Recommended: U.S. Can’t Win Iraq’s Civil War

I recommend James Fearon’s lead article, Iraq’s Civil War, in the March/April 2007 Foreign Affairs magazine. Iraq is, of course, in civil war whether or not the American administration will admit it. Something like 60,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the past three years by their own countrymen over religious and tribal differences as various armed factions maneuver for power, and if that doesn’t qualify as a civil war I don’t what would.

Fearon points out that of the worldwide civil wars since 1955, about three-quarters of them have ended with a decisive victory by one of the sides. Only about one-quarter ended with power sharing agreements of the sort we have been promoting in Iraq, and these only come about when two conditions have been met: (1) the participants have fought for long enough (typically around 10 years) that it is finally clear to all sides that no one side is powerful enough to prevail, and (2) each of the main players is cohesive enough that it can control its own forces. (Hamas and Fatah in Palestine come to mind as a current example)

Neither of these conditions exist in Iraq at the moment, and as Fearon points out, a continued America troop presence prevents the first of these conditions from being met. So long as American forces provide some sort of control, the Shi`a can continue to believe that as soon as the Americans leave they will prevail because they are in the majority, and the Sunnis can continue to believe that as soon as the Americans leave they can retake the country, since they did it once before.

Of course his argument goes into much more detail than this short summary, and the whole article is well worth reading. But the conclusion is persuasive – we aren’t helping either our own cause or the cause of the Iraqi people by pursuing this fantasy that if only we keep troops there long enough things will improve. The Democrat’s drive for immediate and full withdrawal probably isn’t the answer either, but a staged disengagement of some sort seems the best of a bad lot of choices.

The arrogance of certainty

I can think of nothing more intellectually arrogant than absolute certainty. At root, it is the arrogance of being certain that you are right and everyone else is wrong that is the core error in many religions and political philosophies. Certainty has probably fueled more killings and wars and general misery throughout history than any other cause, including simple expansionist greed. And certainty lies at the core of many if not most of the really stupid and self-defeating things people have done through history (including our own recent history).

In fact, we are never more likely to be in error than when we are certain, because as soon as we are certain we stop thinking, stop accepting new information and evidence, and even become hostile and resistant to any data or argument that challenges what we believe.

It is reasonable be confident or even very confident about things if the evidence warrants it, but we understand that even things we are very confident about sometimes turn out differently. But when you meet absolute certainty you meet a closed mind!

Recommended: The Stink: What makes the worst lies in the Middle East acceptable?

I recommend Bruce Thornton"s recent post, The Stink: What make the worst lies in the Middle East acceptable? Once again he points out the hypocrisy and double standard that pervades so much of the world's views on the Middle East. I have no doubt that the majority of those in the Middle East, though they live within a different culture than ours, are decent people who would prefer to live a quiet life in peace and prosperity. That fact does not in any way excuse the abominable actions of those power-hunger thugs among them who stoke religious and nationalistic feelings for their own ends, and we ought not to confuse our empathy for the average Middle Easterners with acceptance in any form of the lies and actions of the unprincipled minority that currently seem to control events there.

Sunk costs don’t matter

A common fallacy in business is to keep pouring money and effort into a failing enterprise on the grounds that so much has already been invested that we can’t quite now. These are called “sunk costs” – investment one has already made that won’t be recouped unless the enterprise succeeds. This is a fallacy, albeit a fairly common one. The amount of cost and effort already sunk into an enterprise should have no bearing on whether or not to keep investing. All that should really matter to a manager are the prospects of success from this point forward, irrespective of past history. If the prospects are good, keep investing. If the prospects aren’t good, the proper strategy is not to throw good money after bad, but to cut one’s losses and move on to something more promising. To do otherwise is to succumb to the losing gambler’s fallacy that surely if one just keeps playing, eventually one’s luck will turn.

What applies in business applies just as much to personal relationships. Some people hang on to dysfunctional relationships because they have so much history, and they hope that with a little more investment and effort they can make it work, even though years of past effort haven’t made it work.

And it applies to foreign policy. Just because we have committed billions of dollars and a lot of American lives to a policy is not enough in itself to continue that policy, even though it isn’t working. The only valid criteria for continuing a policy is if it appears to have good prospects for succeeding from the present moment forward.

