More Regrets

Nasi Lemak has another Iraq War mea culpa that captures an important piece of flawed thinking that I engaged in as well: "I didn't have to be an especially strong rational choice proponent to believe that elected politicians tend to try to avoid disaster, and that electorates tend to try to punish politicians who end up leading them into trouble." This made me drastically underrate the possible downside risks of the war. Two other points. One, as I've said before, a person of my generation got to watch a dreary catalogue of events in the nineties whereby there was much human suffering owing to American failure to use force (Rwanda), delay in the use of force (Bosnia), or hesitancy to expose our soldiers to risk (Kosovo). This created a predisposition toward "hawkishness" as a generic position. Once the debate was framed as "what to do about Iraq?" this inclined me toward the hawkish view. There'll be more on this later, but in retrospect I think that the most pernicious thing about the public debate in America is the continued propensity of questions to be framed around generic issues of "hawkishness" versus "dovishness" rather than the more relevant question of where should finite military and related resources be deployed.

Two, as my roommate at the time Jeff Theodore pointed out to me the other day, we were both bouncing around Harvard hearing all sorts of factually or logically deficient anti-war arguments. As this was the immediate context of our lives, it tended to harden our views in the opposite direction -- "look at all these silly anti-war people!" If we'd been hanging out in Red America, of course, we would have been hearing all sorts of silly pro-war arguments. In general, the person on the street does not have an especially nuanced defense of his or her favored stance on national security issues and the fact that the people on your street may happen to all think one thing is no reason to go adopt the reverse position. Meanwhile, the fact that the President of the United States was making silly pro-war arguments (others made much more convincing ones) lacked emotional immediacy even though, obviously, this should have been a far more relevant consideration.