Asymmetrical Information

An excellent post. I agree it's too early to pop the champagne, but at the very least things are starting to look more promising. The dictatorships of the Arab world are starting to bend and make some token concessions to democratic ideals.

The real question is: what model will the region now follow? The Eastern European example where small concessions rapidly accelerated into something much bigger? Or the Chinese model where a few concessions and a military crackdown basically stopped the democracy movement cold? I guess we'll find out.

The conservative pundits may be too quick to claim leftists are on the wrong side of history -- but given they've had to sit through endless howls of "quagmire" and "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time", I suppose it's understandable.

I appreciate the hesitation and agree with the reasoning, however I don't agree that Egypt is being used to justify the Iraq war (maybe by some). I just can't help but be optimistic based on what has happened in the last two years, a mere blip in history. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, now Lebanon and it looks good in Palestine. Condi will be going there personally, as opposed to an envoy. My understanding is the Palestinian cabinet has been for the most part purged of Arafat cronies and is now stocked with people who have phd's from western universities.

All of these events are related, and have all happened in an extremely short period of time. I just saw someone on TV saying full democracy across the Middle East will take between 1/2 and a full generation, so there will be setbacks. Just visualizing the Middle East 20 years from now, (and other more free places around the world) with what we had 3 years ago is better than a dream. None of this would have happened without Iraq. Personally, I think our Prez and our soldiers deserve every bit of credit they get.

Journalists are always tempted to write history in real time, and it is always a mistake, but nobody ever got money or recognition by saying, "I don't have the vaguest noton as to how events will play out", hence much yammering ensues.

I agree that it's too early to tell, and I think it'll be decades before we really will be able to know whether the result was positive or negative. Nonetheless, a Democracy project in the Middle East was worth trying, even if it doesn't work out as well as we'd like. I fear what will happen if Democracy fails, and we keep seeing nothing but hate and terror continue to spew from this region.

But I'm still pretty optimistic. Everything seems to be moving in the right direction, despite the setbacks. What's going on in Lebanon, and the fact that Hosni Mubarrak feels he even has to go through the motions of talking up democracy is certainly a change from the status quo in that region, which I don't think too many people would argue was working well.

Well, even the most raging hurricane starts with the slightest of breezes, to coin a phrase.

Let's start out by asking the obvious counterfactual: if we hadn't zapped Saddam and shown we were at the very least serious in our good intentions about letting Iraq vote in its own destiny, would we be seeing these developments now? It seems to me that to ask the question is to answer it.

Now, to pick on your concrete example: Egypt is the big dog in the Arab world. Yes, I know...they don't even think of themselves as Arabs--but you take the point: if Egypt sneezes, everyone from Morocco to Dubai catches a cold. So what Mubarak does is being closely watched, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

And as far as the elections being rigged goes...the elections that were agreed to in 1989 at the Polish Roundtable between the Jaruzelski regime and Solidarity were rigged too. And certainly nobody--least of all myself--expected them to have the results they did: except for one Senator, *every single seat* that was not "reserved" for the regime was won by the non-government parties. And--guess what?--suddenly the bogus "electoral partners" of the Communists in the government "coalition" discovered they'd rather be on the other side too.

As Reagan once put it, if they allowed a second party to be formed in the Soviet Union, it would still be a one-party state, because everyone would rush out to join the new party.

A very good post.

I know this is just (?!) semantics, but I wish we could remember that hindsight is just that. Whether the invasion was a "good idea" should properly be evaluated based on the knowledge available at the time. We can now look to developments and decide if it was successful or not, but I would argue that, if a decision was a "good idea" when made, it remains so.

You can still have a good idea that fails to work out.

What bobby b said.

It is very important to remember that you can also have a good idea that does work out. We forget or ignore that at our peril.

Establishing democracy in Germany and Japan after "the war to end all wars" was viewed by many, in the short term, as either a bad idea or as a good idea that wasn't working out. Fifty plus years later, the perspective is different and those who thought it a bad idea or a good idea that wasn't working are mostly dead and forgotten.

