Note to opponents of the war

Want to know why people won't come out and say they were wrong? This is why. If you are obnoxious to people who admit you were right, you guarantee that doing so is one mistake they will never make again.

Update To everyone who asked "Why would the behavior of the people you're arguing with matter?" I can only respond: so what have you learned during your visit to our planet?

I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me. But surely you have noticed that America has now hardened into two opposing camps who are often less interested in getting the right answer than in sticking it to the people on the other side? Both sides are guilty of this, and I wish it would stop, because this isn't improving matters in Iraq. Indeed, if you want us to stay there for another hundred years or so, the best way to do it is to completely alienate the moderates.

I am not immune to the charms of unleashing your fiery sense of righteousness upon the sinners of the world, but I try to limit my outbursts to largely lost causes. If I were that sure that I was a foreign policy genius, I would probably try to avoid doing things that manufacture more McCain voters.

Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be. And every word that you type mocking the repentant supporters of the war will, I guarantee, be hauled up and thrown in your face. It is best not to fling calumny about other peoples' decisions unless you are very confident that you will be able to bat a thousand for the next forty years or so.

Comments

I just clicked through and saw the title of the post. I am about to go back and read the post and the comments, but I have to note that if you intend a sincere mea culpa, the weasel form "Mistakes Were Made" is a poor start.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 11:02 AM

Shorter Megan: You may have been right, but you are still DIRTY FUCKING HIPPIES!

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | March 25, 2008 11:02 AM

That doesn't say particularly good things about you, though, does it Megan? If you are interested in pursuing the truth, rather than self-aggrandizing, why do you care how people react to your admission of failure? If your point is to actually interrogate your own bad assumptions and mistakes, it shouldn't matter one iota. If your point though is to appear to be a deeply serious and self-critical thinker-- if your apology is just another opportunity to flaunt your own seriousness-- then, yeah, what other people say about it matters. So which are you really interested in?

I have little patience for people who pretend to be making a mea culpa and then become deeply offended when others actually hold them responsible for the mistakes they claim they are admitting.

Posted by Freddie | March 25, 2008 11:03 AM

Slightly longer Megan: Hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, US's reputation: Irrelevant. All that matters are my feelings!

Posted by Gore/Edwards 08 | March 25, 2008 11:06 AM

Freddie, I'm not going to change my mind about what happened because other people act like jerks. But one of the reasons that the debate in this country isn't moving is that we've turned into two hardened camps who are arguing more about how much we hate each other, than about the war.

Nor do I think you can argue that the people in the comments are making incisive contributions, or holding me accountable. Their entire response is: "I hate you" and "You're a moron".

Now, I am well in touch with my faults, but a low IQ is not among them. The tendency of human beings to believe that correct decisions validate their brilliance while incorrect ones must be due to some malign and unforeseeable outside influence is on full display among the anti-war side. No one is as smart as they now think they are.

I am more than willing to concede that they were right, and that I made clear decision-making errors. They want me to concede that they must therefore be right about everything. As a graduate student in science, I'm sure you know exactly how . . . what's the word I'm looking for? . . . yes, moronic that kind of cognitive belief is. The guys at Bear Stears were all right up until the point where they weren't. Past performance no guarantee of future results. What matters is having a good process, not a good person, or even a good outcome. You can get the right answer by a stupid method, and vice versa.

I got the wrong answer by a stupid method. But the world isn't going to get better if people who got the right answer decide that they are therefore incapable of making major mistakes. The people who conceded at Munich learned the lessons of World War I, and the people who fought Vietnam learned the lessons of Munich.

Posted by Megan McArdle | March 25, 2008 11:14 AM

And now I've read the post and the comments. Making jokes about France while discussing uncounted unnecessary deaths does not lend credibility to you.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 11:14 AM

Jesus Christ, she had an opinion. She was not in a position of power nor did she vote on the issue personally.

I'm not sure how her culpability is any lesser or greater than any of the critics at the time or any of these yahoos who are sanctimously shocked and appalled to hear any joke ever made about anything remotely related.

I'd like to her from all these people how Megan is actually at fault for the Iraq war in any sense greater than "she help shaped public opinion via this blog." The amount of vitriol displayed here is just shameless.

But if everyone wants to make sure Megan remembers that they're smarter, cleverer and morally superior to her, I guess this all makes sense...

Posted by Glorious | March 25, 2008 11:16 AM

Have you read Jim Henley's post? Was that inappropriate? Moreover, why the heck are antiwar people getting mad at me for poking fun at the war supporters?

Posted by Megan McArdle | March 25, 2008 11:19 AM

"Now, I am well in touch with my faults, but a low IQ is not among them. "

You can uncheck humility too.

Posted by duh | March 25, 2008 11:24 AM

"Want to know why people won't come out and say they were wrong?"

Um, 'cause they're weak of character? Or too weak of mind to know they were wrong?

Here's kind of the opposite take:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/25/war_opponents/index.html

See, a lot of us who were right about the war still get no respect from the people with the megaphones. And we'd really really really not see another disastrous, trumped up, unnecessary to say the least invasion happen again. And I'm not just talking about the true libertarians here.

Posted by ed | March 25, 2008 11:27 AM

Maybe I am just becoming calmer in my mid-40's, but I have a hard time getting worked up about the original post. Strike that, I find it impossible to get worked up about it because I admire it.

The art of correcting oneself has been lost of late, a victim of a political culture (driven by the internet) of declaring the stupidity of those who disagree with them.

Call it Kevin's Corollary to Godwin's Law:

A necessary condition to a thread degenerating to someone being called a Nazi is to first call them an idiot.

Heaven forfend that someone admit error and by doing so open themselves to the charge of being a flip-flopper. It must be so comforting to those who criticize to have the comfort of hindsight. It's easy to look at the broken window, see the kid on the sidewalk and say "I knew that was going to happen" and quite another to look through your unbroken window, see the kid and say "That kid with the baseball is about to break my window".

Posted by Kevin Stevens | March 25, 2008 11:30 AM

Megan,

A word of advice. Obnoxious people are best ignored. By complaining about their obnoxiousness, you are giving them exactly what they desire. Leave their immature comments unanswered, and their comments themselves will stand to discredit their characters.

