Iraq – Obama vs McCain

Now that it looks increasingly likely that the November election will be between Senator Barak Obama and Senator John McCain, here are some questions I’d pose to each candidate:

Barak Obama:

1. You are for withdrawing all our combat troops starting as soon as you enter office, with all troops out of Iraq by 2009 (see Obama’s position paper on his web site at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/pdf/IraqFactSheet.pdf). How would you handle –

1. The possible (likely?) full-scale Sunni-Shia bloodletting or ethnic cleansing/civil war that might come as soon as foreign troops are withdrawn?

2. The possible (likely?) development of a hostile Iraq under Iranian control, similar to the way Libya controls Lebanon?

3. The possible (likely?) development of a lawless Iraq in civil war becoming a new base and training ground for worldwide terrorists, just as Afghanistan did after the Soviets were ejected?

2. Having chosen to remove the one force that kept sectarian warfare and ethnic cleansing under control in Iraq (Saddam’s regime – brutal but effective), what moral responsibility do we have for providing security to ordinary Iraqis in its place? And if we withdraw before the security issue is resolved, what moral responsibility does America bear for any unpleasant consequences to ordinary Iraqis?

John McCain:

1. You are for increasing our troop strength in Iraq. (see McCain’s position paper on his web site at http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/fdeb03a7-30b0-4ece-8e34-4c7ea83f11d8.htm) It is certainly true, in hindsight, that we entered Iraq with too few troops to establish security after the main fighting was over. However:

1. Why should Iraqi politicians compromise as long as foreign troops are keeping things stable for them (see my Nov. 15 2007 post on Counterinsurgency Strategies)?

2. The bloody Sunni-Shia conflict has been going on for centuries. It is based on long-standing, gut-level fear and hatreds, and centuries of bloody tribal history. What can our continued presence possibly do to change that?

3. No doubt a large increase in American troop strength will suppress violence for as long as we remain, but then what? Many insurgent forces, like those of Moqtada Al-Sadr, will just wait until we leave to resume their activities. They can wait for a long time. Do we remain forever?

2. From a strategic point of view, Iraq has drained our military forces to the point where we would have difficulty dealing with conflict or threats anywhere else in the world. What is the strategic justification for continuing to pour scarce resources into Iraq just to maintain a sort of unstable status-quo, rather than withdrawing and rebuilding our forces against future and perhaps much more dangerous threats?

Greenspan and Free Markets

Alan Greenspan’s 2007 book “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World” (see the booklist on the sidebar to the right) is a marvelous work – part autobiography, part detailed academic analysis of why the American economy has worked so well over the years. For those not enamored of the details of macro economics, it can be heavy going in a few places, but overall it is quite readable, very instructive, and highly recommended.

Greenspan is a free market proponent, meaning that he believes that the world markets operate most efficiently when allowed to respond naturally to price signals. Free markets, of course, drive a continuous process of “creative destruction”, in which less efficient producers are driven out of business by more efficient producers, and newer, more capable products displace older, less capable products. That is good for the world economy as a whole, but hard on those who have just lost their jobs. Still, if you are a maker of buggy whips in a world that no longer has horse-drawn buggys, there is no help for it – you need to go learn a different trade. And if one factory produces cars at a cost of $20,000 apiece and a competitor can produce essentially the same car at $15,000 apiece, it’s pretty hard to argue that I ought to be forced by government policy to buy the $20,000 car just to help the workers in the first factory keep their jobs.

The opposing view, popularism, advocates government regulation and control to try to prevent people from losing their jobs. One sees this, for example, in the calls by some politicians (on both sides of the aisle) to have the government try to stem the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries with lower wages. It is a position that resonates with American voters, and wins votes for politicians, but as Greenspan shows from decades of data throughout the world, such government interference with the free market forces generally produces a far less healthy economy.

Similarly, he argues that the Federal Open Market Committee (what is commonly called the Federal Reserve Board) needs to continue to have freedom to adjust interest rates as needed to control inflation. But of course raising interest rates is never politically popular. Greenspan reasons that inflation has been kept unusually low for the past decade by the emergence of large new labor markets in places like India and China (where we are outsourcing jobs), but that as these markets saturate and their wage rates increase, inflation will appear again. He worries that when the Federal Reserve is finally forced to raise interest rates markedly to control inflation, popularist politicians will try to interfere.