The pace of events make arguments like this difficult to get a handle on. I agree that you have to evaluate a decision, in large measure, as of the time you made it. The problem, however, is that we're talking about a lot of different sorts of decisions being wrapped up into one action - the invasion of Iraq - and people deploying different decision mechanisms. Lots of people were (and remain) against it b/c we think a country ought to present a threat or have otherwise provoked us before we invade; I don't think that Iraq met the criterion, and I still don't. I don't like the idea of promiscuous use of force to reshape the world as we see fit, largely on the pragmatic grounds that I think such shaping is difficult and likely to fail. I happen to think that democratic regimes are probably more friendly too us than non-democratic regimes, but that's not clearly the case (see, e.g., the rationale for our support for Musharraf under Clinton, and concerns about who the Saudis might elect).

So, if the dominos do fall, and democracy breaks out in the Middle East, I won't much revise my decision mechanism for determining if another country is a threat. But I'll probably have to at least revise my beliefs about how rarely we should deploy American military power and how effectively we can shape other countries through it. And if the democracies are unfriendly to us and present a greater threat, I'll probably have to revise my theory on that, as well.

Let's see what happens first, though.

"... a dazed herd of journalists milling ledelessly on the vast media savannah." Dang, that's nice.

> I'll probably have to revise my theory on that, as well.

On one side, we have someone who has pretty much ignored "theory" and, as a result, has produced a situation with a reasonable chance at a success beyond what the theory-folk believed was possible.

On the other side, we have folks hoping for a disaster so they don't have to adjust their theories, theories which still predict that the USSR wasn't vulnerable.

I suspect that the latter group is going to have more trouble arguing that they saw it coming this time.

> Lots of people were (and remain) against it
> b/c we think a country ought to present a
> threat or have otherwise provoked us before
> we invade; I don't think that Iraq met the
> criterion, and I still don't.

I don't know. I tend to view firing on coalition warplanes patrolling the UN imposed 'no fly zone', along with multiple other violations of the 1991 cease fire that Saddam agreed to in order to save his regime, were provocation enough to remove the regime.

Lots of people seem to want to believe that Iraq was friendly and peaceful before we went in and invaded it in 2003. Iraq's history of bad behavior and aggression toward the US in spite of the cease fire is well documented.

When things are going south the smart money readies to buy.

ML

"full democracy across the Middle East will take between 1/2 and a full generation" You understood that going in, didn't you? The middle east is the original example of this. Moses and the Israelites marched out of Egypt and right up to the border of Canaan, but because the Israelites still had the mindset of slaves Moses turned them around and wandered through the Sinai for forty years until the memory of slavery was gone. The same is going to have to happen here, as it still has to happen in the old East block countries. Look at what's going on in Russia now and the nostalgia for Stalin and communism among many.

And yes, the dominoes are falling. The first was Gadhafi when he gave up his nuclear weapons program and exposed the A. Q. Khan network. The interesting question is who will be the last to go and by what means, peacefully, by revolution, or by war? Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran?

Good post. I'd like to second the thoughts of Bobby B and SCMTim: we can't just evaluate the decision by its outcome. As Hobbes said to the Fool, simply because an action worked out to your benefit does not mean it was wisely done. Believe me, I want the hopeful signs to continue as much as anyone-- if they do, though, there will still be hard questions about whether this was all part of the Master Plan or whether BushCo just got tremendously lucky.

I think if you look at the stuff that was coming out of conservative think tanks before we invaded Iraq, it's hard to argue that the result here was all luck and no strategy. The notion of Democratizing the middle east was out there even before the war, but I think the administration focused on WMDs for a couple of reasons. For one, it was an idea they thought everyone would get behind, two they fully expected to find them when they went in, and three they believed successful removal of WMDs from Iraq would have made up for any failure to democratize the country. Since we didn't find stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq, now they are forced to focus on the long shot.

I think it would also be equally wrong to say it was all strategy and no luck. If this whole thing turns out to actually work, I think we will indeed owe a lot to luck. But I suppose there no war that's not a bit of both.