Posted by Yancey Ward | March 25, 2008 11:31 AM

And now I've read down to yesterday's post "The Art of Explanation": that there was no way to tell ahead of time that things would go badly, so we had to try things out and see. Now that we know, the people to listen to are the ones who underwent this learning experience, not the ones who are prevented from having learned anything by having been right all along.

feh

For those taking book recommendations, I suggest Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly". It looks at various foolish decisions governments have made over the centuries. She imposes fairly strict criteria, including that the folly of the decision must have been accurately foreseen. The last chapter is on Vietnam. We need an updated edition.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 11:37 AM

Megan, do you still stand by your 2007 comments about how you were right to be wrong in 2002 while others were wrong to be right in 2002?

Posted by thoreau | March 25, 2008 11:37 AM

This has been the most successful war and reconstuction ever. And it has made the world a safer place and a nuclear exchange less likely. That is why W hasn't been constrained or impeached and convicted. See the ending of the Mission Earth Series by L. Ron Hubbard to understand why so many are emotionally over the top.

Posted by Huggy | March 25, 2008 11:41 AM

I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.

I thought you'd read Jim Henley's blog post.

Posted by thoreau | March 25, 2008 11:41 AM

"I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me."

*splorf*

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 11:41 AM

Does your blog utility show you the poster IP address? It's hard to believe there are that many assholes reading your blog. Perhaps it's one or two trolls with a vendetta?

Many people keep returning to your blog for your thoughtful, analytical process. Don't let the bad apples get to you.

Posted by solarlux | March 25, 2008 11:42 AM

"Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be. "

I think your ideas are much more dangerous than one botched war in Mesopotamia. You were just warming up. The worst is yet to come.

Posted by Jolly Inquisition | March 25, 2008 11:50 AM

Sigh. Thoreau, I never said that. What I said is that when I look back at the decision I made then, it's not clear to me how I could know that Saddam didn't have WMD. That having been my primary concern.

If you think--as I think is fairly indisputable--that the antiwar side would now be in the despised minority had Saddam had a nuke program, then it is worth considering that unless it was actually predictible, in 2002, that Saddam did not have a nuclear program, there existed in 2003 an alternate future in which you would now be enduring exactly the same self-righteous "told you so's" that you are currently heaping on those of us who supported the war. We would be 100% certain that it was obvious we were right. But since we know for a fact that his behavior could be consistent with *not* having a nuclear program, we know that this would have been gross overconfidence. I ask you to consider the fact that if there was a nonzero chance that he had a nuclear program, then you are overconfident in your abilities to predict the future. Guessing on a random outcome will produce a correct result 50% of the time; if you only do it one time, people who guess right are prone to think that they are geniuses.

I'm not saying that this was a random game. The antiwar side was clearly right about many things. But many of the other metrics upon which they based their arguments did not come to pass, and have dropped out of their discourse. I think the antiwar side has become grossly overconfident in their ability to correctly predict foreign policy outcomes, and I think that this is just as dangerous as our overconfidence would be in the same position.

Posted by Megan McArdle | March 25, 2008 11:51 AM

"Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be."

I don't know anyone who claims to have opposed the war because of his huge brain providing deep insights. The vast majority of war opponents, including me, hold that it was blatantly obvious that this was a bad idea: that the justifications were shakey and a disasterous outcome far likelier than not.

When former war supporters defend their earlier support on the grounds that they were taken in by Jedi mind shit, we remember Jabba the Hutt's opinion on the subject.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 11:54 AM

Overall, it doesn't matter to me whether Megan was right or wrong about Iraq. She wasn't in charge of sending us to war. She may have been a cheerleader for a group of people that in retrospect to her (and at the time to me) did not deserve it, but that doesn't make her morally inferior or any such judgement on her character.

All it does is mean that she was a mistaken supporter of a project that has ended up causing a catastrophic loss of life.

What would bother me more than anyone being "I told you so!" about being wrong, would be how you could come to trust anyone to engage in such a project--especially one involving war and nation building and such things--that had the clear risk of going so horribly wrong.

That is the question I have.. and it's one that I had from the beginning. I didn't question the desire of people to want to do something "right," but I never understood how they could look at Bush and crew and think that they were the ones capable of doing it. What in Bush's history made them think he was, at all, competent... or that he could be trusted?

Posted by Why so Serious? | March 25, 2008 11:57 AM

The 27 million people who live in Iraq now have a representative government and live in a society which is getting more safe by the month.

Most of 'mistakes' you point out where simply unknowable at the time of invasion. Even the people screaming 'I was right! i was right!' could not have know how things would turn out. Did they not also predict the surge would be a failure? They were wrong in that, where they not?

We will never know what might have happened if we did not invade, but it is reasonable to say that it is highly unlikely (to say the least) that Saddam would be gone and Iraq would be a republic which has held multiple free and fair elections.

I think the price paid had been worth it. Granted, I did not have to live in Iraq through the worst of times. But knowing myself like I do I know I would rather live in a dangerous country with a bright future than live under a dictator's heel.

The one reason only I would not support a similar action in the future is because the American people are clearly not willing to pay the costs associated. If it were up to them we would have left Iraq when things looked worst, right before they started to improve. Which in my mind would have been the worst of all possible outcomes.

Posted by semm | March 25, 2008 11:57 AM

Ah, the "both sides are guilty" cop-out! Last refuge of the truly wrong.

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | March 25, 2008 11:57 AM

I didn't say they'd only been made by me; I said that so far, my critics haven't come up with anything I haven't said to myself, many times.

Posted by Megan McArdle | March 25, 2008 11:57 AM

I think taking a ribbing for finally barely admitting you might have gotten one or two things sort of slightly a little incorrect but were still really on the right side of things overall, is more than justified by the outrageous slanders which rained down on opponents of the war at the outset of the invasion. It is less important that you won't admit you were wrong in the future than it is imperative that a real debate about foreign policy occur when decisions are being made without one side being accused of treason for disagreeing with the president. That is the object lesson here.

