Anti-Climacus

LINK: Megan McArdle has an interesting post on the problems of hindsight in attempting to judge past decisions. The particular case here is the Iraq war. Now, my reasons for supporting the war were different than most peoples', so hindsight doesn't really change my judgment of whether invading was morally and politically acceptable. Since then, things have gone, to put it mildly, not so well; but I have an academic hunch that part of this is because the great majority of political and legal writing on intervention focuses on the justification for the immediate decision to intervene (that is, it shouldn't be surprising that no one in the administration had a plan for what to do beyond the immediate military operations: almost no one ever does). Anyway, the good excerpt:

"Many of the doves seem to be reconstructing their memory of why they objected to the war, crediting themselves with having predicted that the invasion would fail in this way. Many hawks are also reconstructing their memories to make themselves less hawkish. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.

The lesson that I can unequivocally take out of this is: do not be so confident in your ability to read other people and situations. Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future.

At the same time, though, in a similar situation this shouldn't necessarily make me listen to the hawks [I think she means 'doves,' but I'm not sure] next time. North Korea was behaving exactly like a country that had WMD, and it turned out that this was because they had them. What the doves would like to see the hawks do--"I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, I am a stupid idiot, you are a brilliant figure with god-like omniscience"--is no better a guide to future decisionmaking than ignoring the fact that you were seriously wrong about the Iraq invasion. They are both ways of being completely stupid, not that this has stopped anyone."