Mea Culpa, Mea Minima Culpa
The other day, Chris Roach, in comments here, tried to pour balm upon the waters:
Supporters of the war, who have changed their mind, are often castigated for their earlier positions taken under different facts, as if changing one’s mind or adjusting one’s view is the worst of sins. And war critics are wrongly labeled as unpatriotic or defeatist, rather than supremely concerned for our fate as a nation.
I take his point. I’ve repeatedly claimed, at least, that I didn’t demand anyone “come crawling on their knees” when they decide that speculative, transformative war in Iraq was a bad idea after all. So you should seriously consider calling me a hypocrite when I say that there’s something about Cato VP Brink Lindsey’s “Confessions of a Former (and Maybe Future) Hawk” that doesn’t sit right.
Lindsey is frank about admitting what he now considers to be factual errors and explaining his changed risk assessment:
First, on Iraq, my support for the invasion was based on the assumption of active biological and nuclear weapons programs. That assumption, of course, proved incorrect. I also failed to anticipate the Sunni insurgency that has been at the root of Iraq’s post-Saddam problems. And, perhaps most egregiously, I placed my trust in the Bush administration to assess the Iraqi threat accurately and do all within its power to make the occupation of Iraq a success. That trust, however foolishly offered, was badly betrayed.
and
What has changed, for me, since the spring of 2003 is the weight I assign to the relevant risks. In particular, I currently consider the threat of Islamist terrorism to be far less grave than I feared it to be in the wake of 9/11. Yes, it is a very real threat, and one that should be addressed with the utmost seriousness. But my best reading of the available evidence tells me that both the scale and the sophistication of anti-U.S. terrorist activity are currently rather limited. Consequently, I am less persuaded than before of the need for bold and risky moves against terror-sponsoring states.
It’s disarming when a man describes his own thinking with adverbs like “egregiously” and “foolishly,” and buried under a few layers of euphemism, the second paragraph can be read as a tacit admission that rank fear distorted his judgment. And when Lindsey says that, for now at least, he opposes going to war with Iran over its nuclear program, it’s a relief.
Some of the rest of the piece is a muddle. Lindsey
. . . can’t quite bring myself to wish Saddam back in power and, with the sanctions regime probably moribund by now, enjoying $75 a barrel oil and emboldened by having survived the Gulf War and its protracted aftermath. On the other hand, I certainly wish that the United States had not assumed responsibility for Iraq’s post-Saddam future.That mission was undertaken on the basis of totally erroneous expectations regarding its difficulty and without any Plan B in the event of unforeseen problems.
But like love and marriage, or horse and carriage, you can’t have the one - Saddam kicked out by US military force - without the other - US responsibility for Iraq’s post-Saddam future. And, as many of us have discussed previously, the political reality of Fall 2002 and Winter 2003 was that the US government could not be honest about the scope of the effort truly necessary, in terms of troops and time commitment, and still sell the war politically. The Administration had to have “erroneous expectations” to have the war at all. A reconsideration that doesn’t grapple with the impossibility of having it both ways is a reconsideration without the consideration part.
Still, that passage strikes me as ascribable to mere good-faith error on Lindsey’s part. We all make them. Too much of the rest of the piece smacks of positioning and an ugly kind of defensiveness. I think that both problems, mere error and defensiveness, flow from the same root cause.
Some excerpts:
The views I expressed were extremely controversial within Cato and the larger libertarian camp. Cato’s foreign policy scholars, reflecting the “orthodox” libertarian opposition to an interventionist foreign policy, strongly opposed the Iraq invasion. But for a minority of policy staffers at Cato, as well as many other libertarians, waiting for the other guy to take the first swing no longer seemed to make sense in a post-9/11 world.
and
Today, as before, I’m afraid I’m immune to the attractions of any grand foreign-policy abstractions, whether realist, idealist, or otherwise. And I’ve yet to find refuge in any bright-line rules on when military force is and isn’t called for. To my mind, international relations is a field that just isn’t amenable to much theoretical illumination.
So I muddle along, weighing the risks of action against the risks of inaction on a case-by-case basis.
and
But I stand prepared to flip-flop once again should changing circumstances warrant. In the words of Keynes (whom I don’t get to quote very often), “When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?”