I'm working hard to suppress my triumphalism... Nothing ventured, nothing gained, is as far as I'll take it right now.

I'd add to Keith's comment that "there's no war that's not a bit of both [strategy and luck]" that there's a third factor: determination. Maybe a fourth too: patience and/or timing.

"So, if the dominos do fall, and democracy breaks out in the Middle East, I won't much revise my decision mechanism for determining if another country is a threat. But I'll probably have to at least revise my beliefs about how rarely we should deploy American military power and how effectively we can shape other countries through it. And if the democracies are unfriendly to us and present a greater threat, I'll probably have to revise my theory on that, as well." --scmTim

Suddenly becoming aware that he is among the Repudiated Tim slowly starts to realize that he has been Hoplessly Wrong all along. This is the first step towards enlightenment. Congratulations! Maybe some won't call you tim any longer.

Let's see what happens first, though.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim at February 28, 2005 06:34 PM

That's a waffle -- receive 2 demerits.

thedaddy

There are two questions to ask:

1. Was the purpose of the war to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East?

2. Was invading Iraq the right way to accomplish this?

I think that the answer to #1 is clearly "Yes." Talk of destabilizing the Middle East and the suitability of Iraq for democratization has been around since even before Bush was President. The answer to #2 is harder. I believe that it is also "yes," but we won't really know for decades.

One thing to keep in mind... the President and his advisors have access to information that most people don't. Not that they are infallible or beyond question or even that that information is always correct. I am happy to second guess Presidents all day. But I try to remember that there is always the chance that they know something important that I don't.

Anyway... the WMD thing was a red herring that has unfortunately tainted the perception of the motivations of the Administration. Hopefully, we'll continue to see good progress in the Middle East and the result will be a better and safer world. If we do, then I think that the current Administration will deserve some credit, though the people in the Middle East who will be making democracy and freedom work deserve most of the credit.

Bolie IV

Tim,

You said, "I don't like the idea of promiscuous use of force to reshape the world as we see fit." I don't think that ANY of us like the idea of promiscuous force, yet Bosnia and Kosovo were close to that with no objections from the left. I still shudder when I remember Albright's words, "But what good is a military if you can't use it?" in connection with Kosovo.

But invading Iraq was not at all promiscuous, but rather a carefully tailored essential step in the GWOT.

Wait a minute... you're still not sure whether the War was a mistake?

It's a simple matter to resolve. Has support for the myriad claims we made to justify the invasion suddenly turned up? No? Then the War was a mistake, whether it happens to result in positive consequences or not. I can kick a blind beggar in the head and happen to restore his vision in the process, but that doesn't mean I didn't commit assault.

Matt,

I'm sure the war in Iraq was not a mistake. Saddam has had WMDs in the past and was poised to make more. He had ties with terrorists (I'm not sure how anyone can claim he had none when there have been many reports of the links). He was flaunting the sanctions. He was not cooperating with the inspectors. I know some of them have said that he had no WMDs, but given how crippled they were, I'm not sure how they can say that they knew he had no WMDs with a straight face. He never documented the destruction of WMDs we know he had like he was supposed to.

Where was the mistake?

Bolie IV

Bolie:

In hindsight, that's where... and there, only if you are able to discount all the other reasons for using military force against Iraq. And if that position describes one, it's a setup, IMHO: the person who now says, "I was against the war from the beginning. It was sold, sold I tell you, to the American people on the basis of the presence of WMDs [a professor in AZ with whom I briefly corresponded thundered this at me a few times], and see? No WMDs" is, again IMHO, also a person who if the WMDs had been lying in neat stacks when we invaded, have rejoined, "But where's the evidence that Saddam intended to use them on us? He had no connection, no connection I tell you, with [take your pick] 9/11/al Qaeda - we had no reason to believe he was an imminent threat." Etc. And this in spite of Bush's explicit statement that Iraq wasn't an *imminent* threat, just one that we couldn't afford to go on ignoring.

