Taking of the Scientist Hat for a Little Chat on Iraq

I am taking off my scientist hat and putting on my citizen hat. (For explanations of these two hats, read my previous post.)

The defining issue for me and most people in the coming election is the war on Iraq.

I can tell you that at the beginning I was a supporter of US intervention in Iraq at least conditionally. I thought that our cause was relatively just and that the case for WMD was relatively strong. It turns out that case was not nearly as strong as I believed and the cause was significantly grayer.

In this regard, I feel part of a peer group that has had a similar arc of changing beliefs. A friend of mine, whose opinion I value deeply -- even if we may not always agree -- has written a part-apologia and part-recommendation on Iraq. It is posted on the first blog I ever participated in (tear), so I thought I would link to it. Money quote:

I was rebuked earlier last week by a man whose intelligence, honor and honesty I respect more than anyone I've ever met. He reminded me that four years ago, when I was expressing support for President Bush's planned invasion of Iraq, that he had cautioned me and had predicted most of what has now gone wrong in Iraq. He said then, and repeated now, that the sectarian violence was easy to predict. All one had to do was read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence to predict that loyalty to the different tribal factions in Iraq would supercede any nationalism that the Iraqi people felt and that civil war would break out between the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds (I ordered a copy from Amazon last week). Even now, he warned, the Kurds are likely arming themselves for when they enter the sectarian fighting.

He was right then, and he's right now. All you have to do is go into this site's archives to see how wrong I was. I would like to rely on the excuse that we all thought Saddam had WMD, but I can't. You often hear Republicans frustratingly exclaim that all of Iraq's behavior pointed toward having them, and that even Bill Clinton thought Saddam had WMD. Maybe we were right about the WMD; maybe he did have them. But at this point, does it matter? Unless it's the best-kept secret in the world, we did not recover them. We may have uncovered some facilities and a few old chemical capable artillery shells, but there have been no massive stockpiles that were ready to deploy like we'd been led to believe. At best, our intelligence capabilities are so weak that Saddam was able to trick us into believing that he had the weapons. At worst, our military response was so weak that he was able to do what we were trying to prevent, and give the weapons to other unfriendly regimes and terrorist groups before we could stop him.

For my part, when I was five years younger I was much more optimistic and strident in my belief that the US is a force for good in the world. As a consequence, I was much more willing to give politicians of either party a free hand, believing as I did that they were generally well intentioned if not always perfectly competent. Likewise, I believed the world to be ultimately comprehensible and changeable for the better.

Since I have been struck more and more with the Burkean nature of the world. It is composed of only sometimes stable polities with confusing and countervailing tendencies. To hold the belief that we can meddle in these societies and create utopias by fiat is the worst kind of folly. This view of the world as fundamentally complex parallels the scientific world that is filled with assertions that can only be conditionally verified through vigorous experiment and analysis. Any experiments I perform may indeed illuminate some particularly subtle aspect of the human organism, but they only scratch the surface of what is a deeply complicated and perhaps incomprehensible system. Partly the war in Iraq and partly the analogy with science have taught me to have much more humility in my beliefs and to have much more limited expectations for the good government can provide.

In the recent burst of partisanship surrounding election time, we sometimes forget that we all have arcs in our beliefs -- that we grow and mature over time. I may not agree still with points my friend has to say. LIkewise I may disagree with points brought up by the war's staunchest detractors. But I would like to think that this whole business has made us all grow at least a little.

Ambrose Bierce quipped that "war is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I would also argue that if we learn anything it should teach us humility.