The rhetoric here is self-congratulatory. Worse, it is self-congratulatory at the expense of people who were more right about Iraq than Lindsey himself. We are contemporary westerners. As such we know that anything “orthodox” (especially scare-quoted) is suspect. We know that “extremely controversial” is bold, and that being immune to the attractions of any grand abstractions is a hard-headed, can-do, pragmatic attitude for no-nonsense serious people to take. We know that the sorts of people who can’t “find refuge in bright-line rules” are brave, complex seekers with only their tragic sense of life for comfort. We even recognize that muddling along . . . on a case-by-case basis is not only refreshingly free of hidebound orthodoxy but (”muddling along”) disarmingly modest too. Top it off with that quote from Keynes and the picture is complete, a picture of a man whose intellectual odyssey from pushing pretty hard for a war gone spectacularly wrong to recognizing that maybe the country shouldn’t be so quick to attack other countries based on notions is a kind of Hero’s Journey through the thickets of American Pragmatism.
That’s bad enough. But worse is that every shine Lindsey takes to himself is shade cast on his theoretically quondam adversaries in the policy community. Cato’s foreign policy scholars (and other libertarian thinkers) were “orthodox.” By implication that are susceptible to “grand abstractions” and beholden to “bright-line rules.” They certainly don’t weigh risks on a case-by-case basis. They may not be ready to change their minds when the facts change. Unlike the economist who wandered into foreign policy seeking shelter from a sudden spate of explosions, these scholars of international relations somehow have the idea that their field is “amenable to . . . theoretical illumination.”
It needs to be repeated: these people were right. Lindsey’s rhetorical sleights (and slights!) would be merely unpleasant if they didn’t indicate that Lindsey may not have learned much after all. Specifically, he does not seem to have learned the true usefulness of libertarian theory to foreign policy. You can boil it as far down as a single sentence:
National security may indeed be a legitimate function of the state, but it is still the state when it does this.
Its component parts will still, per Buchanan, act to advance their own interests before anything else. Societies will still depend, per Hayek, on embedded webs of information invisible to the state, and state intervention - say, military occupation and reconstruction - will still tend to destroy the information it would, ironically, need to take into account to succeed. The unforeseen consequences of today’s intervention will still “necessitate” tomorrow’s new one. Political actors in a democracy still profit personally, in terms of power, status and even, if you are Richard Perle, money, from fostering a sense of crisis and exaggerated fear. The Press will be overly credulous in amplifying a sense of crisis and fear because crisis and fear sell papers.
None of the previous paragraph is, or should be, particularly abstruse or controversial among libertarians. That’s why those “orthodox” scholars at Cato and the Independent Institute and the cranky ideologues at Liberty and elsewhere saw the shipwreck of the Bush Doctrine before it hit the iceberg of Iraq. These are the same people who spent the 1990s warning that our contemporaneous level of international intervention made a major attack on US soil only a matter of time.
These are precepts one would like to see Brink Lindsey internalizing, because they’ve proven the most useful guide available to what has actually happened over the last 15 years. The flight from theory is, in this case, a flight from understanding. It is, ironically and contrary to what his piece suggests, a flight from true pragmatism. Because unless you keep the structural nature of the State foremost in mind when thinking about possible foreign policies, you can’t reliably distinguish between the necessary and the unnecessary, the practical and the impractical.
FOOTNOTE: For comparison, I suggest the reconsiderations of Neel Krishnaswami and Andrew Olmsted. Neither abases himself, but neither implicitly congratulates himself for his former views.
Comment by Anodyne —
July 29, 2006 @ 10:45 am
FWIW:
“The belief system defenses deployed in the Iraq debate bear suspicious similarities to those deployed in other controversies sprinkled throughout this book. But documenting defenses and the fierce conviction behind them serves a deeper purpose. It highlights why, if we want to stop running into ideological impasses rooted in each side’s insistence on scoring its own performance, we need to start thinking more deeply about how we think.”
Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know?
Comment by abc —
July 29, 2006 @ 1:31 pm
International trade and economics are immune to theoretical analysis. Some say a proposed steel tariff will hurt domestic steel consumers and create a calcified American steel industry that then lobbies for additional government protections. I say, what the hell, the world’s different after 9/11, let’s try it and find out, because, as Keynes once said, when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir?
Lindsey, preening with self-confidence even when he writes a mea culpa, knows enough about foreign affairs to be dangerous… to the Cato Institute. But not enough to be any help.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
July 29, 2006 @ 4:16 pm
This kind of piece is the reason why it doesn’t make sense to cognratulate anyone who is just turning against the war now. The last date at which anyone who could think could have reasonably turned against the war was about a year ago. Anyone doing so now is merely self-interested, and has shown that they are unable to fundamentally reconsider their premises. Lindsey was a sucker then and he remains one.
Comment by srv —
July 29, 2006 @ 6:33 pm
Yeah, uh, so y’all were right. But it’s not because you saw something we didn’t, it’s because you were just lucky…
Right.
