Jim Henley: War Is Bad.

While I'm doing Saturday quickies, CT points to this golden post by Jim Henley on why he got the Iraq war right. The entire post delivers a high laugh-to-paragraph ratio & is therefore worth reading, but I will spoil the ending for you by quoting the conclusion he arrives at:

. . . you didn’t have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with Iraq made even less sense than driving home to East Egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. Any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out, each for different reasons. . . .

What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.

In short, War Is Bad. Its badness is, very rarely, the only alternative to something even worse, but you can get pretty far in life and in foreign policy by simply avoiding violent conflict, and especially avoiding initiating violent conflict. This rule of behavior is devastatingly simple, and therefore available to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, including e.g. the ubiquitous "Dirty Fucking Hippie" of left-blogger rhetoric; which, of course, means that it's intolerable to people whose self-image — and even professional survival — hinges on being more sophisticated than the unwashed rabble. But, ultimately, it's a good rule.

War Is Bad. Shout it from the rooftops, and one day you too may be as right as Jim Henley.

C. Shalizi on Iraq, econophysics

Further evidence that C. Shalizi's blog, however infrequently updated, is essential reading:

• Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Econophysics?
• The Khaldun Option

After reading a few of Cosma's essays, any person of merely ordinary erudition must wonder how he finds the time to know as much as he does. As it happens, he has a section of his FAQ devoted to this subject, and the price is steep. On the margin, however, I suspect many people would benefit from becoming slightly more like Cosma.

A feature, not a bug

Yglesias writes, in the context of the growing movement in Washington to depose al-Maliki and re-install Allawi:

I find it hard to find words to describe what a disaster it may be if the US ends up engineering the return to power of a grossly unpopular ex-Baathist ex-Prime Minister. It's as if people are trying their hardest to come up with policies designed to end with Muqtada al-Sadr marching at the head of a crowd shouting "Death to America" into the rapidly abandoned Green Zone sometime in 2010.

In all likelihood, the President and Congress in 2010 will both be Democratic. Worsening the objective situation in Iraq in 2010 would be a feature, not a bug.

Of course, the Iraq war was largely architected and executed by Republicans, in a time when the Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. It would be logical to blame Republicans for the consequences. However, Republicans are working hard to crystallize the "stab in the back" narrative --- i.e., that the war could have succeeded, if only it weren't for those meddling critics --- in the public consciousness. If this propaganda effort succeeds, then worsening the consequences of our inevitable withdrawal would pay political dividends for Republicans.

So far, I don't think they're succeeding, except among the "28 percenters" who believe basically anything that the right-wing noise machine spews out. But there's still a long way to go until withdrawal. And using foreign policy for political ends is hardly out of character for this administration.

---

UPDATE 2007-08-26: OK, in this post, my cynicism got the better of my sense. What can I say; I was in a bleak mood. Sometimes you can be too cynical. Truthfully, I don't think that this administration consciously wants to worsen long-run outcomes in Iraq.

However, I do think they're determined to extend the occupation until Bush leaves office. If they accomplish this, then one of two things will happen. Either the next administration will initiate the withdrawal, causing the aftermath to play out under their watch; or the next administration will remain in Iraq, extending Bush's running long-shot gamble that something good will happen someday. In either case, the outcome can be spun into reduced blame for the Bush administration. Probably, they even believe in earnest that the next administration would deserve the blame for a disastrous withdrawal.

Given that the desired outcome is to remain in Iraq until 2009 at all costs, the question becomes how to maintain some illusion of progress, some hope for imminent improvement, however flimsy, in the short term. Hence ongoing noise about ousting al-Maliki; hence the noise about Petraeus's September report; and hence, and hence, and hence.

When you're grasping at straws like this, it becomes easy to disregard the long-run consequences of your actions. It is not active malice that drives our astonishingly bad Iraq policy. It is selfish shortsightedness. But that's hardly better in the end, is it.

War's most significant bit

Read this. Then read this.

One of the reasons I post less frequently than I used to is that lately, my despair at the stupidity of humanity exceeds my fury, whereas the opposite once obtained. Shall I bother to point out the obvious? All right, once more into the breach. This post will be more indirect than it needs to be, but I can only overcome my sense of the inherent futility of it all by creeping up on the subject sideways.

Computers represent everything, including numbers, using bits. Each bit is either a one or a zero. One and zero are not the only numbers we would like to represent: two and three and five hundred million are all nice too. To represent other numbers, computers use several ones and zeros at a time. This is called binary notation:

11010110

represents the number 214. Binary notation works more or less like the decimal notation that everyone's familiar with. In decimal, you interpret a number by multiplying each successive digit from right to left by an increasing power of ten, so 214 = (2 * 10²) + (1 * 10¹) + (4 * 10⁰). In binary, you interpret the bits by multiplying by successive powers of two, so that the rightmost bit is multiplied by 1 (2⁰), the next-to-rightmost bit is multiplied 2 (2¹), and so on, up to the leftmost bit, which is multiplied by 2^n-1, where n is the number of bits in your string. In the above case, because there are eight bits, the leftmost bit represents 2⁷, or 128. Summing up, 128 + 64 + 16 + 4 + 2 = 214.