SCMTim, FWIW, I always enjoy and learn from your comments; but I confess I have a hard time believing that you would have considered the Iraq war justified for any reason other than a missile with an Iraqi flag on it videotaped independently by dozens flying into the Statue of Liberty or some such. (That is, an uncontrovertible Iraqi attack on US soil.) If I mischaracterize you as holding this position, which I consider to be principled but incorrect, I apologize.

Keith, AIUI the UN was opposed to the no-fly zones. The US and British enforced them anyway to prevent Saddam and Co. from slaughtering the Kurds in northern Iraq. Having said that, I agree that the US had plenty of reasons to invade (violations of ceasefire agreements, noncooperation with UNMOVIC and UNSCOM, and so forth). I'd recommend Jeffrey Goldberg's excellent "The Great Terror" in the New Yorker (2002-3-25) for a look at how the UN actively ignored the plight of the Kurds under Saddam and Co.

"I was wrong about the WMD, indisputably..."

The only indisputable point is that Saddam's WMD were not where we expected them to be -- the reasons for that fact are themselves subject to broad and intense dispute.

Which, as it turns out, the precipitate withdrawal of the Syrian Army and some or all of their terrorist thugboys from the Beka'a may shed some VERY interesting light upon...

Oh, please. The U.N. inspections teams couldn't find any signs of ongoing weapons programs or stored weapons themselves. We insisted that they were wrong and that we knew the locations of stockpiles.

We went, we looked, we failed to find. There's never been any indication that Saddam still had WMDs. It seems he wasn't cooperating with U.N. inspectors as a very effective bluff.

Remember all those claims of knowledge? Where is the evidence that we claimed to possess, accurate or not? Why hasn't it been brought forward?

Matt: NO, Hans Blix never said that they couldn't find signs of WMD. He said they hadn't found them yet, but the Iraqis hadn't even satisfactorily accounted for the poison gas they'd had before. Blix wanted to go on looking for years - presumably, while half our army stayed on alert ready to invade, because that imminent threat was the only thing that got him into Iraq in the first place.

It's not entirely accurate - or perhaps it's simply incomplete - to say "We went, we looked, we failed to find." A more complete statement would be, "We made our case to the UN, we waited for six months, we went, we looked, we failed to find." I think the six months changes the picture, potentially quite a lot.

As to why evidence of stockpile locations hasn't been brought forward, I see a couple of scenarios:

1. Our evidence - our intelligence - was flawed, which we now know; the gov't is "saving face" by not revealing its failure explicitly, but rather letting it sink into the mire of other intelligence failures in the post-9/11 period. This scenario is certainly a strong contender, and not terribly scandalous.

2. We flat-out lied about having this evidence. Always risky to flat-out lie in the public sphere - one tends to get caught these days. It's possibly the simplest explanation but not, imho, the most likely one - because why do it? With much of the world intelligence community already believing that Saddam had continued his WMD program on some level, and with multiple other stated (and undeniable) reasons for invading, why introduce a lie? Too much to lose; too little to gain.

3. (sort of a variant of 1) We had evidence of stockpile locations; we suspected or knew going into Iraq that WMDs had been moved from the locations we suspected or knew about (e.g., satellite imagery of truck convoys from suspected weapons sites while we waited for the UN to finish deliberating), we looked anyway on the off-chance, and we're not now revealing our evidence because it would reveal more than we care to reveal about our remote intelligence-gathering capabilities, which, after all, we may be needing again. Maybe yes, maybe no. Everyone knows we can "look down" with sufficient accuracy to read a license plate; what isn't known, I guess, is how good our coverage is and how good our interpretation people/software are. Or maybe - all reports to the contrary - we actually did and do have humint in the area and don't want to compromise it.

Or, who knows, maybe the stockpiles have been found and Rove is just saving the announcement for a Really Bad Day, right next to OBL.

I think it's way, way too early to give Bush any credit whatsoever for the popular demonstrations in Lebanon. All that happened there was the Syrians overplayed their hand and (allegedly, we're not sure yet) assassinated a popular former prime minister.