Posted by Diggity Jim | March 25, 2008 11:57 AM

Exactly, Richard. You didn't have to be a genius to see the errors in 2002, you just had to pay attention and not be completely stupid.

Posted by thoreau | March 25, 2008 11:58 AM

Megan, part of what's going on here has to do with the "dirty hippies" issue that has been raised in your comments section, by Atrios, and by many others. Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning -- and for anti-60s-aesthetic reasons, especially those of us who marched against it -- were insulted, dismissed, laughed at, accused of treason, and on and on, right up through about mid 2006, when all the admissions of wrongness from war supporters started. We've heard a lot about errors in judgment, and your list is as good as any, but I think what many of us want is an apology to us personally. I didn't read you back in 2003 so I don't know if you were insulting hippies, but I think that's the one element that's been missing from, for example, Andrew Sullivan's many detailed posts on how he go this wrong. We "hippies" want former war supporters, especially our fellow liberals, to get get down on their knees an apologize for spitting on us and for dismissing the anti-war stance out of hand. Maybe it shouldn't be personal, but it is. Then, far more important: we want a real seat at the table. As many others have pointed out, it's all well and good that so many war supporters have admitted they were wrong, but we still see very few war opponents on the TV.

In short, we war opponents still have a right to be pissed.

Posted by J-Ron | March 25, 2008 11:59 AM

Hubris?

I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.

OK, so only you are capable of interesting criticism of yourself.

But wait..

Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be.

WTF Meghan? You just explained that only you the only smart one here right? So surely you mean "no one but me is as smart as war opponents think they are".

So lets sum up this diatribe.

Meghan was wrong on Iraq, but only she is smart enough to point out her wrongness.

And unless you can guarantee that you will never be wrong on any subject for the next forty years, you have no business pointing out that:

A: Meghan was wrong.

B: It took Meghan a hell of a wrong time to understand and admit she was wrong.

C: Even though Meghan was wrong, she's still the smartest person in the room and her past mistakes are no indication of her wrongness.

Or something like that I guess.

I should rethink my title.

How about Forrest Gump Hubris

Posted by Davebo | March 25, 2008 12:00 PM

From a pragmatic point of view, it is more important to discuss what you learned from this venture than to admit that you made an error in judgement. That is what was really wrong with the previous post on this subject, that you didn't really want to learn why you were wrong whereas others were right.

Still, I won't hammer you on this because there are still so many neocons trolling here repeating the Bush line who don't even see anything wrong, let alone realize why.

Posted by freddiemac | March 25, 2008 12:03 PM

Well, I can hardly apologize for the dirty hippy calumny, because in 2003, I was saying that both sides should be civil to each other, rather than accusing the others of being venal morons. On that, I haven't changed my mind and that's because I was right.

Posted by Megan McArdle | March 25, 2008 12:06 PM

"Well, I can hardly apologize for the dirty hippy calumny, because in 2003, I was saying that both sides should be civil to each other, rather than accusing the others of being venal morons."

Remember your joke about clubbing war protesters with two-by-fours? That's civility.

Posted by Blake | March 25, 2008 12:15 PM

Well, Megan, I'm glad you've come into the fold. As a brief exercise I'll post an abbreviated score card of my reasons for opposing the war.

1. Invading is the best way to assure Saddam uses WMD or gives them to terrorists. I was wrong on that one, since he had no WMD.

2. The Kurds will want their own state and Turkey will be pissed. It looks like I was right on that one, though it's taken a long time to develop and hasn't been as dire as I would have expected.

3. Saddam is a secular thug, and he has no connections with Islamist terrorists; the Islamists have been operating in areas of the country he has little control over. Seems like I was basically right.

4. Urban warfare is no picnic, and Saddam's forces will be able to inflict more casualties than we're expecting. A mixed bag here. It's not the Iraqi army that caused the trouble, and the violence started later than I was expecting. Also I was probably expecting more soldier casualties on our side, but I forgot to factor in that unlike Vietnam, these guys were trained professionals, not conscripts. (Also there were no WMD, which factored into my thinking on casualties.)

5. Iraq is majority Shia, and those guys are crazier Islamists than Sunnis. Do we want to hand Iraq over to them? Looks like I was wrong about the "crazier" part. "Just as crazy" seems more accurate.

6. I don't trust the people responsible for the Post Office and the DMV to build nations. This was probably my best call. (And note that it holds whether Bush, Gore or Saint Peter is in the White House.)

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 12:16 PM

I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.

Megan, there cerrtainly have been some dumb criticisms made. Still, if you really believe this, I think it's more self-revelatory than a comment on the replies.

Posted by Charlie (Colorado) | March 25, 2008 12:21 PM

The people who conceded at Munich learned the lessons of World War I, and the people who fought Vietnam learned the lessons of Munich.

Nice sound bite, Megan, but what on earth does it mean? On the first part, are you really suggesting that Baldwin and Chamberlain had a better understanding of WWI and its ill effects than Churchill did? Surely you jest!

Same with the Vietnam bit: all the temporizing, all the nuanced "sending of signals" and the like, sounds a lot more like the anti-war crowd of the 30's than it does like the "unconditional surrender" that ended up being official Allied policy.

Posted by Kirk Parker | March 25, 2008 12:26 PM

Still, I won't hammer you on this because there are still so many neocons trolling here repeating the Bush line who don't even see anything wrong, let alone realize why.

freddiemac, if they're anything like me, we'll shut up after a while. If you're not having a conversation, one saves one's energy. Your comment does sound like the conversation we're supposed to have about race though which should go, 'You're wrong, wrong, wrong. I was right, right, right, moral, and you're an evil idiot. Shut up, I didn't ask you to agree yet.' It's a lot like listening to what I believe at the Catholic Church but without the soaring brilliance.

Posted by Michael Brophy | March 25, 2008 12:32 PM

"I was probably expecting more soldier casualties on our side, but I forgot to factor in that unlike Vietnam, these guys were trained professionals, not conscripts. (Also there were no WMD, which factored into my thinking on casualties.)"

