Reality Bites
Following up on yesterday’s post, I want to clarify exactly what’s the important lesson to be learned about the Iraq situation and the capability of the Bush Administration to competently develop and run effective policies. Obviously, at this late date, the litany of blunders in Iraq is written in ink. It’s ultimately futile to look back at the record to see exactly how many times the President’s assurances have turned up rotten and how many neo-con predictions ran hard aground on unyielding reality, merely for the satisfaction of wagging a finger and saying “told you so.”
What is important to examine is, how did the process break? How did the truth get ignored in favor of dangerous fantasy, and how can we break that cycle?
First, when we talk about risk assessments and forecasting for something as complicated and important as a war, we’re not talking about the random musings of bloggers and pundits. You can go out on the Web and find all kinds of chatter in the months leading up to the war, pointing out the distinct possibilities of civil war, the dangers of rejecting international support for the occupation, the untrustworthiness of the Iraqi exile community that we were apparently going to rely on to govern post-Saddam Iraq, the problems of restarting the oil industry, and nearly everything else that’s gone wrong. Some of the people who were writing this were simply marshalling arguments to justify a pre-existing anti-war position. But others were looking carefully at facts and listening to convincing voices urging caution.
Remember, in the months before the war, the most credible critics were those within the government and within the Administration. OMB Director Larry Lindsay predicted the war would cost $200M (a conservative estimate in light of later developments, but considered such an outrageous statement at the time he made it that he was fired). General Eric Shinseki warned that it would take 200,000 troops to pacify the country (a forecast that also won him premature retirement). Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and perhaps Colin Powell himself disliked and distrusted Neocon poster-boy Ahmed Chalabi and distrusted pre-war intelligence estimates. Both they and their planning board that drew up extensive post-war strategies were ignored and marginalized. Former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter even dared to suggest that Saddam didn’t actually have WMDs.
It’s not enough to say that all of these people “turned out to be right.” It’s not like they were sitting in their offices with a Ouija Board and a crystal ball, making wild guesses that reflected their pessimistic anti-Americanism. There’s a discipline to building accurate forecasts from existing information (I speak from experience – this is what I do for a living). There are methods such as scenario planning to help policymakers understand the risk/reward logic of particular decisions, identify early indicators that might lead to certain outcomes, and highlight points of leverage in a dynamic situation.
Forecasting isn’t perfect, of course. There are always variables you can’t account for, outcomes you can’t predict. That’s why the one basic rule for successful planning is, don’t overweight your efforts toward one preferred scenario; try to plan a strategy that plays well across the most possible scenarios, including the more challenging ones.
Most observers could see in real time that these principles were completely disregarded in the run-up to the war. Bush and his inner circle had preemptively determined that the risks associated with Saddam having WMDs justified the even the known costs of a war and occupation. They preemptively dismissed the efficacy of arms inspections, the utility of international cooperation, the need to prepare the public for the realities of an occupation. They underestimated the cost and complexity of the occupation, they ignored well-founded concerns about the likelihood of religious strife, they overestimated the help that Iraqi exiles could provide in post-war administration, they miscalculated the reaction of the local population, and seemed to have no understanding of the importance of maintaining the existing physical and administrative infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Sadly, this is but a partial recounting of the errors of judgment made in the first 30 months of the war.
Now our government surely gets some things wrong. But, under normal conditions, it doesn’t get all these things wrong, or produce results so dramatically at odds with its intentions. It’s not enough to say this was a problem of planning, or that there was no way to know any of this stuff. There were plenty of ways to know, and the evidence indicates that many people in key positions understood the situation well enough to anticipate and develop a strategies against non-optimal outcomes. Almost everyone up to the highest levels was doing their best to give the President and his advisors a clear picture of how the war would play out. And comparing some of their estimates with later events, it turned out they did a pretty good job.
We also know that Bush and his inner circle not only rejected this advice, they marginalized, ridiculed, smeared and fired those inside and outside the government who tried to make it part of the public debate.
In other words, the problem was squarely one of executive leadership, not staff work. Bush chose to ignore the considered judgments of experienced professionals applying proven analytical methods against real information, in favor of a style of decision making that has consistently produced unimaginably bad outcomes every time he applies it. The President puts his faith in fanciful theories, which his supporters present as facts – often with such insistence that it’s hard for non-specialists to understand the difference.
We’re at the point now where many Americans are finally asking how many people have to die before the President recognizes the limitations of his faith-based decision-making process? How many more blunders and broken promises before the arrogance gives way to a bit of humility before the hard facts of the real world, and the genuine intellectual skills it takes to make sense of them?
People are finally starting to see the limitations of Bush as a leader – though it’s too late to do anything about that. But what really needs to be discredited is the whole process of ideology and delusional optimism substituting for the hard work of analysis and planning. We have good tools at our disposal to promote our interests, meet complex challenges, and plan ahead for ourselves and future generations. Here’s hoping our next President is someone who actually knows how to use them.
3:49:32 PM 
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