"Ah!" you might say, "but the Lebanese were emboldened to protest by the elections in Iraq!"

Well, maybe. Or maybe the events in Lebanon would have played out pretty much the same way whether or not Iraq had been invaded.

Do we give Bush and the Iraq invasion credit for the events in Ukraine? Of course not. That would be silly. But the people rose up there anyway (and accomplished far, far more than has been accomplished in Lebanon so far).

Did the Iraq invasion cause the peace process to move forward in Israel/Palestine? No. That took Arafat's death and pretty much everyone had figured out that that was the only thing that was ever going to break the logjam.

I don't think we should give credit to Bush for the sun rising in the morning either, and it's just as plausible to credit him and his policies in the Middle East for events in Lebanon and Israel.

Wow, great post. Humorous and thoughtful. I got here via ThePoorMan. Expect more visits.

I found $10 in the parking lot today. This happened because we invaded Iraq.

It's dangerous to lie in public? Ha ha ha ha ha!

I take it you haven't been reading up on Stalin, lately. Roald Dahl's "Matilda" would suffice. Find a copy and read it -- pay particular attention to what Matilda tells the other students about the Trunchbull.

"Certainly, the history of economic journalism is the history of hysterical panic about some unsustainable trend, right up to the point where the trend abruptly stops trending, leaving a dazed herd of journalists milling ledelessly on the vast media savannah."---one of the best sentences of the year, IMHO.

Lebanese are in the streets because of what happened in the Ukraine. In their view (except perhaps some Xtians from the elite, who are collaborating anyway) the US's proxy agents the Israelis have destroyed their polity, so I find it unlikely that W's speeches are inspiring them.

As for Iraq, please remember that, regardless of the strategic or historical assessment, this situation looks very different to most of the rest of the world (including even US journalists on the ground) than it does to us. You have to strip off all the packaging and spin and reconstitute the real information in our national media's so-called reporting on this set of stories. Many journalists are themselves utterly disgusted, when they're not trying to avoid kidnap for ransom.

Removing Saddam is one issue and goal, but sustaining the result is quite another, and that is where the words and deeds of the administration are radically out of synch. In a state of near chaos, including a sustained guerilla war against the country's police and military (such as they are after we have non-trained them) millions of Iraqis voted, which is moving testament to the desire of Iraqis, like everyone elsewhere, to control their own fate. This doesn't fool them that they are not living in a chaotic mess which the US occupation has utterly failed to remedy. If you want the credit for deposing that bad man (and I, like JaneGalt, have decidely mixed feelings about the invasion itself) you have to also carry the can for a while afterwards for full credit.

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It's dangerous to lie in public? Ha ha ha ha ha! I take it you haven't been reading up on Stalin, lately.

I tried to be very specific: "Always risky to flat-out lie in the public sphere - one tends to get caught these days," I said. Stalin is dead, I recall. A big lie has less chance of going unquestioned in a world that includes people like Jane here, it seems to me, than it did in his time... as witness the fact that there's a whole lot of questioning going on about the WMD rationale, who knew what when, etc., from many quarters. Cast a lot of light and expect to find a lot of dirt in the corners - perhaps not all the dirt there is, but one person with a BlackBerry or its international equivalent, witnessing one blatant lie or proof thereof, can - within like a minute - email his/her observations to Kos or Prof. Reynolds and stand a pretty good chance of getting the word out, esp. if s/he has the sense to email it to the one with the biggest axe to grind.

As for Iraq, please remember that, regardless of the strategic or historical assessment, this situation looks very different to most of the rest of the world (including even US journalists on the ground) than it does to us.

And I might add that apparently this situation looks very different to many in Iraq than it does to US journalists "on the ground," e.g. among others Chrenkoff's weekly-or-so blog roundups of largely unreported good news. What "real information" should we be gleaning from what's reported?

