The Folly of Fools (40 page)

A classic case of overconfidence was based in considerable part on deeply held racist attitudes by the British toward Turkish people in general and their army in particular. The notion that any and all British troops must be superior to their Turkish counterparts was widespread throughout all levels of British society, and the commander at the disastrous Suvla Bay invasion believed that British soldiers must win every time because they were superior to Turks in such well-defined traits as “ideals” and “joy in battle.” The British soldier was worth several dozen Turks, he declared, though the actual statistics of the battle suggest the reverse, one Turk worth about ten British when fighting on Turkish soil.

THE 2003 US WAR ON IRAQ

From the outset, the US war on Iraq in 2003 was drenched in deceit and self-deception. Using the false pretext of 9/11, it was a war of choice and aggression apparently designed for control of oil and related economic assets, as well as to build a regional power base and to support its joined-at-the-hip ally, Israel. It was of course sold under patently false pretenses. If the world survives, this war will surely be taught as a textbook case of a colossal military blunder entrained by deceit and self-deception.

One nice feature is how much of the internal deliberations are already known to us so that the underlying processes can be studied in detail. Although as usual, overconfidence was a key factor, another was the one we have seen so vividly with NASA (see Chapter 9). When you are selling a lousy product under false pretenses, you do not wish to hear about the downside. This was not a war in which the adversary needed to be fooled or in which capturing the capital and routing the enemy could be in any kind of doubt. So there was little or no self-deception to deceive the enemy on this point—all of the self-deception was directed toward internal and international consumption and had to do with the aftermath of this action and its beneficent effects, for which no rational planning was seen as either necessary or desirable, turning a blunder into a catastrophe.

As has well been said, if Iraq’s major exports were avocados and tomatoes, the United States would have been nowhere near the country. Of course, this had to be denied, but two small facts alone symbolize the truth. When looting broke out in Baghdad within days of US arrival, the United States did nothing to defend the treasures of this great civilization, libraries and museums of immense value (despite repeated pleas from the relevant Iraqis), but they did station guards in front of the oil ministry (of trivial importance even to the oil industry). Likewise, before all hell broke loose in Iraq, the United States announced that any country that did not participate in the invasion would be frozen out of bids for oil reconstruction and redevelopment projects. Nothing was said about the avocado industry.

The war’s rationale was based on two unlikely falsehoods: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including nuclear warheads, and that he had somehow been involved in perpetrating 9/11. Evidence, however feeble, was organized to support both claims that were then widely trumpeted as true. Was the administration lying or simply mistaken? A very nice linguistic analysis suggests lying. When making statements about the (in fact missing) WMDs or Iraq’s (in fact nonexistent) connection to bin Laden, the statements showed the classic signs of deception we saw in Chapter 1 (compared to statements on neutral subjects made by the same people). That is, the first-person pronoun (“I,” “we”) was sharply reduced, the better to reduce personal responsibility. Exclusive words (“although it was raining”) were also reduced, the better to avoid complexity, cognitive load, and the need to remember. Negative words were increased, perhaps due to denial or even unconscious guilt. The only variable that ran in an unexpected way was action words. These were reduced, perhaps because planned action was then being denied. It is notable that the linguistic features predicted lying better in real life than in the lab—just as expected, since the consequences of lying in the lab are usually trivial compared to those of lying on the international stage.

These falsehoods and the underlying aggressive logic of the war also entrained a series of self-deceptions with very unfortunate consequences. Chief among these was the denial of the enormity of the undertaking and the need for careful, adequate advance preparation, including the use of far more troops on the ground. An outline of the key events goes as follows.

The war was decided on very quickly, with a minimum of deliberation. Although “regime change” in Iraq was declared official US policy in 1998, no planning for an invasion seems to have occurred prior to 9/11. Iraq, in turn, had nothing to do with this event—indeed Saddam Hussein was more anti–bin Laden than was the United States. Nevertheless, the US government immediately turned its attention to Iraq. Bush asked counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke and others to gather any evidence of Iraqi complicity, and the next day (September 12) Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made a revealing remark. “Afghanistan,” he said, “has no targets worth bombing, while Iraq has many.” Presumed translation: Afghanistan has no resources worth coveting, while Iraq has them in abundance. Within weeks, lower-level Pentagon generals knew that the United States intended to attack Iraq and that an ambitious five-year plan had been drawn up for the successive attack of a series of countries
after
Iraq: Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally (the prize) Iran. Under one popular neoconservative version, the inspirational example of Iraqi freedom would lead to a domino effect, similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall, causing many of the above countries to embrace democracy and the United States without the need for invasion. The immediate stimulus for all of this cogitation was an attack on the United States emanating from Afghanistan.

Here was an imperial fantasy to fit the full grandeur of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. In a unipolar world, the United States is now an empire, the greatest ever, and an empire creates its own reality, something people in the “reality-based” world do not appreciate. The United States will seize on 9/11 as a pretext to launch a series of interconnected, aggressive wars with lightning speed and increasing beneficial effects on themselves and others, including those being invaded. Here self-deception is directed at the nation and the world. The more we are convinced by our fantasy of imperial action, the more easily we can unite ourselves and others in pursuing this fantasy. But fantasies, as we have seen, are intrinsically dangerous—we do not wish to hear information, however important and true, that would disturb the fantasy.

