization, but you can remove obstacles to it and cross your fingers. Bush saw that the Middle East contained only two models–the theocratic dictatorship and the secular-authoritarian dictatorship–and that both were obstacles. He wanted to create an alternative. He was insufficiently thoughtful about how hard that would be, but, I suspect, right to think that if the alternative stuck it would succeed, and that its success would be imitated–not because “eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and soul” in some abstract sense, but because human beings value such things as stability and prosperity and a low probability of being murdered, and seek arrangements that deliver those goods.
Bush’s wager was based on a long-range, detail-poor projection, but the projection was an extrapolation of the 20th century’s trend line. We have seen the feedback mechanism transform societies that lacked some or many of democracy’s historical and intellectual antecedents in the West, and we are watching it transform at least one country riven by awful sectarian divides: India, which is lifting itself out of the Third World toward power coupled with decency. The Middle East is savage by comparison, but in Iraq we have a country with a genuine though weak sense of national identity alongside the factionalism; with great potential to create wealth; and with a dominant faction whose leader (Ayatollah Sistani) is comparatively secularist and moderate, and rejects the two failed models.
In any case, you assess risk relative to reward. The hope that the Iraq War will be transformational is a little like the hope of making a gutshot straight draw when there’s a huge pile of chips on the table: It’s a long shot, but if it happens you’re likely to win, and the reward will be big. And you are of course taking stock of all possible outcomes. By itself, expectation of a straight will often be a poor reason to make a bet, but it must be added to the scales of probabilistic judgment.
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I can’t offer an unqualified defense of Bush’s actions, but I will say that they were bold. Another possible word is “hubristic.” This descriptive choice often characterizes the actions of great poker players and great leaders. They take great risks in pursuit of great rewards, and to a significant degree are at fortune’s mercy. It can take a lot of history to decide which word is apposite.
Evaluating the war relative to a single justification–existing WMD stockpiles, nuclear-weapons program, state support of terrorism, democracy promotion–from a retrospective point of view that locks the present facts in place is like judging a Texas Hold ’Em player during the middle of a hand based on the way he bet before the flop while assuming that he is going for only one hand and happens to be omniscient.
The Iraq War was always supposed to advance two broad purposes, counterproliferation and political/cultural reform. The extent to which it advanced each purpose was always going to depend on many things, many of which are still up in the air.
I supported the war because the first purpose seemed, on the basis of the intelligence story about WMD, to be a sufficient justification in its own right. The majority of Americans thought so, and most of our representatives (including a majority of Democratic senators, though not of House members) ratified that view with their votes. We have learned to be more skeptical, to set a higher evidentiary threshold. But it would be a false lesson to conclude that the threat of WMD-meets-dysfunctional-state-meets-terrorist has gone away, or will never compel war.
The second purpose I regarded as a side benefit–something good that might come of what we had to do anyway. My naïveté about the first group of psychological questions made it easy to take this view.
It also prevented my grappling with the war as ethical dilemma, because I supposed the war would give Iraqis a brighter future at no great cost to them. There are such wars. Our intervention in the Balkans, which toppled a tyrant and stopped a genocide, is one example.
After the WMD story turned out to be wrong, as Iraq plunged into the abyss, it seemed I was watching a literal tragedy, complete with (retrospective) dramatic irony and a flawed hero. Saddam’s bluff was the irony. The flaw was excessive optimism. Bush underestimated man’s depravity. He lacked understanding of the benighted peoples he wished to liberate. He simply had no idea how hard it would be.
As the tragedy played out, we might have asked whether its ending could be rewritten–because you keep playing as long as you think you can win. That is an especially important principle in war, where there can be no return to the status quo ante and defeat does not cease to be that for having begun with error. Once we were at war, the range of possible outcomes had to be broadened, to include expanded Iranian power, the conversion of Iraq’s Sunni provinces into strongholds of al-Qaeda, generally diminished American prestige and influence, and a nation’s unspeakable suffering. But we were so convulsed with hatred for the protagonist that we grew callous to the tragedy. Then, quite against our will, the protagonist did that which may have rewritten the final act.
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Let me end with the wisest short comment about the Iraq War I’ve ever heard. It is also among the most modest (there is a connection, you see). The speaker was a Dutch lady whose name I can’t remember. It was the spring of 2004. I was in Chinese Turkestan. One night in Kashgar, I found myself at an expat café with this Dutch lady, a pair of Swiss girls, and a Swedish guy. Iraq came up. The Europeans said predictably European things–except the Dutch lady, who said this:
I understand why you’re fighting in Iraq. I understand because I watched what you did in the Balkans. There was a big problem there. For years we Europeans watched a genocide and did nothing. Then you Americans came and said, “Look. This is a big problem. Let us come fix it.” And you came. And you fixed it. [She pronounced these words with special emphasis.] And that’s what you’re trying to do in the Middle East. You saw a big problem and you said, “Let’s go fix it.” It’s very American. I’m European, and I’m skeptical. But you know what? Maybe it will work.
Maybe it will. There is more reason to think so today than there was when she spoke, and much more than there was two years ago. And if it does, there will come a time when we are grateful that, as the world prepared to ratify a tragedy, its flawed hero did not fold.
– Jason Lee Steorts is the managing editor of National Review.