Big lies are even easier to tell, nowadays. People are swamped with so much data they can't personally sort through it all, so they rely on authorities they trust to tell them what the truth is.

You don't even have to fool the majority of people, as long as you fool a larger group than any of the other groups. Look at how many people fell for the misdirection, false implications, and outright lies during the buildup to the Second Iraqi War. Various news sources and commentators were pointing out just how pathetic the argument really were -- and there are *still* people repeating those arguments today.

Re: journalists: The ones who don't leave their hotels because it's too dangerous to go outside, much less where the news actually is, or the ones grouped together with U.S. military forces?

Matt G.:

Your comment speaks to the media's agenda-setting/gatekeeping function, I think... But I disagree about the Big Lie. Information overload is preferable to ignorance, it seems to me; if you receive a datum such as "Jeff Gannon isn't really a reporter nor is he going by his right name," you can make up your own mind about whether to follow the story, today. In the past, even the recent past, you'd have been hard-pressed to find out more about, say, the Eason Jordan thing from sources commonly available if the reporting pattern that actually happened were followed: it was, what, two weeks before any newspaper reported it? And that only because the so-called "blogstorm" had gotten so noticeable?

Information overload is a problem, of course. It has been since newspapers started being circulated, I bet. But - I say again - better to have the information circulating than the information squashed.

As for US reporters in Iraq, I think you'd have to be SuperReporter to get a good, accurate, in-depth story about Iraqi attitudes from your hotel room... but then again, you only stand a good chance out on the street if you're either fluent in Arabic or accompanied by a trusted translator. Going around with US soldiers probably isn't the best way to get an honest assessment from all Iraqi citizens, but at least you make personal contact. It's those rare reporters who "embed" themselves among *Iraqis* who get my vote for "best journalism out of a war zone." But I was speaking more of Iraqi bloggers, all that being said. (I don't read Iraqi blogs as much as I ought, but I'd certainly give them a credence I don't give a hotel journalist.)

Who values water more: a man dying of thirst in the desert, or a man who can choose between buying bottled water (secretly laced with psychoactive substances) and getting hit in the face with a firehose blast?

Who values water more: a man dying of thirst in the desert, or a man who can choose between buying bottled water (secretly laced with psychoactive substances) and getting hit in the face with a firehose blast?

And which one actually has water to drink, if he so chooses?

Ignorant people without education recognize their ignorance. Ignorant people with education don't -- and that makes them easy to control.

Matt G:

The uneducated ignorant only recognize their ignorance if they're around, or have knowledge of, educated people, wouldn't you say? Since it's impossible to be entirely informed on any subject "these days" (I'm starting to feel OOOOOOOLD for using that and similar phrases so often in this thread), is it better to be entirely UNinformed, or as well informed as you are able?

I admit that begs the question of how many people will become as well informed as they're "able" as opposed to as well informed as they want to be. But so far I see no reason to change my opinion: in a world where even I, a simple housewife, stand a chance of reaching Kos's 400,000 daily viewers or Instapundit's 200,000 if I've witnessed something important or interesting, it's hard to hide a big lie. More to the point, where even people living in what functioned as a "medieval" society can go to an internet cafe and start a blog (and then email Ali and Omar about it), it's hard to hide lies.

Ignorant people who haven't been taught that they're educated generally recognize the limits of their knowledge, in my experience. It's the people who've been told that they're not ignorant who have the hardest time recognizing this fact.

You don't *need* to hide lies if no one cares about them, or wants to believe them. The simple truth is that you really have no idea what's going on. No one here does. But you've been given the appearance of having meaningful information about the workings of the world. Instead of recognizing your own ignorance, you believe you're informred.

Matt G.:

Well then, thanks for the information - I now know I'm ignorant, though not the limits of my ignorance. I wish you could help me out with that too ;-).

In the face of the statement that because I can't know everything and don't know what it is that I don't know, I'm helpless to argue and I retire the field, knuckles dragging on the floor.

But wait! Support for my POV from Prof. Reynolds at Tech Central! http://techcentralstation.com/030705G.html

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