In my Thanksgiving post I said, “Bring them home.” I meant the troops in Iraq, in case that wasn’t clear.
Some people were puzzled that I have an opinion on this subject. Your puzzlement is justified, given that I often say I don’t understand complicated situations. And Iraq is clearly a complicated situation.
Or is it?
Today I’m going to talk about how to make decisions in general. I’ll use the Iraq war as an example, but the focus is on how you would make a decision when faced with lots of unknowns.
I have a rule I like to use. Let’s say there are a hundred important factors to consider in a given decision. 99 of the factors are impossible to predict, based on the fact that the experts are all over the map with their opinions. But let’s say one of the factors is easy to predict and important. I make my decision based on the one easy-to-predict factor and ignore the other 99.
Just to be clear, any choice that one makes in this hypothetical situation has a high likelihood of being wrong. You have no way of knowing the best path because there are 99 unfathomable factors. So while you can’t know the RIGHT decision, you can know the RATIONAL decision. And the rational decision is to follow the one factor you can predict and ignore the 99 you can’t.
I can imagine lots of exception to this rule. For example, if one of the 99 unfathomable factors is a risk of nuclear annihilation, you might want to treat that risk as a certainty and try to eliminate it. But in our messy real world, you often don’t know which decisions make the risk of nuclear annihilation greater and which ones lessen it. It’s fundamentally unknowable. Is the world safer or more dangerous now that both India and Pakistan have nukes? There’s no way to know.
You might also be seduced into thinking that your amazing brain can predict the unpredictable. So you peer into the 99 unpredictable factors and somehow assign a probability to each outcome. While this might work in some special cases, generally the approach is absurd. No one is that that good at assigning probability. The world is too messy.
And I can imagine a strictly financial decision where the outcome is thoroughly unpredictable but the potential payoff is huge. In that case, if you can afford to diversify your investments, it might make sense to give it a try.
Now consider Iraq. If we set a timetable for pulling out our troops, either entirely or to protected bases, no one knows what happens next. It might spark decades of intense civil war. It might force the Iraqis to settle things precisely to avoid the decades of intense civil war. It might free the majority to ruthlessly squelch the minority. Or the minority might prove through their terror attacks that defeat is impossible and therefore the only path to peace is to include them in the government in a more meaningful way.
Terrorists might find a haven in Iraq if we leave. Or maybe the Iraqis hate al-Qaeda almost as much as we do and would hunt them down once the common enemy (America) is removed.
Maybe the oil supply would be permanently damaged by ongoing civil war. Maybe not.
And so it goes. Iraq has its own 99 thoroughly unpredictable factors. But there is one factor we know for sure. As long as American forces occupy Iraq, there will be substantial American losses. That’s why the decision appears uncomplicated to me. While it’s impossible to know the RIGHT decision, since no one can see the future, it’s simple to know the RATIONAL decision. You should base your decision on the one factor that is both important and known: troop casualties.
Some have suggested that to leave before “the job is done” would dishonor the fallen. As cold as this will sound, past deaths should not be considered in decisions about the future. The past is the past. And if the dead could speak, they would warn you against dying for their benefit. Even so, the troops HAVE accomplished a lot for which they can be proud:
1. A dictator was removed.
2. America verified to 100% certainty that Iraq had no WMD (that’s a big deal in my book)
3. Iraq has been given an opportunity for democracy, even if it does not take hold.
4. Presumably we learned a lot that will help us fight terrorism.
While our execution of the after-war was a mess, the world can’t doubt our intent to make democracy work. We bled for it. But it only counts if we leave. Otherwise we are occupiers and the Iraqi government will appear to be our puppet.
There is also genuine concern for the fate of the Iraqis if we leave. Yet, according to this opinion poll, 7 out of 10 Iraqis want us to pull out.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf [no longer available]
And so the decision about leaving Iraq can be boiled down to this:
1. American troops are dying.
2. It’s impossible to know if national security is best served by staying or leaving.
3. 7 out of 10 Iraqis want us to leave.
4. We have accomplished all that we KNOW we can accomplish. Anything else is guessing.
5. Iraq diverts resources from our higher priorities.
It’s impossible to know the RIGHT answer about Iraq. But it has become simple to know the RATIONAL path. Unlike a financial investment, where you might be willing to invest in a high risk/reward situation, you can’t diversify war. If the payoff isn’t obvious and predictable, the rational thing to do is pull out and minimize troop casualties. Any other path is just guessing.
Your disagreement is invited.