Six weeks after the attack from Afghanistan, in mid-November 2001 a secret, formal order was given by President Bush to the secretary of defense to initiate detailed planning for the invasion of Iraq. Within months, resources and personnel were being moved from Afghanistan to just outside Iraq. The United States decided to go to war very quickly and then maintained a long (and unconvincing) public posture that war was the very last resort. As we know, this decision had a catastrophic effect on the future of Afghanistan—the second US abandonment in twenty years, with effects reverberating to this day. Psychologists long ago showed that when we are deliberating a decision—such as whom to marry or what job to take—we are willing to consider contrary evidence and to evaluate alternatives rationally, that is, with reference to benefits and costs. But once we have decided—to marry Susie, or take that job in Beirut—we no longer wish to hear about the choices not made or the possible downside to the decision we have made. We are now in the instrumental phase; we are carrying out our decision. By deciding within hours to attack Iraq, on entirely fictional grounds, with hardly any follow-up appraisal, the period of rational decision making was truncated to nothing at all. Once the decision was made, not only were alternatives no longer embraced, but there was no appetite to hear any evidence regarding the potential costs—the downside to this whole enterprise. Quite the contrary, there was active avoidance of any such evidence, while seeking out the flimsiest kind of evidence to hype the upside.

In the process, the United States easily imagined that the invasion was seen as good for the Iraqi people. The United States will naturally act in the interest of the Iraqis, who will appreciate this fact, so the United States will be seen as liberators and not occupiers. This was backed up by such reliable informants as “Curveball” and the notorious con artist Ahmed Chalabi. Here the US thinkers were swallowed by their own self-deception—denying that this was an aggressive war to grab control of very valuable resources, they embraced the countervailing fallacy that they were doing this for everyone else’s benefit—ridding the world of the threat of nuclear war, weakening terrorists worldwide, and (especially when these rationalizations became implausible) freeing the Iraqi people of their longtime oppressor and our former dear ally, Saddam Hussein. American exceptionalism out there pulling off another exception.

The decision had to be sold to the larger country
.
This consisted of emphasizing that the goal was important and legitimate—preventing an imminent terrorist attack—as well as safe and inexpensive. There would be no casualties (or very few), asserted Bush to White House visitors days before the attack, and Paul Wolfowitz of the Pentagon assured Congress that the war would be inexpensive, perhaps on the order of a few billion dollars, that Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction, and that a modest number of soldiers could easily do the job. The war has cost more than four thousand US lives alone and its direct and indirect costs to the United States, including lifetime care for more than twenty thousand grievously wounded soldiers, exceed $2 trillion and counting. So much for a safe, inexpensive excursion into Iraq. As for WMDs, before the war UNSCOM (the UN organization tasked with investigating nuclear activity) had virtually proved their absence, and the occupation soon confirmed this. As Hans Blick, the chief UN inspector, later put it, “Could there be 100 percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero-percent knowledge of their location?”

A striking illustration of the power of denial in public opinion occurred in 2003–2004, some six months after searches for WMDs in Iraq turned up nothing. A strong split appeared in the US population over knowledge of this new—and apparently incontrovertible—evidence that there were no such things, WMDs being apparently nothing more than a US/UK fantasy used to justify invading another country. Democrats found it relatively easy to believe they had been lied to, and most knew about the new evidence. What was striking was that more than half the Republicans (the war party) had either not heard of the new evidence or had dismissed it out of hand and believed that WMDs had been found. With this strength of confirmation bias, you need merely state the lie of your particular group to get almost everybody aboard. And counterevidence ends up being cited as evidence.

Some people have argued that you can’t infer self-deception, that US spokespeople could simply be bald-faced liars, and that is indeed a general problem when trying to interpret official behavior, but I do not think this is plausible here. Some exaggeration surely the actors were aware of, but did any of them imagine the scale of the disaster they were producing? Did Wolfowitz appear before Congress conscious that the war might easily cost more than $1 trillion, with no known economic benefit (or indeed any other kind) while killing more than a hundred thousand Iraqis and displacing from their country an additional four million? Seems doubtful. Of course, it could simply be a mistake—computational error—or a symptom of underlying mental illness or whatnot. By definition, one can’t prove self-deception through examining people’s behavior alone, but I find the notion of simple, unbiased “error” naive on its face. Wolfowitz and others at the top practiced one of the most elementary forms of self-deception: they made sure they were not exposed to information that conflicted with their optimistic fantasies.

It is certain that among the decision-makers, little effort was made to learn relevant information about ruling Iraq once the invasion succeeded. No national intelligence estimate was made on the conditions to be expected during and after the war, yet such estimates are routinely produced for a large range of less important (and certain) contingencies (such as invading Bolivia). The CIA began war-game exercises in May 2002, to plan for what might happen after the fall of Baghdad, and people from the Defense Department attended the first of these sessions, but when their superiors found out, they were ordered not to attend again. The key is that postwar planning was seen as an obstacle to war itself. Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer in the CIA for both the Near and Far East, points out that no one had any appetite for such assessments and gives two general reasons:

Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much. The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the selling of the war.

These are the two great drivers of self-deception: overconfidence and active avoidance of any knowledge of the potential downside to one’s decisions. The contrast with World War II is instructive. Before the United States even entered that war, teams at the Army War College were studying what went right and wrong when Germany was occupied after the previous world war. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, an entire School of Military Government was created at the University of Virginia whose mission was to plan for the occupation of both Japan and Germany. But of course this was much closer to a just war and was designed and thought through without the need to sell the war under false pretenses likely to induce self-deception. Injustice always requires justification and special pleading, justice less so.