A Distinction With A Very Real Difference
I want to follow up on my previous post which elicited a considerable amount of intelligent criticism, some of which I responded to in the comments. But among the most important critiques was this one from commenter "aw, come on" and it deserves a bit more extended response (apologies for the length of this post):[Yglesias is] saying the chances of success were so remote that the risks weren't even close to being worth undertaking the effort.
You're saying the chances of success were zero, so that the risks weren't worth undertaking the effort.
(Putting the analogy criticism aside - which also strikes me as petty) your criticism is that he's not willing to say that the Iraq war was doomed to failure to an absolute certainty? That's what some people call a distinction without a difference between Matthew's outlook and my own.
As for whose judgment I'd trust more in the long run -- I'll always take the guy who's willing to recognize that there [are] no certainties in life.
The point is well taken because it goes to the heart of contemporary political/intellectual discourse. I'll try to explain why I drew such a seemingly fine distinction and why I think there is a major difference. I'll also address why I think "aw, come on" may wish to reconsider his opinion of whose judgment to trust.
Most folks are poorly equipped to assess risk and probability. Even highly experienced statistics professors often get confused about seemingly straightforward odds like those in coin tosses and the like. Nevertheless, all of us have share a very rough consensus about what terms like "risky," "very risky," and "extremely risky" mean.
Let's say, for example, that an operation to avert a life-threatening condition with about a 30% chance of failure leading to death is one we would call risky. An operation with approximately a 50% chance of failure most of us would call very risky and one with around an 80% chance of failure extremely risky. Sure, we can argue about the percentage of grades of riskiness forever, move them around by a factor of ten, and cleverly point to all sorts of contingencies that modulate our sense of difference between high risk and extremely high risk and when extremely high risks are justified.
But there are very few among us who would seriously argue that an operation with a 99.999999999999999999999999% chance of failure leading to death is, in any real-world sense, an extremely risky operation! We would call such an operation " impossible."
Any physician who called an operation with those kinds of odds merely "extremely risky" and left it at that is clearly guilty of grossly misstating the facts. I doubt any judge in a wrongful death suit would accept the defense that the patient and family were adequately informed of the risks prior to an operation so clearly doomed to fail in such circumstances (if I'm wrong, I'd love to see a link to the case.) I think calling such odds "extremely risky" is not exactly what Frankfurt means by bullshit but it sure smells very similar.
Unscrupulous people work this con all the time. Among the most cynical, of course, are the state lotteries which are nothing more than an unfair tax on the innumerate. Hey, y'never know! Well...actually, we do know. You can't win the state lottery. Sure, someone will win, but except in the most abstruse, arcane mathematical sense, you have no chance in hell of winning. If you truly understand the odds -and lottery designers are extremely clever at hiding the actual risks- then you know that betting "only" a dollar is a complete waste of your hard-earned cash. You might as well use that buck as toilet paper - at least it would be of some practical direct use to you.
And it was only in this highly technical, mathematical way that a "successful" invasion of Iraq was "extremely risky." In reality, it was impossible. But that's not how the liberal hawks understood it.
I suspect this is part of how they were snookered. Their first mistake was the fallacy of the appeal to authority. "Brilliant, thoughtful, geniuses" like Wolfowitz, who had enormous political power were telling us the Bush/Iraq War was extremely risky but "winnable." Could such brilliant, influential men be completely wrong? Let's take what these experts say seriously, despite our misgivings. Hey, y'never know!
The second mistake was assuming "extremely risky" meant "some slight chance it could possibly work." But it obviously couldn't, not in the real world. The third mistake was the slippery slope fallacy - an "extremely risky" venture is one that is often characterized, as Bush/Iraq was, as audacious and bold, or in Nicholas Lemann's fatuous description of PNAC's proposal from whence Bush/Iraq sprung, a "breathaking vision."
Well once you have a "breathtaking vision" coupled with "extreme risk," hoary American myths start to kick in. Americans, after all, are risk takers, we are a people of breathtaking vision. And here's a splendid chance to...do some real good for a change! Hey, y'never know! It could work.
Well many of us absolutely knew it couldn't. It wasn't wrong because the chances of success were slim, but because it was, by any rational standard, absolutely impossible. If in the real world an invasion of Iraq ever was "successful" (in terms of democratization and increasing regional stability), then everything we knew to be true about that real world would simply have to be wrong. It would mean not only that Bush and Rumsfeld were competent, but that imposing democracy by invasion works almost all the time (Carnegie Endowment calculated before the war at best a 25% success rate and those successes were in situations not comparable to Iraq), that atrocities like Abu Ghraib would be minimal, that an analysis of the possible reception of a US invasion that stemmed from an agency that can barely read Arabic was in fact precisely accurate, that the rest of the world would line up to cheer us on, if not publicly, at least privately; and -the least likely of all- the relatives of the victims of American war actions would welcome us with kisses and flowers.
By characterizing the chances as exceedingly slim, but real, an utterly stupid idea is given a weight it simply doesn't deserve. You can discuss how slim the possibilities are, after all, and hey! y'never know, do you? No, folks: You call ideas as bad as the invasion of Iraq exactly what they are: completely nuts. That, to use an overused word, accurately frames the discussion.
Had the mass public discourse been so framed, there would have been no Bush/Iraq War with all the attendant horrors. In fact, that is exactly how Josh Marshall and other ex-liberal hawks framed the debate over Social Security: Bush's plan is not risky, but impossible. Well, who knows? They're extremely risky but they could work, right? Actually, no they couldn't, except in some alternative universe.
That is why this is a distinction with a genuine difference. Matthew makes an elaborate philosophical argument about the morality of high risk taking, complete with intellectually daunting verbiage, the ex ante and the complex sentence structure. But whatever its merits, it's utterly irrelevant to Bush/Iraq. This is not a case where the morality of risk taking would ever apply because the Bush/Iraq War wasn't risky at all. It was impossible. The liberal hawks' failure to understand this (and, of course, the administration's, the media's and public's') is extremely distressing because the mistakes in reasoning are so fundamental, and so terribly naive.
As for trusting those who say there are no certainties in life, well it sure sounds like a reasonable idea, but only if you're dealing with reasonable people. Would you trust someone's judgment who said there's a slight but very real probability that there was a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet? Most of us wouldn't, but hey, y' never know, and a lot of people in the Heaven's Gate suicided so they could travel to that comet. Hey, y'never know, they may be right.
And that, my dear friend "aw, come on" is the problem. In listening to Wolfowitz and Perle, many of us knew immediately we were listening to the foreign policy equivalent of Do and Ti, the intellectual leaders of Heaven's Gate. True, uncertainties abound in life. But there are limits and the failure of Very Authoritative Experts to understand that the Bush/Iraq War was crazy from the get-go and immediately label it as mad and impossible is a failure of such immense stupidity, it will boggle the minds of historians for centuries.
After all, even Bush the Father was street enough to label the Perle gang as The Crazies.
(PS If you need links, lemme know. I assume everyone knows the references by now, but if you don't, just ask.
PPS I'm aware that "Aw, come on," like Matthew and the other war supporters, also finesses the real reasons the Bush/Iraq War was wrong, namely that it was immoral and illegal, flying in the face of thousands of years of common law. That it couldn't work in a very real sense is not the main issue. But that's another discussion (grin).)