Being Neal Sample
Sort of like "Being John Malkovich," but for my own head.
What value constancy of purpose?
Hindsight's 20/20, and we're now sure that going into Iraq to stop a WMD program wasn't necessary. But stepping back a bit, there has been a real shift in the criteria by which we judge the “war.” Allowing this shift in assessment creates an incredibly sticky situation.

In our determination of whether or not we should have gone into Iraq, we have moved from favoring a Type II to a Type I error. At the outset of the war, the intelligence was quite shaky. Some was (perhaps) fabricated, much was dated, and even more was incomplete. We can blame myriad causes: lack of human assets in the region, over-reliance on information from biased Iraqi ex-pats, information silos between agencies, weak data from allies, etc. We are sure of one thing: the picture was incomplete, and so we risked making a mistake by either invading or NOT invading.

However, regardless of where the quality of intelligence blame sits, there seems to still been a fundamental change on which side we were willing to err on (from war day 0 to today). Moving back in time, ever closer to 9/11, the US had a mindset that favored the Type II error with respect to Iraq; we were much more willing to go in and remove Saddam even if we were later proven to be wrong. We were much more ready to “err on the side of caution” (a Type II error). Now that we have a high level of certainty that there are no WMDs currently in Iraqi, we have the luxury of saying that we shouldn’t have gone in unless we were more certain. And therein is the fundamental issue: what do we do when we lack certainty?

Being wrong if Iraq had WMDs would have been a Type I error, and probably incredibly costly to our interests. Do were favor that Type I of error today? No, of course not… we’re not willing to accept another WTC or our own version of the Russian disaster. But we have to make a real decision to favor one error type over the other (with probabilities, we cannot have our cake and eat it too).

Anyway, without constancy of rationale, every action will be subject to near-term revisionist history. Think about if we’d found a vibrant underground chemical weapons program in Iraq (like they previously had, producing weapons similar to those used against Iran)… if we’d found such a thing, everyone would be lauding this war. And that’s a real danger: outcomes based assessment.

If we’re going to come to a meaningful answer about Iraq, specifically, and preemptive strikes in general, we cannot look through a constantly refocusing lens. We must be willing to accept more of a Type I or Type II error at the beginning, and that same Type I or Type II error at the end. Without this, we’re lost in the shifting sands of outcome-based assessments… never knowing if we’re doing the right thing until after the thing has been done. Phooey on that.
2004-10-26 19:02:51 GMT
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