Another factor is that body armor technology has vastly improved since Vietnam. This lowers the overall casualty rate, and the ratio of dead to injured.

Posted by Richard Hershberger | March 25, 2008 12:32 PM

People who opposed the war in 2002 and 2003 were not just accused of being venal morons -- they were accused of being un-American, traitorous, terrorist-sympathizers. And as Glenn Greenwald has noted (see Ed's post above), people who opposed the war are still marginalized in the debates about current Iraq policy by members of the media who were wrong about the war but still label the opponents as "unserious." So it shouldn't be a surprise that many opponents were, and still are, incensed by the arrogance of the war's proponents and enablers. This isn't a grievance about past behavior -- it's a current grievance. Many of the "apologies" from war's former supporters sound a lot like "You were right and I was wrong; now shut up and go away and let the grown-ups (including me) decide how to sort out this mess."

Perhaps it is unfair, dear Megan, to lump you in with that crowd -- but if it is, I don't think you've made the sale.

Posted by Jorge | March 25, 2008 12:33 PM

What I would like is for someone who voted for Bush to come out and say "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___". That's someone I want to hear from because their reasons are probably legitimate.

If you didn't vote for Bush and didn't support the war, there's nothing more you can add. You didn't support the war BECAUSE Bush supported it, and whatever justifications you had (or think you had) were simply invented to ease your opposition to Bush. Stop pretending you were so prescient - you're like the joke about the economist who has predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions. If you oppose everything someone does, unless that person happens to be infalible, you'll be right at some point. It doesn't mean we should listen to you the next time or that you have any particular insight into how to not f*** up.

Posted by Josh | March 25, 2008 12:34 PM

Personally, I'm quite glad the war opponents are still pissed. Anything to bring their blood pressure up. That alone is reason enough to vote for McCain but fortunately I won't have to -- he'll certainly take Texas without my help.

Posted by ...Max... | March 25, 2008 12:46 PM

I know, it's been harped on above, but it has to be quoted again:

"I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me."

MUAHGAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHA

Posted by NutellaonToast | March 25, 2008 12:47 PM

part of what's going on here has to do with the "dirty hippies" issue that has been raised in your comments section, by Atrios, and by many others. Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning -- and for anti-60s-aesthetic reasons, especially those of us who marched against it -- were insulted, dismissed, laughed at, accused of treason, and on and on, right up through about mid 2006

Well, sure -- stopped clocks are rarely regarded for their prophetic abilities, even when they are kept around for sentimental reasons.

The simple fact is, a very large chunk of the Day One antiwar group never made any original or prudent insights from which they can claim to have "been right" in any meaningful sense of the word. They simply opposed the war from nostalgic force of habit and never had a good answer to the historical context that had been building up for at least thirty years. Then they repeated the same canards over and over, and now they want credit that some of them can be spun as accurate?

This is wholly uncovincing to those of us who have an attention span longer than five years, but that seems to be a rather small minority of the American public these days.

Posted by anony_mouse_ | March 25, 2008 12:48 PM

Most of 'mistakes' you point out where simply unknowable at the time of invasion. Even the people screaming 'I was right! i was right!' could not have know how things would turn out.

Nonsense, and a deeply pernicious argument as well. We had many respected experts at the time articulate many good, well evidenced reasons that the war was a bad idea. To the best of our ability outside of actually invading, we knew there were no WMDs (and so did the Bush Administration, with its tacit admission of such by not bothering to secure any weapons sites). No one could know how it would turn out, but we had lots of reasons to predict that it would go exactly as it did, and lots of respectable figures made that prediction.

This is what's so frustrating for those who were right in the first place: now that the mea culpas are plentiful, there's still no admission that they were right, for the right reasons. The mea culpas all have a bitter flavour of acknowledging that some were right because a stopped watch is right twice a day. "You were right, and I was wrong, but that still doesn't mean I should hear you out and consider what you say."

Did they not also predict the surge would be a failure? They were wrong in that, where they not?

No, they were right: The surge is failing. The political reconciliation that was the whole purpose of the surge has not happened, and now the ability to sustain the surge of troops is ending. I think it unlikely that a miracle coming together will occur between now and July, but I could be wrong--stopped watches usually are.

And just this morning come news stories that the Mahdi Army are in direct conflict with Iraqi government forces, having called for 'civil revolt'. 22 are dead as of noon EST.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 12:48 PM

AMW:

"Invading is the best way to assure Saddam uses WMD or gives them to terrorists."

Yeah, this is the one that I called in the opposite direction. I was thinking that as time went on the WMD question would get worse not better (and I was thinking nukes, to be honest, which can't usually be made in really large numbers fast by groups still learning).

Do I consider the other reasons good -- yes. But I weighed them against nukes and decided that invasion was a difficult but rational decision.

That a man who had actually USED WMDs against internal opponents (nerve gas) actually had none of any kind was a complete shock. I really had expected regulators (weapons inspectors) to be less effective.

But I was wrong, I knew I was wrong shortly after the invasion and still don't have a good idea how to fix things.

Maybe that would be a good way forward: who has an idea about what to do now that Humptey Dumptey has fallen off of the wall??

Posted by JD | March 25, 2008 12:48 PM

The problem as I see it, and Megan touched on it, is the adamant refusal of the DFH crowd to accept anything other than total unconditional surrender. Folks, that's not going to happen. People who supported the war may eventually admit they were wrong; but despite your fondest wishes that they would then go away and leave the policy discussions to those who were right about Iraq, they are still citizens and still are entitled to give their opinions. They may even be right on something other than the desirability of invading Iraq. These are very intelligent people who have studied the world for a long time; go ahead and lambaste them when they get it wrong, but I think you need to stop short of demanding they cease being experts. (Not that this will ever happen either; it's human nature, but the attempt must be made regardless...)

Eliminationism (as described by Dave Neiwert) is ugly wherever it occurs, not just when practiced by people we don't agree with.

Posted by liberalrob | March 25, 2008 12:50 PM

Meagan, I know the tone of the people who were right about the war is sort of off putting, but you have to understand that in the comments to the posts where you try to seriously examine what you got wrong with your decision there are loads of people arguing that sadaam was going to attack america and that we did a good thing killing hundreds of thousands of people. It was kind of shocking, I expected your readers to be less crazy.