In all these cases, sunk costs don’t matter. All that matters are the prospects for success from this moment forward.

Whether you think you can….

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right” – Henry Ford.

As Henry Ford noted, there are two kinds of people, those who are optimistic and confident and thrive on challenges, and those who are fearful and pessimistic and fear change. A surprisingly large proportion of people fit the second category, though of course they would describe themselves as cautious instead of fearful, “realistic” instead of pessimistic, and conservative instead of fearful of change.

Nonetheless, this is an important distinction, because few if any of the important advances in knowledge or human civilization have ever come from the pessimists in the crowd. Almost all of the things that have advanced human culture have come from those who dared to think that the impossible just might, with enough effort and work, be possible. Indeed, it is amazing that we have come as far as we have, carrying all the dead weight of all those people who were dead sure “it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done” and were prepared to explain to us in great detail just why our ideas wouldn’t work.

It’s a matter of personal choice which of these two groups we want to be in – but in the long run it’s much more satisfying to be among the optimists who make things happen than among the pessimists who sit on the sidelines and criticize.

Congressional majorities in Washington

Last time around, it took the Democratic congressional majority in Washington about 40 years (from the 1954 elections to the 1995 elections) to alienate the electorate with their greed, sleaze, and ineffectiveness and get thrown out of power. The Republicans must work harder, because this time around it only took them 11 years (from the Gingrich revolution in 1995 to the 2006 elections) to lose the support of a majority of the electorate.

Now the Democrats have won a slight majority in each house, and have an opportunity to show that they are better stewards of the country than the Republicans have been. So with all the really critical issues that face us, from global warming to the impending implosion of the Social Security and Medicare system, what do they focus on first? New ethics rules which they are already circumventing and a staged debate on the Iraq war (the CSPAN camera is fixed on the speaker, so the public can't see that the chamber is almost empty while the speakers read their speeches into the record), scoring cheap points for the next election. Early evidence suggests the Democrats may now be trying to beat the Republican record for how short a time it takes to alienate the electorate.

The problem with leadership

There is a systematic problem that faces all leaders and people in power. The people around them are afraid to tell them painful truths. It doesn’t help that people who reach high leadership positions more often than not have outsized egos, and are already unduly confident that they are wiser than those around them. And some have a tendency to “kill the messenger”, which further constrains the people around them.

So it is not surprising that presidents and prime ministers and CEOs and kings are so often wholly out of touch with the real world. They tend to surround themselves with people who will tell them what they want to hear, whether it is true or not, and they tend to systematically purge from their court people who challenge their thinking. It is a problem inherent in leadership, and we see examples in public life all the time.

The position of the royal fool has sometimes been an answer to this problem. According to some histories the royal fool could – gently – tease the king and tell him painful truths, so long as they were offered as entertaining verses or songs or jokes. And since the royal fool was by convention assumed to be simple minded, whether he really was or not, whatever he said could not affront the king’s dignity.

We no longer have royal fools, but the wisest leaders will assure that their immediate advisers include people who are not afraid to tell them when they are wrong, or to tell them bad news, or to challenge their reasoning, and they will treasure such people above those courtiers who just seek to ingratiate themselves.

Unfortunately, we have few wise leaders in the world.

Global Warming

I just watched Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, which is a well done non-technical presentation of the global warming issue/crisis. And coincidentally I had also just read the UN’s latest report on the state of the current science of this issue. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis - A Summary for Policymakers gives a good overview of this report for those who don’t want to wade through all the data.

It’s amazing to me that the American political apparatus in both parties still thinks there is some uncertainty about this issue, or at least finds it expedient to pretend that there is still some uncertainty so that they don’t have to face the issue yet. And of course there are powerful business interests who find it useful to help the politicians pretend to remain unconvinced for as long as possible. There is no uncertainty among those who really understand the data – the climate scientists.

But it does raise an interesting point about scientist’s responsibilities in issues like this. It seems to me it is not enough in the real world to be right – one must be effective as well. In terms of real-world consequences, to be right but unable to convince anyone to take effective action produces exactly the same result as being wrong or wholly ignorant.

