Revisiting the Iraq War

John Psmith reviews a book from 2019

John Psmith writes,

Mazarr very huffily accuses Cheney of having “contempt for democracy,” but apparently what this refers to is Cheney’s habit of reaching down through many layers of the bureaucracy to get the information or answers he wanted directly, or to make something happen. This, apparently, violated “the norms,” and Mazarr is very upset about it, because he thinks Cheney should have, I dunno, stayed in his lane and allowed himself to be manipulated by the Deep State like every other politician, I guess…

Of course this reminded me of nothing so much as Paul Graham’s writings on “Founder Mode.” Everybody who’s run an institution, large or small, knows that as the institution grows, the quality of the information the leader gets is worse and worse. Every bit of data gets padded and massaged and reformulated as it makes its way up through layers of yes-men and of honest men with agendas. The only solution, as countless CEOs and presidents and generals and monarchs have discovered, is to “go deep,” reaching down through all the protesting layers of middle managers to find out the ground truth for yourself. The middle layers hate it when you do this, and they hated Cheney for it, but this is a good way to get results — and alas (since he would become the biggest booster of the war), it worked for Cheney.

Decade before Paul Graham, Anthony Downs and Gordon Tullock identified the problem of information loss and bureaucratic misalignment. I reviewed Downs here.

My favorites lines from Psmith:

nobody ever actually made a decision to invade Iraq. The system as a whole “decided” in the sense that that was the outcome, but this was emergent behavior, like an ant colony discovering a source of food. At no point did any human being sit down and say, “okay, now we’re going to debate the pros and cons of invading Iraq,” and then make a decision that the benefits outweighed the costs. Instead a vast multitude of people — with different goals, presuppositions, and beliefs about the world — interacted over a period of years, and at the end of it an invasion occurred. At some point there was a phase change. At some point everybody started assuming that somebody must have made a decision that we were really doing this, but in fact nobody had. Does a molecule of water decide to join a flood?

The Vietnam war emerged similarly. Nobody said, “Let’s plan on sending more and more troops and try turning bombing campaigns on and off.” That is just what the Johnson Administration ended up doing.

one big downside of the US government as a whole making the decision to invade Iraq “unconsciously” is that it was never actually debated or discussed in blunt term. This meant no hashing it out in a big room, no arguments sharpening each other, no big list of pros and cons, and, crucially, no big list of risks and how to mitigate them. Nobody even knew what the invasion would look like. Were we going in with a light footprint and knocking out Saddam, then leaving again? Were we engaging in a long-term occupation? Were we just bombing? Was the goal to free the Iraqi people? To fight al-Qaeda? To get rid of the WMD? Nobody knew the answers to these questions. Or perhaps everybody knew the answers, but they all had different ones in mind.

I disagree with Psmith that Iraq deserves first place in the list of American foreign policy disasters. I still vote for Vietnam. But it is interesting, and if you read Psmith’s entire review you will see this clearly, how much they had in common. Not just the unsystematic way we went about going to war. But the sheer moral hubris. We know that we are doing the right thing for the people, so everything is bound to work out well. Different culture? What’s that?

The American foreign policy establishment, with its moral hubris, comes across as deeply flawed. And Donald Trump comes across as wiser.