Whether you are a free-market believer or a popularist, this is an important book to read, if only to test your beliefs against some real-world data.

Reasoning flaws – the anthropic principle

Human reasoning is prey to a number of flaws, and much of the work of advancing human intellectual thought is directed toward detecting, understanding and avoiding these flaws. A case in point is the anthropic principle.

Some of those prone to seek incontrovertible evidence for an intelligent (and presumably divine) designer of the cosmos have fastened on to the obvious fact that some key physical attributes of our world, and indeed of our entire cosmos, have to be exactly as they are for us to exist. If any one of these factors (like the distance of earth from the sun, or the energy flow of the sun, or a number of physical constants) were even a tiny bit different, we wouldn’t be here. (see for example Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, 1999) This they find as evidence that we exist because some intelligent force must have “tuned” the cosmos to be just right for us to exist.

Appealing as this argument is, it is fatally flawed, because the only possible universe we could study would be one in which we exist, so any universe we do study will of course be “tuned” for us to exist (or rather, we will be “tuned” to survive in it). There may well be many other universes (before ours, after ours, and/or existing simultaneously with ours) in which the parameters wouldn’t allow us to exist, but of course we can never observe those because we can’t exist in them to observe them.

It’s a little like being amazed that we always find things in the very last place we look. If we didn’t find our lost item in the last place we looked, we would keep looking, so it wouldn’t be the last place. Just so, if the critical constants in the universe weren’t such that we could exist, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.

Now this may all sound a bit arcane, but it is an example of the sort of subtle reasoning error into which we humans can fall, and understanding it ought to help to keep us from being so certain we are always right.

The inertia of government ideas

The Jan/Feb 2008 issue of The National Interest contains an interesting article by Seven Metz entitled “Three Years and You’re Out”. The thrust of the article is that history shows that the American public supports counterinsurgency operations for no more than about three years, though of course such operations, even if successful, typically take much longer.

I found especially thought-provoking the following comment about the political elites we support in typical counterinsurgency operations:

“…The elites we support often develop a vested interest in sustaining an insurgency, at least so long as the rebels can’t win. Having a comfortable, controlled insurgency lowers pressure on the regime for reform, allows it greater latitude in controlling its opponents, and often provides a stream of foreign assistance that can be skimmed or used for patronage. And while we ask our partner to improve its security forces, these may be more of a threat than the insurgents themselves………. Ultimately, American counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine assume that our partner elites will commit de facto political and economic suicide, reforming away from the system that made them powerful and rich. Yet we are bewildered when this does not happen.”

Or put more bluntly, some regimes find it convenient to use an insurgency to milk America for dollars, so why should they want the insurgency to end and democracy to break out? One thinks immediately not only of Iraq, but of places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where precisely this process seems to be operation today.

The interesting point about our own political apparatus, Republican and Democrat alike, is that it has adopted much the same counterinsurgency approach for decades now, all over the world, apparently without paying much attention to whether it is truly effective or not.

The gambler’s fallacy

Gamblers often think that there is some natural force that keeps losses and gains ”in balance”. One hears them say that their luck has been bad for so long, it surely must be about to turn in their favor soon. At a roulette table, one hears people say that since 5 or 6 red numbers in a row have turned up, “it must be time” for a black number to turn up.

This is the “gambler’s fallacy”. In fact, of course, there is no such natural law of balance. Unless the table is rigged, the odds in roulette of getting a black number on the next play are the same whether it has been preceded by 1 red number or 100 red numbers in a row. For gambling games with no skill involved and a level playing field, like flipping coins or cutting cards, mathematically the best estimate of how much you will be ahead or behind 100 plays from now is exactly how much you are ahead or behind right now. For nonskill games in which the house takes a percentage of each play, like roulette or slots, the only certainty is that slowly but surely the house will make money from you. In these cases, gambling is just a tax on the innumerate.

A few games, like poker, do involve some skill, and in those cases one’s odds do depend to a degree on how good you are compared to the other players. As the poker saying goes, if you can’t tell who is the mark at the table, then it’s you!

Why is this important? Because, one way or another, we all gamble in our day to day lives, and we are all susceptible to the gambler’s fallacy.