Next it’ll be ”it’s not Bush Derangement Syndrome if you’re just coming around to reality now.”
Comment by Leonard —
July 29, 2006 @ 9:27 pm
That’s not strong enough. Sure, Lindsey could usefully learn that the state screws things up sometimes. Usually, even. And that’s an important lesson that libertarianism has to tell us. But while it is a clear and important lesson, its implications are not necessarily libertarian. To a Green Lantern statist, it just suggests the mainstream Democratic/Republican lesson: “we” need to try harder to gain control of the state, so we can do evil things better.
If people learn only one libertarian theory about war, I’d prefer this one:
War is the health of the state.
That’s all a libertarian needs to understand about war.
Comment by Henry —
July 29, 2006 @ 9:35 pm
Keynes, contra Brink;s argument, was rather harsh towards people who ”immune to the attractions of any grand foreign-policy abstractions, whether realist, idealist, or otherwise.” In his other, even more famous quote:
Which defunct international relations theorist is Brink the unwitting slave of?
Comment by Leonard —
July 29, 2006 @ 9:59 pm
Rich, if you read his piece, Lindsey doesn’t say when he turned. He says he’s been busy for the last three years. That he’s only publishing now is suggestive that only does he find his views strong enough to write down (as milquetoast as they are). But he might well have turned a year ago, and just not said anything.
Comment by Leonard —
July 29, 2006 @ 10:47 pm
On Keynes, I find that quote irritating. Sure, when a fact changes (and what does that mean? facts don’t change; only our perceptions of them), I change my view of that fact. But I do not change theory lightly.
This is the entire point of theory. It gives you a powerful lens with which to examine, and to organize, facts. Finding a contrary fact does not destroy a theory, even a theory allowing no such contradiction. All it does is let you know that the theory is not 100% correct. The contrary fact may induce you to adopt a new theory, but only if that other theory is demonstrably better.
Consider the Newtonian theory of gravity; a very great success (and still true in any situation where relativistic effects are small enough to be ignored). Physicists knew about several anomolies for centuries before Einstein. But this did not overthrow the theory, which was wildly successful in spite of a few inconvenient facts.
In that case, when they discovered, for example, the slow precession of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun the “facts changed” - and nobody did a thing. Nobody changed his mind, Mr. Keynes, for there was nothing better to change it to.
Back to the topic of war and libertarianism: we have a very clear theory stating that war is bad for liberty. Taxation to support huge standing armies is bad. Huge standing armies are themselves bad; they get used, or they find things to do on their own. Wars are bad. Wars induce socialism. War is just bad, bad, bad, for liberty, up, down, right and left.
We can look and see the pattern over and over and over, incessantly throughout history. So, we don’t need (and didn’t need in 2003) “facts” to know what would happen if the USA got in a war with Iraq. We knew it would be detrimental to liberty, as a theoretical matter - that is, prior to knowing any facts whatsoever about the specific course of the Iraq War.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. Libertarians — the ones who believe in our theory, anyway — knew that Iraq would be a blow to liberty before the war, before there were any facts known. Yes, we were proved right in retrospect as the facts about lack of WMD came out. But of course, the decisions to go to war, and what strategy to use, were not made in retrospect. Those decisions, like all decisions, were made in ignorance of the future. Only theory could have possibly informed the decisionmakers as to the factual outcome of their actions. That is why theory is powerful.
Theory allows us to predict the future facts, Brink. THAT IS WHY THEORY IS POWERFUL!
That is why Lindsey’s mea insignifica culpa is so irritating to me. Libertarians cannot be accused of having too little theory, in the main. So it’s not like Brink is going to lose friends by propounding libertarian ideas about war. Yet he does not. He prefers to “muddle through”, making mistake after bloody mistake, without the slightest appreciation for those not muddling who got it right before getting the USA into a quagmire.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
July 29, 2006 @ 10:53 pm
In particular, I currently consider the threat of Islamist terrorism to be far less grave than I feared it to be in the wake of 9/11.
So, pretty much, Atrios is right when he says this war was motivated by the bed-wetters. I’ve always said we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if we’d just bought every Red a pair of neuticals and some strapping tape.
From Lindsey’s post:
And a pony!
Comment by matthew hogan —
July 29, 2006 @ 11:17 pm
Jim -
Yep.
Comment by radish —
July 29, 2006 @ 11:23 pm
Huh. It didn’t seem anywhere near that bad to me. Either I’ve run out of irritation about this particular issue or else I really don’t give rat’s ass what Brink Lindsey thinks. Both I guess.