Posted by Michael Foody | March 25, 2008 12:51 PM

The simple fact is, a very large chunk of the Day One antiwar group never made any original or prudent insights from which they can claim to have "been right" in any meaningful sense of the word.

And a larger chunk did have prudent insights; they were right in the meaningful sense you identify. But they were lumped in with the dirty hippies reflexively in order to marginalize and dismiss them.

In all the admirable reflection of war supporters identifying how they were wrong, I've seen not one admission that amounts to "I should have listened to Scott Ritter and David Kay. I should have listened to Juan Cole and Fareed Zakharia." They all analyze their own mistakes without ever acknowledging that vast amount of actual expertise and evidence that they ignored.

"I trusted Bush too much" is one half the equation. The other half should be "I distrusted the anti-war crowd too much."

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 12:57 PM

But Megan, you’re being much too easy on yourself for two important reasons:

1) It wasn’t hard to get it right. Until Bush started warping reality and hyping the case, just about everybody other than extreme neocon hawks felt that attacking Iraq was stupid. So you fell for spin, and transparent spin at that. Those of us who didn’t fall for it watched in amazement as the country suddenly agreed that the sky was green and the grass was blue. It was clear to any rational observer that a) the case for Iraq having WMDs was tenuous at best, and b) even if Iraq did have them, it had not threatened us with them, and was not a clear and imminent threat under any reasonable assessment, and c) withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, where we had already bungled the hunt for UBL, in order to attack the non-threat of Iraq was strategic nonsense, and d) the so called Pottery Barn rule still applied. You say that everybody will make a policy mistake at some point in their lives, which is of course true. But this was not some close call, with little data. This was rather clear to anybody not subject to neocon spin. It made no sense. I could see that clearly. Why couldn’t you?

2) The consequences of getting it wrong are enormous. You’re assessing what you got wrong as if it were a bad choice on a wine pairing at a dinner party, rather than a matter of massive death and destruction. Getting this decision wrong has meant hundreds of thousands of dead men, women and children, including 4000 US troops, countless more wounded, millions of refugees, a weakened US security situation throughout the world, 3 trillion wasted dollars, etc. But now you complain that people are being rude, and feel people should be glad that you admitted that you were wrong. In fact, you should be grateful (astonished, even) that you have any career or audience at all after such an absurd and catastrophic failure of judgment.

After this catastrophe, if you can explain why anybody should value your judgment or listen to your opinions over, say, mine (a total amateur who got it exactly right), I’d like to hear it. And no, I’m not saying everybody should trust my judgment either. But then again, I wouldn’t presume to ask anybody to, as you do by writing this blog.

So no, people should not be rude to you. But they should also never again take you seriously. I certainly don’t.

Posted by Ely | March 25, 2008 12:59 PM

I have little patience for people who pretend to be making a mea culpa and then become deeply offended when others actually hold them responsible for the mistakes they claim they are admitting.

Freddie, being an asshole is not "holding someone responsible." It's just being an asshole.

For those taking book recommendations, I suggest Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly". It looks at various foolish decisions governments have made over the centuries. She imposes fairly strict criteria, including that the folly of the decision must have been accurately foreseen. The last chapter is on Vietnam. We need an updated edition.

Richard, the problem is that for any decision that gets made in life, there will be naysayers. And in a country with 300 million people, there will always be people saying, "That's a bad idea." That doesn't mean that the foolishness of any particular decision was foreseeable, just because someone said so. Stopped clocks are right twice a day.

Posted by David Nieporent | March 25, 2008 1:01 PM

Megan:

What you are have attempted to express is known in decision theory as the exploration vs. exploitation dilemma, exemplified in the two-armed bandit problem.

The two-armed bandit goes as followed: you are given a slot machine, and told that one arm pays off more frequently than the other. Pulling an arm comes with a cost, and the two arms do not need to cost the same amount. The question is, what is your best long-term strategy for minimizing your costs and maximizing your payoff? How do you decide which arm to pull?

Ideally, you'd discover the arm that has the best long-term payoff, and keep pulling that arm until it falls off. But any decision about which arm pays off the best is predicated on an estimate of the frequency with which it pays off, which in turn is predicated only on your knowledge of how well it has paid off in the past. Your knowledge (based on past performance) is therefore never sufficient to achieve absolute certainty.

After a sufficient amount of pulling both arms, you can get an estimate of the payoff frequencies. At any point in the future in which you need to decide which arm to pull, you can therefore choose to either exploit your existing knowledge base by pulling the arm you currently believe to be the best, or explore and potentially acquire new knowledge by pulling the other arm.

The optimal strategy depends, of course, on the relative frequencies and costs. But here's a clue: if it costs 4,000 American lives, 200,000 Iraqi lives, $3,000,000,000,000, and our standing in the world to pull one arm to see if the DFH were wrong:

Don't fucking do it.

Posted by John Bates | March 25, 2008 1:06 PM

squeak:

The simple fact is, a very large chunk of the Day One antiwar group never made any original or prudent insights from which they can claim to have "been right" in any meaningful sense of the word. They simply opposed the war from nostalgic force of habit and never had a good answer to the historical context that had been building up for at least thirty years.

I assume you lump in Brent Scowcroft as one of these "nostalgic" war-opposers?

You're right that some of the antiwar crowd was against the war because it was war. But there were also some very "serious" people who were opposed to the war, if not in principle then at least in the timing and process leading up to March 2003. The problem was that many more people who were accorded "serious" status were in favor of marching off the cliff immediately if not sooner; and some of those people happened to be in charge of the nation. To a degree, they still are.

Which leads me to Justin JJ:

This is what's so frustrating for those who were right in the first place: now that the mea culpas are plentiful, there's still no admission that they were right, for the right reasons. The mea culpas all have a bitter flavour of acknowledging that some were right because a stopped watch is right twice a day. "You were right, and I was wrong, but that still doesn't mean I should hear you out and consider what you say."