Recommended: The Truth about Tolerance

I recommend Bruce Thornton's recent article The Truth About Tolerance: How our therapeutic thinkers threaten Western values. We do have a tendency in our society to spend a lot of time being critical of ourselves (well, not really about our own views, of course, but certainly about the views of all those wrongheaded and misguided Americans around us). I suppose that stems in part from the dominant religious views in our society, with their constant focus on human sin and unworthiness. In any case, as Thornton points out, we do seem too often to be applying a double standard in our constant attempt to be tolerant and politically correct.

Recommended: Global Warming: Get Used to It

I recommend Fareed Zakaria's new post Global Warming: Get Used to It . As he points out, the global warming effect already has enough momentum that even the most extreme measures to reduce greenhouse gases still won't slow the process for decades yet, and the half measures the world is more likely to take will require even longer to slow the process. So, he argues, even as we work hard to reverse the process, we had better also be preparing to live with global warming for the rest of our lifetimes.

Radicalizing movements

I had a professor once who taught me an important principle. Social and political movements almost always start reasonably and get progressively more extreme as time passes. One can see this in the history of movements like the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and many of the world’s socialist movements.

The mechanism is straightforward. A group will have a real grievance against society that needs to be addressed, and so a movement will form. The initial leaders of the movement will make demands that, in retrospect, are probably fairly reasonable, and so after a period of years of agitation and re-education and consciousness-raising, society will eventually, though perhaps grudgingly, acquiesce to these demands.

So what happens to those initial moderate leaders once they have gotten everything they asked for? They no longer have a mandate to lead, and many of their followers leave the movement because it has achieved what they set out to achieve. So they are replaced by leaders with more radical demands that haven’t yet been met, and smaller groups of followers who want more. And so on, until the movement finally splinters into lots of small groups, often at odds with each other, all with extreme demands that society is not prepared to meet.

An interesting principle. I see it in operation all the time, all over the world.

What matters are results, not intentions

Americans in general, and American politicians in particular, are prone to defend their actions on the basis of their good intentions. It was our intention to bring democracy to Iraq. It has been our intention for decades to free Cuba from the grip of an authoritarian Communist leader. Religious leaders intend to reduce teen pregnancies by teaching abstinence and opposing sex education in schools. The No Child Left Behind legislation was intended to bring more accountability to public schools.

What is notable about each of these examples, and many more that I’m sure you can think of, is that despite the best of intentions they have thus far failed to produce the anticipated results, yet their supporters continue to follow and justify the same ineffectual policies because the “intentions” seem right.

In the real world, only results matter. A victim of AIDS is not mollified by the information that condom use, which might have prevented their infection, was not taught in their village because it was someone’s “intention” to avoid encouraging more sexual activity. The battered child who is finally murdered by their abusive parent will not be brought back to life by the explanation that it was social service’s “intention” to keep families together if at all possible.

People will make mistakes. We humans are fallible. Despite our best efforts, every nation makes policy mistakes – lots of them. But the proper response when a policy is tried and doesn’t work is to admit the mistake and learn from it, not to defend it and even continue to follow it on the basis of our “good intentions”.

The next time someone tries to defend their ineffective or even disastrous actions on the basis of their good intentions, we ought to boo them right off the stage. In real life, only results matter.

The von Däniken fallacy

In the 1970’s Erich von Däniken wrote a series of books such as Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past which made the argument that since we couldn’t explain how ancient non-technological people had built some massive things like Stonehenge and the pyramids, this “proved” that aliens had once lived on earth and must have used their advanced technology to build these edifices. He built quite a cult following for a while, especially among high school students and some fringe groups of adults. Of course all it really proved was how unimaginative von Däniken was and how gullible many of his readers were

But this form of fallacious argument still comes up from time to time. At root, it is the basis of the intelligent design argument: we don’t know how complex things like an eye could have evolved, therefore God must have made it. Of course, the same argument could just as well “prove” that advanced aliens bioengineered us, or that our distant descendents came back in a time machine and did the job, or any number of other far-fetched ideas.

Arguing from ignorance is never very sound logic, but it’s surprising how often people do it.