Michael Kinsley tries to figure out just what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq. Unfortunately, I think he gets it wrong.
Bush's Ulterior Motive - Could it be oil? Maybe, but what about oil? By Michael Kinsley: How has an attack on the United States by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan led us to war against Iraq? Why are nuclear weapons in Iraq worth a war but not nuclear weapons in North Korea? For most skeptics about Gulf War II (including me), the Bush administration's failure to answer these two questions sincerely or even plausibly, let alone convincingly, is central to our doubts.
This isn't entirely reasonable. The battle could be worth joining even though George W. is unable to explain why. The 9/11 pretext may be phony without necessarily invalidating the whole exercise. As for Iraq versus North Korea, following the right policy in one place is better than following the wrong policy in both. There are worse things in this world than logical inconsistency.
Furthermore, it is hard to dismiss the official reasons for this war as disingenuous without some theory about what the ulterior motive or unspoken war aim might be. George W. Bush is not taking the nation into war to avenge his father or as a "wag the dog" strategy to win re-election, as Bush's more cynical opponents have charged. He deserves more credit than that. Nor is he planning to conquer and occupy Iraq in order to bring human rights to the Iraqi people or start a chain reaction of democracy throughout the Middle East, as he and his supporters have lately augmented the official war aims. He doesn't deserve that much credit...
In my opinion, Michael Kinsley falls prey to one of the normal human cognitive biases: to assume that the actions of whatever thing you are studying are guided by a human mind. This anthropomorphization is very common to humans, and has been for a very long time. It has clear evolutionary advantages. To assume that something is dumber than it is is very risky if that something is dangerous. To assume that something is smarter than it is--of human-level intelligence, even if it is a wildcat or a wolf or a skunk or a thunderbolt or the ocean--is not very dangerous. Hence, I believe (in my crackpot evolutionary psychology way) our default model of everything--forests, animals, rivers, et cetera--is that its actions are such as would make sense if it were guided by a human-level intelligence.
Kinsley applies this to the Bush Administration.
But the Bush Administration is not a sentient being with human-level intelligence. The Bush Administration is a set of warring bureaucratic factions with an unqualified ultimate decision maker perched at its top. This has happened before: remember the early years of the Reagan Administration, when it faced foreign-policy problems like the Argentine attack on the British-settled Falklands and couldn't decide what to do? Remember the Carter Administration?
Whenever you have a group of feuding bureaucrats--however smart they might be--with an unqualified ultimate decision maker/referee at the top, it is downright mistaken to analyze the decisions taken as if they were made by a human-level intelligence with consistent purposes.
What happens, instead, is that the smart people with strong views who head each of the bureaucratic fiefs start to hate each other. They remember all the times that the unqualified ultimate decision maker (let's abbreviate that UUDM) decided for the other guy on spurious and silly grounds. They turn their attention to trying to manipulate the UUDM--figure out how to press his hot buttons, how to get him to stop listening to the other guy. They abandon any sustained campaign of educating their boss for one of feeding him propaganda. The UUDM soon becomes even more unqualified as what was a slow process of substantive education by his subordinates turns into one of pressing his hot buttons repeatedly.
This is what happened during Jimmy Carter's administration as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance fought for primacy. The net effect was that U.S. foreign policy became completely random, as Carter would sometimes decide for one and sometimes for another on grounds that nobody but Carter could grasp. This was not a good way for things to be.
That's what's going on now. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and company want to take out Saddam Hussein. They have long wanted to take out Saddam Hussein. They have convinced Bush that he wants to take out Saddam Hussein. They don't particularly care why Bush thinks he wants to take out Saddam Hussein. They just want it done. And to get it done, they need to keep Bush convinced that Saddam Hussein has or will soon have weapons of mass destruction that he will use against the United States if we do not remove him quickly.
Posted by DeLong at March 6, 2003 04:04 PM
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