I see this complaint all over the Liberal/Progressive Web, and it pisses ME off. No, that's too strong; it SADDENS me. "I'm sorry, I was wrong" isn't good enough; the demand is that everyone who supported the war should put on sackcloth and sit in ashes for 40 years, and leave the running of the country (and the world) to those who were right. I have to ask, when has that EVER happened? What leads you to believe that it will happen this time? Given that it manifestly will NOT happen, why are you wasting time (and as Megan illustrated, wasting an opportunity to convert people who disagreed with you) insisting on it? Take the apology for what it is, and build a bridge to the other side.

Let the admission that they were wrong on Iraq be a lever to getting them to admit they might be wrong on other things. Don't demand they cease participation in the discussion.

Posted by liberalrob | March 25, 2008 1:10 PM

Richard, the problem is that for any decision that gets made in life, there will be naysayers. And in a country with 300 million people, there will always be people saying, "That's a bad idea." That doesn't mean that the foolishness of any particular decision was foreseeable, just because someone said so. Stopped clocks are right twice a day.

Exactly the point I identified above: The mea culpas ring a bit hollow because they're eternally paired with "stopped clock" crap.

The anti-war crowd was not a "stopped clock". It was full of experts, of knowledgeable people who repeatedly argued against the war, only to be dismissed as having Bush Derangement Syndrome.

This is why Megan is getting a rude reception from the anti-war crowd. Even now, even after being dragged by circumstances to admit that the war was wrong, they still won't admit that the anti-war crowd was right.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:11 PM

David, yes, being an asshole is, in fact, being an asshole. But by the same impeccable logic, being wrong is being wrong. So forget the stopped clock nonsense. There was more than enough information to know that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Those who were unable to interpret that information showed poor judgment on this critical decision. Those who were showed good judgment. It's quite simple. This idea that it was not "foreseeable" just because you couldn't foresee it is merely another example of the Bush administration's "nobody could have predicted" excuse. Plenty of people did predict. But that makes them stopped clocks, i guess, as opposed to merely being right.

Posted by Ely | March 25, 2008 1:13 PM

I see this complaint all over the Liberal/Progressive Web, and it pisses ME off. No, that's too strong; it SADDENS me. "I'm sorry, I was wrong" isn't good enough; the demand is that everyone who supported the war should put on sackcloth and sit in ashes for 40 years, and leave the running of the country (and the world) to those who were right.

I'm sorry that it saddens you, but how else should I push back against the "stopped clockers" who are still refusing to acknowledge any merit in the anti-war case? David Nieporent just used the phrase above to dismiss the anti-war crowd.

I've never seen anyone suggest that the pro-war crowd should go home, should absent themselves from public life entirely, should leave the hippies in charge. But the point remains that a mea culpa that fails to acknowledge that the anti-war crowd was fundamentally, meaningfully right; that they had real expertise and real input to make; that calling them traitors and unserious was a mistake (at best); a mea culpa that refuses that is only half done.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:19 PM

Megan,

On the one hand, you are right: highly emotional and personal attacks do not generally lead to productive outcomes. On the other hand, Iraq was no ordinary foreign policy decision, it was a radical overturning of nearly 100 years of American foreign policy principle and practice, and it was pursued by the administration in a way that was and is *intended* to make people react emotionally and personally. It's unrealistic to hope that most people will react dispassionately now, while we're still embroiled in the mess, to any analysis that carries a whiff of self-justification or implicit rationalization of further adventures in pre-emptive war.

I argued strongly against the war from the beginning. To me, you had to believe 3 things to justify the invasion:

1. Saddam had WMD.
2. Military intervention would make it less, rather than more, likely for those WMD to be used against us.
3. Assuming 1 and 2, the opportunity costs and blowback risks did not overwhelm the case for intervention.

I had no trouble believing 1, although the case for nukes was transparently flimsy, and I'd made far too many corporate PowerPoints to be impressed by Powell's presentation. On 2, I had strong reservations - I'd read far too much military history to believe that, in the chaos of war, we'd find all of those WMD needles in the haystack before they were snapped up by bad guys with far less disincentive to use them than Saddam. On 3, where do I start? Putting Iraq at the top of the priority list, at a time when Osama was still on the loose, numerous potential weapons of assymetrical warfare remained unprotected, Afghanistan was still unsecured, etc, etc, seemed crazy to me. And the possibilities of blowback: I remember reading in enraged astonishment Wolfowitz's "hard to believe" statement that we wouldn't need more troops for post-war security than were necessary to defeat Iraq's much-diminished military. Surely, he was smart enough, and well-read enough, to know how unhistorical his analysis was. Compounding
the possibility of blowback was the amateurish, sometimes hysterical, and highly political approach the administration took toward selling the war. Having basically called a large part of the American citizenry, and most of the rest of the world, naive or cowardly required putting up
a large portion of American credibility as collateral on an already risky bet.

When the war finally started, I remember being astonished that we were actually going to do it. I thought at the time, and still do, that it was analogous to what happened in the dot-com bubble: A large number of normally smart, responsible people had become convinced that one signal event changed all the rules, overturned all the lessons of history, and rendered invalid all conventional old-school criticism. If there is one meta-lesson we might all take away, it is that we have to put in place mechanisms for avoiding the same kind of group-think the next time we have such a signal event.

Posted by MahlerFreak | March 25, 2008 1:21 PM

By way of comparison, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole have both gone through this exercise of saying why they were wrong, and received much better responses because there wasn't the air of moral reservations, of only grudgingly admitting that "mistakes were made".

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:23 PM

So did Megan actually call any anti-war supporters traitors? Because I've seen people complain about that repeatedly as if Megan had something to do with it.

You want her to apologize for something she didn't do? You want a satisfaction she can't honestly provide.

Posted by Glorious | March 25, 2008 1:23 PM

I am deeply sorry, Megan, that you have to deal with asshats like most of the people commenting above.

(If it helps, I think you were less "wrong" than you do - and I put no onus on being wrong with the best information available at the time.)

Justin JJ: Remember "we shouldn't invade Iraq because Saddam will use his WMDs and kill lots of people and poison the Iraqi environment"?

