Iraq in the Rear View Mirror

“Time to turn the page,” said President Obama on Aug. 31, “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over.”  While it still may be decades too early adjust the focus of the hindsight lens, I can’t help thinking about it.

In some alternative universe it never happened.  The response to 9/11 concentrated entirely on Al-Qaida in Afghanistan; the man-hunt began with a massive sweep from the Pakistan border West & North instead of from Kabul out—squeezing the toothpaste from the middle with the cap off and a slit at the bottom of the tube.  Or in another, the trigger was pulled with Bin-Laden in the scope at the time of the West African bombings; 9/11 was aborted and we deal with incidents like attempts to ignite one’s sneakers or blow up one’s underwear in a few news cycles.  All of this is fantasy, of course.

In our universe, decisions are made in a very risky mix of ambiguous information spiced with an overdose of wishful thinking.  We still do this, in economics, in social engineering and foreign policy and will continue to do so.  Maybe there is no alternative—fact and opinion more a chemical solution than a separable mixture of, say, salt & pepper.

So was there a rational, if erroneous, process that let us down the path to hold the broken pottery in the china shop?  I think there was, knowing full well that there are many who posit criminal intent as prime motivator.  I relegate that B-movie version to a corral adjacent to the ones holding the “Saddam was responsible for 9/11” herd, the alien corpses in formaldehyde at Area 51 congregation, and the LBJ ordered the hit on JFK crowd.  Sorry.

There was, to be sure, purposeful manipulation of information used to garner political support.  Alas, that is commonplace and un-eradicable, the only consolation being that there already is a circle in Hell (the 8th, I think) dedicated to these perpetrators.  But these were post-decision cosmetics to air-brush the blemishes; I am more interested in what predicated the decisions.

The WMD rationale was the one made most visible and most exaggerated by proponents once the decision was made.  I fell for it.  Heck, Colin Powell fell for it, and the manipulation of this noble man is a tragedy that should not be forgotten.  Still, there is some logic to place the prospect of WMD’s, in some proportion, on the decision balance.

In it’s simplest form the decision matrix is a 2x2 array with columns labeled “invade” & “not invade” and rows “WMD’s available (to Saddam)” and “not available.”  There were four scenarios to evaluate: invade/he has them; invade/he doesn’t; don’t invade/he has them; and don’t invade/he doesn’t.

We now know that the evidence at the time that he had them was low; that is the probability that he had them was low—but not zero.  He certainly had chemical weapons at one time and used them.  That he didn’t use them ’92 should give pause to the idea that there was any significant stockpile left then.  A decade later… ?  As for nuclear weapons, the probability that he had access to a thermonuclear device was nil, but the technology for a dirty bomb had to be considered.  Biological weapons too were a finite, if miniscule probability.  Nothing was “certain” in 2001-03. 

So the “best-case” scenarios were: (1) don’t invade and there would be no WMD consequences (likely); or (2) invade and pre-empt WMD use (unlikely).  But worst-case scenarios must be given weight beyond their probability—think deep water drilling, dykes holding, global warming, etc.  Of those, (3) invade, find no WMD threat, and an occupation quagmire; or (4) don’t invade and a dirty bomb makes its way in an athletic shoe container to Port Newark on San Pedro, no. 4 is the most unacceptable, trumping probability estimates.  Now cue the propaganda machine.

But the WMD impact on the ultimate decision was a fly on an elephant’s back, IMO.  The greater miscalculation was a gross misunderstanding of the psyche of Iraqi society.  The only Iraqis I know (a dozen or more) are all ex-pats—secular Muslim professionals: academics, MD’s, engineers, etc. This is exactly the segment of Iraqi society that the Wolfowitz’s of the world were conversant with.  They uniformly compared Saddam to Hitler, his sons, Itchy & Scratchy, to Goebbels & Himmler and with great justification in first hand witness of persecution and extermination.  The Mukhabarat (note: not the Republican Guard) was more Gestapo than CIA (though international assassination was in their bailiwick) and Wlfowitz in particular had often expressed that humanitarian handwringing over a holocaust event should take a back seat to active intervention. 

What these ex-pats also claimed was that with the yoke of Saddam lifted, there was a critical mass of Iraqi professionals—Muslims not adverse to modernity—ready, willing and capable of administering the physical & social infrastructure of their country.   Whether this was merely delusional, or the infrastructure was too badly damaged for anyone to administer, or the nitty-gritty of “security” was not in the legerdemain of this class, or any combination of the above, clearly this was a failed assumption of monumental proportion—outstripping by far any erroneous WMD estimates. 

These ex-pats weren’t being intentionally deceitful and were uniformly flabbergasted at the resulting chaos.  Non state-sponsored sectarian violence is something they had never witnessed.  While some blame foreign insurgents sewing chaos for chaos’ sake, most I know admit now there was another, darker, energy compressed by Saddam’s boot and released when he was shoved off the vent.  And they regret the assumption that tipped the scales in the decision matrix; that made the more probable “worst case” (invade/no WMD) more palatable while leaving the gravitas of terror weapon export, however unlikely, in the forefront.  Rational process was betrayed by a false conditional: “If P then Q” is always true when P is false.  

Any lessons learned?  Probably there are many, including a number of wrong ones.  One candidate might be: when considering worst-case scenarios, put at the top of the lists the possibility that your assumptions are wrong.  Rumsfeld’s attempt to distinguish between what “we know we don’t know” and what “we don’t know we don’t know” became SNL fodder, but he was spot on—whether he knew it or not.

 

C.C Youngren's Archives

Post Your