Note that the leftmost bit is vastly more important than the rightmost bit. If you twiddle the rightmost bit of 11010110, you get the string

11010111

which corresponds to 215. That's pretty close to 214. If you twiddle the leftmost bit, you get the string

01010110

which corresponds to 86. That's pretty far from 214. Programmers call the leftmost bit the most significant bit; we call the rightmost bit the least significant bit.

As the size of your string grows linearly larger, the difference between the significance of the most significant bit and the least significant bit grows exponentially larger. With a 16-bit string, the difference is about about thirty-three thousand to 1. With a 32-bit string, the difference is about 2 billion to 1.

The concept is suggestive, and programmers readily adapt it metaphorically to other subjects. In most decisions in life, it's important to get the most significant bits exactly right, and much less important to get the least significant bits exactly right. Err on the most significant bit in the quantity of your jet's fuel, and you're making a "water landing" in the middle of the Atlantic. Err on the least significant bit and nobody will notice.

The ability to concentrate on the most significant bits is also called "having a sense of proportion".

Here, in what I consider roughly descending order of significance, are several "bits" of truth from the years 2002-2007:

• America should not have invaded Iraq.
• Congress should not have given Bush authority to invade Iraq at his sole discretion.
• Invading Iraq without a UN mandate hinders America's diplomatic efforts, which are crucial to antiterrorism and nuclear non-proliferation policy.
• Given its failure to establish a stable state in Afghanistan, the Bush administration could not be trusted to handle the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
• Invasion of Iraq and its subsequent destabilization fuel anti-American sentiment and provide a propaganda bonanza for violently radical Islamist movements all over the world.
• Saddam Hussein's WMD program had not made significant progress towards either nuclear weapons or mass casualty biological weapons.
• The doctrine of preventative war does not suffice to justify the Iraq War.
• ...
• ...
• ...(several thousand more bits)...
• ...
• As a companion to coffee, key lime pie is superior to blueberry pie.
• Absolute isolationism and absolute pacifism are philosophically unsound.
• The Beyoncé Knowles song "Deja Vu" was produced by chart-topping super-producer Rodney Jenkins.
• Theoretically speaking, the doctrine of preventative war might someday suffice to justify some hypothetical war.
• ...

One can summarize Megan McArdle's point (and Kevin Drum's point here) as follows: "Some leftists were wrong about the least significant bits on the Iraq War; therefore, the arguments of anti-war advocates remain no more credible than those of people who were wrong about the most significant bits."

Of course, stated this way, nobody would dare make such an argument. Obviously, a decision procedure that leads to correct answers in the most significant bits is strictly preferable to one that gets the most significant bits wrong but the least significant ones right. Arguing otherwise is transparently stupid. So former hawks take a circuitous route that's no less stupid, but slightly less transparent. By filling the conversation with angels-dancing-on-the-heads-of-pins arguments about absolute isolationism and absolute pacifism and preventative war, McArdle and Drum hope to divert readers' attention to the least significant bits and induce the illusion that the most significant bits are not, in fact, far more significant.

And I suspect that McArdle and Drum even believe that they're talking about important subjects, despite the fact that virtually nobody actually believes in absolute isolationism or absolute pacifism, or that preventative war can never be justified. If you're arguing that "sometimes war can be justified", you're arguing with Quakers and half-mad hermits who live alone in the woods. To pretend otherwise requires massive cognitive dissonance, or a completely unprincipled and remorseless willingness to erect straw men, or both.

Of course, pundits have ample reason for cognitive dissonance. Pundits blow hot air around for a living. Their sense of self-worth depends on the belief that such vigorous thermoconvection makes them better qualified to judge matters of import than the hoi polloi, who rely on simple rules of thumb, like "War Is Bad". It literally does not compute in their minds that some shaggy dumbass off the street with a picket sign could have better judgment than, say, a professional writer for the Economist or the Washington Monthly.

But "War Is Bad" is a pretty good rule, because in the vast majority of practical cases, nonviolent action leads to better outcomes than war. "War Is Bad" gets the most significant bit right far more often than the punditological prestidigitation of which McArdle et al. are so fond. If all liberal (and "libertarian") hawks had shouted from the rooftops in 2002 that "War Is Bad" instead of the pseudo-nuanced bullshit they actually said, it would have strictly improved objective outcomes for the nation.

But rather than learn from this experience, McArdle's looking around for excuses to ignore the lesson. As an individual, of course, McArdle barely matters at all, but she's representative of a whole equivalence class of formerly hawkish intellectuals who want to emerge from this debacle without troubling themselves to rethink a single assumption.

Hence my despair and fury. The stupidity, the arrogance, the willful blindness; and these people will not be called to account. If anything, they'll be rewarded.