I remember that one.

Were those the "experts" and "knowledgeable people"? Maybe, but they sure were wrong, weren't they?

Clock looks stopped to me.

John: "Our standing in the world"? Which "standing", expressed how? Our European Betters oppose the US when it suits them and support the US when it suits them, according to their perceived interests.

Please explain what this "standing" consists in, in your mind, and what good it does, contra those interests?

Is it the goodwill of random Canadians? The opinion of German newspapers? What is it, and what effects does it actually have?

Posted by Sigivald | March 25, 2008 1:25 PM

Justin JJ: Remember "we shouldn't invade Iraq because Saddam will use his WMDs and kill lots of people and poison the Iraqi environment"?

...

Clock looks stopped to me.

Remember Scott Ritter and David Kay, saying that were no WMDs, that the intelligence supporting the presence of WMDs was flat wrong on actually checking?

Remember Joe Wilson saying that the Niger Uranium connection was bogus?

Remember the very public media debunking of the Prague connection between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers?

Looks to me like the clock was running fine at the time.

Undoubtedly there are public statements by the anti-war crowd that were wrong in hindsight; also statements that were only accidentally correct.

There was also a vast amount of "serious" objections to the war that were justified at the time by the available information, and were correct. They were valid predictions that were borne out in fact. And they were ignored.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:34 PM

Ed and the "Megan is the Devil" crowd et al.,

Do none of you see no value in an honest and civil discussion about how intelligent people arrived at the wrong decision on Iraq? Or that it will help persuade people against supporting the next ill-advised war?

Apparently not. Perhaps it is more important to satisfy your adolescent urge to crow about how "right" you were and how evil Megan is. Well, bravo then. Terrific work. Yay you.

Meanwhile, you've made it more difficult to learn anything about why intelligent people chose to support the war and how you can persuade them next time.

Posted by Patrick McMenamin | March 25, 2008 1:35 PM

John Bates said: The optimal strategy depends, of course, on the relative frequencies and costs. But here's a clue: if it costs 4,000 American lives, 200,000 Iraqi lives, $3,000,000,000,000, and our standing in the world to pull one arm to see if the DFH were wrong:

Don't fucking do it.

Hindsight is always 20/20, John.

What if we pulled the arm and we found WMD and Iraq slipped into a comfortable democracy? Would it be worth it then?

How about if we pulled the arm, 1000 died in the invasion but the country was pacified and we no longer have troops there? Worth it then?

You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits. I don't think we even know the full extent of the benefits yet.

Posted by Kevin in MN | March 25, 2008 1:40 PM

What I would like is for someone who voted for Bush to come out and say "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___".

I already posted my "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___" above. I did not vote for Bush in either of the last two election cycles, but then again I didn't vote for anybody in the last two election cycles. I haven't voted since 1996.

But, I did support Bush over Gore in 2000, and if I voted, would have voted for him. I did not support Bush in 2004, and if I had voted, I would not have voted for him (though I probably wouldn't have voted for Kerry either).

If you didn't vote for Bush and didn't support the war, there's nothing more you can add. You didn't support the war BECAUSE Bush supported it, and whatever justifications you had (or think you had) were simply invented to ease your opposition to Bush.

For some people that's probably true. But for plenty of others who didn't vote for Bush I'm sure that's not the whole story. And dismissing people's opinions on the basis of their past votes like that is one reason you see all the vitriol from my fellow war opposers above.

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 1:45 PM

You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits. I don't think we even know the full extent of the benefits yet.

Or the costs.

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 1:46 PM

Whoa, wait a minute. Scott Ritter wasn't exactly credible because he left Iraq in 1998 swearing that it was working on WMDs and something needed to be done, and then, after not being there for 5 years, was in media swearing that Iraq didn't have WMDs and that nothing needed to be done.

That's not a convincing narrative.

David Kay investigated Iraq after the invasion, so I'm not sure of the relevance to pre-war decisions.

The meaning of Wilson's findings are debatable, but again, that was several months after the invasion.

Sure, the Prague connection was nonsense, but I don't recall the Bush Administration ever stating a definitive link between Iraq and 9/11 anyway.

So, JJ, I think your memory is more than a little faulty here. You want credit for anachronism, and you're angry that you're not getting it?

Posted by Glorious | March 25, 2008 1:47 PM

Do none of you see no value in an honest and civil discussion about how intelligent people arrived at the wrong decision on Iraq?

That honest discussion is being had now, in many places and by many people. Those who are getting a warm response are those whose mea culpas didn't start with the tepid "mistakes were made" formulation.

Megan's analysis is actually pretty good--forthcoming and relatively unflinching. A lot of the ire of the anti-war commenters here is directed at the pro-war commenters who still spout bullshit about stopped clocks.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:48 PM

You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits.

Sure you can; you just need an idea of the range of possible costs and benefits, and their respective probabilities. War opposers thought the probabilities for heavy costs to be high and the probabilities for large benefits to be low. War supporters thought the reverse. The dice came out more closely to the opposers' estimates than the supporters.

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 1:50 PM

Of course. You were right because you knew what David Kay and Joe Wilson would say months after the invasion

You complain about "stopped clocks" being bullshit, but yet a lot of your reasons didn't even exist before the invasion. The ones that did aren't that convincing and reasonable people can disagree.

That's why I don't understand the level of indignation. You're mad at Megan because other, unspecified, people called you cowards and traitors. You're angry because people wouldn't listen to evidence that didn't exist yet. Ok...

I can't get behind a demand for an apology that expects Megan to apologize for something she didn't do because she ignored things that didn't exist. Call me crazy.

Posted by Glorious | March 25, 2008 1:55 PM

Justin and Ely: I wasn't speaking specifically of Iraq, but of the more general point that any given act is "folly" because there existed people beforehand who said it was a bad idea.