Even when people’s minima mea culpa irritated me it never seemed useful to do anything more than suggest that instead of sackcloth and ashes a bit of effort to do something constructive might be nice. Not that I might not have ripped into somebody now and then. But now it doesn’t even irritate me. Who cares? Everybody who enabled the Boy Prince and his vile courtiers can deal with their own conscience however they see fit, and I’m not under any obligation to listen to anyone whose judgment I don’t trust.
I will however point out that there is no way in hell that oil would be at $75 already if we hadn’t gone into Iraq. Particularly not if sanctions had been eased as he suggests. That part he obviously hasn’t thought through.
OTOH, Leonard, that 10:47 is a thing of beauty… (radish sniffs, wipes away a tear)
Comment by (Not that) Jim —
July 30, 2006 @ 12:26 am
It’s true, Leonard. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of something a very nice Objectivist lady once said: ”Thank God for Ayn Rand!” Poor Ayn was turning over in her grave I’m sure, but thank God you and Mr. Henley are keeping the standard aloft.
Comment by Frank —
July 30, 2006 @ 12:55 am
Am I the only one who finds the idea that oil would still be $75/barrel without the war, utterly ridiculous?
Comment by Barry —
July 31, 2006 @ 10:18 am
Brad DeLong had a review of one of Brink’s books a while back; I remember one part, where Brink was talking about government intervention being bad for the market. Singapore was an obvious exception; instead of admitting that nothing’s 100% certain, Brink called that government intervention good for the market, because it signalled the government’s interest in developing a market economy. (note: this is from memory).
At that point, I figured that Brink was not an honest man; this ’mea (itty-bitty) culpa’ is a nice piece of reinforcement.
Comment by Roach —
July 31, 2006 @ 10:28 am
One problem with a theory that is strongly interventionist or strongly noninterventionist, though, is that it will always be right some of the time ex post facto. Interventionists can always say, ah, but if we were more involved pre December ’41 we could’ve licked the Nazis earlier or avoided Soviet repression of Eastern Europe or prevented some easily-prevented disaster, such as the quick fix we provided to Liberia that we did not provide to Sierra Leone.
Noninterventionists can also point to a host of failed interventions, such as the disaster of World War I or the failed interventions in places like Vietnam or our current festering sore in Iraq.
What is needed is a good theory of (a) foreign policy goals, which I think libertarians lack consensus on, and (b) a good way to distinguish good from bad interventions.
I think the biggest lack on part one is whether the human rights of others overseas deserve any consideration and solidarity from the armed forces of free countries; that is, there is some dissensus on whether free nations owe it to nonfree nations to assist them in their movement towards a freer society.
And on the second point there is a more general dissensus on whether interventions of any kind can accomplish this or even the more prosaic goals of national security for our own country.
For these reasons, I don’t like the labeling of realisit or idealist foreign policy as grand theory divorced from reality. Neither is a theory that is particularly prescriptive. THey are simply tools, and over and under-inclusive tools at that, to guide one’s thinking. These theories, and theories under any other label, fail as they become too rigidly interventionist or noninterventionist. I don’t think either theoretical framework, nor one of ”interventionism” or ”noninterventionism,” provides enough useful guidance for actual foreign policy (perhaps no theory reall can).
I think lacking in most foreign policy discussions is a good discussion of the goals of foreign policy, which are too often taken for granted by the foreign policy establishment. I, for example, think some kind of rule of law and protection of property rights is far more important than ”democracy” in the developing world. I do not think we should stick our neck out for Israel, South Korea, or Taiwan, other than in an ad hoc way against truly common enemies. And I think preemptive strikes are sometimes appropriate when the costs of a later intervention are predictable and potentially massive.
As far as goals I’m jealously pro-American, not favoring itnerventions for Iraqi freedom nor abandonment of border security so we can secure the right of Mexicans to travel to ”willing employers.” In this sense, I guess you could say I’m more realist than idealist and probably lean more towards the nonintervention side. I don’t think theory can be much more helpful than that, though I’m open to be persauded. I am not, however, open to be persuaded ridiculously abstract things like ”war is the purpose of the state” or ”the state is evil” or ”all wars are bad, lest they are narrowly in self-defense.”
Comment by FS —
August 2, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
Considering that Brad DeLong ended his review of Lindsey’s Against the Dead Hand with:
I’m not sure he’s the place to go to for criticism of Lindsey’s thoughts.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 2, 2006 @ 6:58 pm
Indeed. The place to come for criticism of Brink Lindsey’s thoughts is right here!