"Do you want America to win in Iraq?"

Apparently this is the latest sound-bite for Republicans trying to defend the Bush Administration --- see this Oct. 27 Lynne Cheney interview...

Well, right, but what is CNN doing running terrorist tapes of terrorists shooting Americans? I mean, I saw Duncan Hunter ask you a very good question and you didn't answer it. Do you want us to win?

...and O'Reilly in this Oct. 27 Letterman interview...

O'Reilly: But they don't want to hear about the bad world that we live in. It's an evil world that we live in. Let me ask you something. And this is a serious question. Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?

...and O'Reilly again on the The View Oct. 18...

O'REILLY: Hold it, hold it, hold it. Want America to win in Iraq, by the way?

O'DONNELL: I don't think it's possible.

O'REILLY: Do you want, do you --

O'DONNELL: I think it's an ill-thought-out plan and I think we should get out of that situation before Americans are killed. Out. Out of Iraq.

O'REILLY: Do you want America to win in Iraq?

JOY BEHAR (co-host of The View): What does it mean to win?

O'DONNELL: I want America to be what the founding fathers wanted it to be, a democracy, where we the people --

O'REILLY: OK. So you don't want America to win in Iraq.

The clarion call has been sounded, the marching orders have been given, and all the little troopers across America are no doubt repeating this mindless sound bite --- "Do you want America to win?" --- even as we speak.

The proper sound-bite response to this sound bite is: Yes, and I want the Mets to win the World Series this year too. But that train has left the station, and we were not on board.

Bonus additional sound bite, in case you don't like that one: Yes, I want America to win. I also like puppies and apple pie. But none of those things has anything to do with continuing the war in Iraq.

The United States has already lost in Iraq, in the only sense that matters: we have failed disastrously in every single one of our war aims. The Bush administration's holding out because it cannot admit failure, and it knows that if it delays long enough then the next administration will come in and the failure can then be blamed on them. As long as America does not withdraw from Iraq under his watch, the President can continue to indulge in the delusion that history will judge him kindly. Or, in other words, the United States continues to spend untold blood and treasure, more or less, to protect George W. Bush's frail self-esteem. A noble cause, to be sure, but one wonders if the effort is proportionate to the results.

Surviving a tour of duty

Josh Marshall and Atrios are both suggesting that young, healthy conservatives who support the war ought to enlist. Marshall's quotes ("Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that.") are especially damning.

So, this prompted me to wonder: how big a gamble, exactly, does a person run by enlisting in the military today?

Well, there are about 170,000 US troops deployed in southwest Asia; this includes those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as supporting forces elsewhere in the region. There have been about 1,738 deaths and 13,074 injuries since the Iraqi invasion. One might be tempted, naïvely, to conclude that there's about 1% probability of death and 10% probability of injury, but that's not right, because in the 28 months since the March 2003 invasion far more than 170,000 troops have been rotated through Iraq and Afghanistan. Salon's Mark Benjamin reports that "well over 1 million US troops" have gone to war since the initial invasion of Afghanistan. The DoD's casualty reports for Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) yield 1,854 deaths and 13,337 wounded. So, naïvely, we obtain 1,854 / 1,000,000 = 0.001854, or about a 0.2% chance of dying.

But that assumes that the probability of death has been constant since the invasion of Afghanistan, which probably isn't the case. Peacekeeping operations in Iraq today, for example, probably have a different casualty rate than the initial invasion of Afghanistan. So, to obtain a better estimate, I use this page's claim that the average tour of duty in Iraq, to date, has been about 320 days, or about 10.5 months. Then I sum the monthly casualty data for the past 12 months (I assume the past year most closely resembles the expected casualty rate over the next year), yielding a total of 876 deaths, or 73 deaths per month. Dividing by the 170,000 serving in southwest Asia in any given month, your probability of dying in any given month will be 0.000429, which means your chance of survival will be 0.99957; raising this to the 10.5 power yields a tour-of-duty probability of survival of 0.9955, yielding a probability of dying over a tour of duty in southwest Asia of: 0.45%.

Of course, this is a pretty crude estimate. If you're an infantryman in Mosul, then your probability of dying will be higher; if you're stationed in Kuwait, then it will be much, much lower. Those who enlist now will probably be sent somewhere in Iraq, where people are most desperately needed. Still, 170,000 troops is a lot, and your probability of being one of the roughly eight hundred who will die during your tour of duty is pretty small.

Now, given the awfulness of the potential outcome, this probability is nothing to shake a stick at, but we should be clear that those who support the Iraq War, but refuse to enlist, are not fleeing from a certain or even likely death sentence. They are fleeing from a combination of hardship and calculated gamble which they have no problem inflicting on others. For the overwhelming majority of US personnel in the Global War on Terror (as the DoD calls it), service to the country consists of a couple years of hard duty and sacrifice, no more --- after which they go back to serving their careers, families, and communities again. I'm not sure whether this makes chickenhawks more hypocritical or less, but there you have it.