But wrt Iraq, shouldn't we look at the whole track record of those who opposed action in Iraq, and not just that one decision? People who opposed action in Iraq tended to be people who reflexively oppose action everywhere. Not all of them, by any means, were/are pacifists; many were/are isolationists or realists. Many of them were wrong (at least in terms of practical considerations) on Bosnia. Some of the more extreme ones, on the left and right, were even wrong on Afghanistan. No, they weren't all stopped clock types. But many were, and those are the ones most vocally insulting people who were wrong on Iraq.

Posted by David Nieporent | March 25, 2008 1:55 PM

OK, I will admit that I was skeptical of the WMD claims and I STILL resorted to the "If we invade, that's the scenario where Saddam is most likely to use WMD" argument. I don't see it as a contradiction, but rather as a rational response to uncertainty. I didn't know for sure what sorts of weapons Saddam had or didn't have, but I saw basically 3 scenarios:

1) He doesn't have WMD. No threat to us. No need to invade.
2) He does have them, and we rely on deterrence. We know that he's able to stay alive and in power in a divided and unstable place, suggesting that he's rational. (In the sense of understanding where his self interests lie, not in the sense of fair or reasonable.) He's hence deterrable. Similar assessments applied to the Soviets (ostensibly ideological folks, in fact just power-hungry evil bastards).
3) He does have them, and we invade. In that scenario, he has nothing left to lose, and so he might as well use the WMD.

What I argued was a rational response to uncertainty, and one that would have had a much lower body count than what the hawks wrought.

To Megan: Yes, in this post you talk about what you learned. Great. However, in other posts you talk about how this war was basically an exercise in testing hypotheses. That suggests that you don't really perceive that this is about actions and consequences.

Posted by Thoreau | March 25, 2008 1:58 PM

So, JJ, I think your memory is more than a little faulty here. You want credit for anachronism, and you're angry that you're not getting it?

Probably my memory is faulty--it's been five years, and I'm not an encyclopedia of the anti-war case.

But then, I don't want credit for being right. I'm not looking for a personal apology, nor do I actually have a lot invested in helping the pro-war crowd dig itself out.

But if the point of these mea culpas is to have an honest discussion by the two sides of how we got to where we are, then part of that discussion is understanding why the anti-war crowd isn't always greeting these mea culpas like the return of the prodigal son.

There's a deep frustration in the anti-war community, especially those who were right at the beginning, about the extent to which they were dismissed and maligned throughout, at the same time as they watched a disastrous war unfold that they knew was wrong but couldn't stop. Even today, a lot of the mea culpas refuse to grant that there was any validity to the anti-war case--two different commenters here have called them "stopped clocks".

So if the responses to Megan's mea culpa are less than warm, it may not be right, but I think it's understandable. Moreso in the presence of pro-war commenters who still dismiss and malign.

Posted by Justin JJ | March 25, 2008 1:59 PM

"What if we pulled the arm and we found WMD and Iraq slipped into a comfortable democracy? Would it be worth it then?

How about if we pulled the arm, 1000 died in the invasion but the country was pacified and we no longer have troops there? Worth it then?"

Other questions to ponder:

What if weak-minded fools didn't get caught up shamefully transparent jingoistic fear-mongering to rah-rah an unnecessary invasion? (Say, has that ever happened before?)

What if The Bush Administration had heeded the infamous PDB from August 6, 2001?

What if the National Security Advisor in 2001 had had the slightest bit of qualified competence?

It seems to be increasingly difficult to change the past. One hopes we can learn from it.

Posted by ed | March 25, 2008 2:00 PM

In addition to what Nieporent was saying, many of those same people have constantly been predicting a disaster in Iraq far and beyond what actually occurred. From claims of a "quagmire" during the conventional invasion, to constant claims of imminent civil war for years now.

If you're right about one thing, does that excuse how you're wrong about everything else?

Posted by Glorious | March 25, 2008 2:01 PM

Thoreau,

I had the same reasoning, except I was quite sure he had WMD. Guess I didn't do a lot of research in that area, but I figured it didn't really matter. His (supposed) possession of them was a reason not to invade.

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 2:02 PM

Well, I guess I meet Josh's criterion- voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and thought both invasions were ill-conceived strategies.

Why?

(1) It is not the United States responsibility to build functioning republics in foreign lands. Iraq was stably governed by a thug for sure, but if the Iraqis wanted something else, then it was their responsibility to bring it about. This criticism also extends to Afghanistan.

(2) Unlike Megan, I did not forget how inept government is at doing pretty much anything.

(3) I thought Hussein may have some chemical weapons, but I did not believe them to be a threat that was dire enough to justify the costs and the risks the US was taking in invading, deposing the tyrant, and rebuilding Iraq.

(4) I did think casualties on the US side would be much greater by now than they have been. I got this one wrong by almost a magnitude.

(5) The Bush Administration clearly had no plan for what comes after Hussein. I predicted ethnic violence between the Sunnis and the Shia majority, and I got this one right. I still view the only workable solution now to be partition.

(6) I knew that if we went in, it would take at least a decade to make it work by the lowest standards of success. It was an easy call to say that Americans would not be that patient. I thought it better to not take on the responsibility at all if we would not be willing to last it out. I am guessing that I got this one correct as well, but the issue is still in doubt.

Posted by Yancey Ward | March 25, 2008 2:07 PM

Here's an idea. Next time we're in the run up to something controversial like the War, commentators should write down a simple list of reasons they support or oppose the action. That way everyone can go back and check to see where they were right and where they were wrong.

Almost everyone will be wrong about something. But people on one side of the argument will probably be right about more things than the people on the other side. I expect this would lead to less posturing on both sides. Those who were wrong about much would have difficulty equivocating to insist that they were in the right. Those who were right about much wouldn't be able to claim sanctimonious prescience ex post facto.

I think scientists to something like this. It's some sort of method or something . . .

Posted by AMW | March 25, 2008 2:09 PM

Hindsight is always 20/20, John. What if we pulled the arm and we found WMD and Iraq slipped into a comfortable democracy? Would it be worth it then?

Risk analysis is always based on subjective assignment of costs and likelihoods. For any decision, one examines as full a range of possible outcomes as can be predicted, assigns a utility to each outcome, and assesses the probability of that outcome.

So, yes, when we make a decision, we should take into account the