I have bad news for those who want certainty in life. There is no certainty; all life is a matter of odds.
One can do everything right – avoid smoking, exercise regularly, eat well, manage stress – and still get run down by a drunk driver or struck down by a fatal disease.
One can do everything wrong – drink heavily, smoke like a chimney, hang around dangerous friends, overeat regularly – and still live to 100.
But the odds strongly favor the person who does the right things.
So the strategy in life, as in football, is to try to improve one’s odds and hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Eat right and exercise regularly, but buy health insurance as well. Drive carefully and defensively, but wear a seat belt as well. Hope your company pension and social security will be there when you retire, but accumulate your own investments as well in case they aren’t.
Once one accepts that everything is a matter of odds, one’s strategies in life change. If one no longer believes in a sure thing, it becomes important to always be thinking about plan B and even plan C if things don’t go as one hopes. It also becomes important to continue improving the odds.
What has this to do with anything? I suggest that the problem we have in Iraq today comes ultimately from the belief of some in the current administration that Iraq was a “sure thing”, whether from simple ignorance of the history of that part of the world or from some religious belief that success was preordained. In reality it was a gamble, as is everything in life, and those who took the gamble didn’t pay enough attention to improving the odds, nor to having at hand a plan B and plan C if things didn’t go well, as in fact they haven’t.
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