fling93 loves fishies

The Case Against Bush

Update 12/10/04: You might be looking for Ron Suskind’s New York Times piece on Bush vs. “the reality-based community.” I wrote this independently of his piece, and while it’s somewhat similar, I don’t agree faith is as central as he thinks. Also, Glen Wishard comments at Winds of Change that the Union of Concerned Scientists is not a nonpartisan group, so I’m removing them as one of my examples. And the rest of the discussion over there is also worth checking out. Also added a tidbit on Larry Lindsey.

I know this is a really long post, so I’ve broken it down into smaller chunks, and I’ve included links to the different sections that you can use to navigate and/or bookmark for later (and I finally also added permalinks next to the headers within the post itself):

• Flip-flopper?
• Cognitive bias
• Blind stubbornness is not resolve
• Ignoring your own people
• Hearing only what you want to hear
• Opportunity cost and threat prioritization
• The Duelfer Report — no WMDs
• The 9/11 Commission report — no ties with Al Qaeda
• The real reason for the war?
• Contrast with other leaders
• What’s a conservative to do?

Anyway, I try to stay as nonpartisan as possible on this blog, and it’s generally not too hard, as I strongly dislike our plurality two-party system, partially because I’m a moderate libertarian who’s roughly equidistant from both parties ideologically. So I’m not really joking when I say that I plan to vote for Tyler Cowen, even though he’s not actually running (indeed, I did). But that’s mostly because California is not a swing state. If I did live in a swing state, I wouldn’t vote for a third party candidate. Unlike 2000, it’s already clear that John Kerry and George W. Bush are very, very far apart, and I think it’s pretty clear which one is better qualified to lead.

Unlike Dan Drezner or Armed Liberal (who have now both come off the fence), I won’t try to keep anybody in suspense. I’d vote for Kerry. And this is because I think there’s a very strong case against the way Bush governs. I think we are better served with a pragmatic leader who will listen to and respond to new information rather than “stay the course” no matter what.

“Flip-flopper?” (link)

To be sure, sometimes it makes sense to stay the course, and sometimes it makes sense to change your mind. It really depends on the new information. But it doesn’t make sense to decide to vote against John Kerry purely due to his “flip-flop” label.

Campaign spin

Especially since the label is entirely campaign spin. For example, consider Kerry’s infamous quote:

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” Kerry said regarding the Bush administration’s request for more funding for the Iraq operation.

The line has been used in Bush campaign commercials, and the campaign distributed a memo Tuesday suggesting the vote raises doubts about Kerry’s commitment to U.S. troops.

The White House is aware that the statement does not reflect a contradiction but an inelegant way of defending a pair of Senate votes. Kerry voted for a measure that paid for the $87 billion by reducing tax cuts for those who earn more than $300,000. He voted against a measure that paid for the $87 billion by adding to the deficit.

Emphasis mine. This perception is largely because he’s in Congress, where you have to vote on many different versions of the same bill, a point reinforced by The Economist:

Many Senate bills exist in similar drafts, and the final version frequently includes obnoxious provisions that have nothing to do with the substance of the bill itself. Senators then face an unenviable choice. Do they back the bill, with the extra provision they would otherwise have opposed? Or do they vote against a bill they support? No wonder no sitting senator has won the presidency since Kennedy. With 19 years of such nuanced votes to account for, Mr Kerry is especially vulnerable.

This is, again, a product of our flawed plurality system that doesn’t handle more than two choices, a topic I’ll explore further in another post. But be very wary of anybody who cites this $87 billion vote. They either didn’t do their homework, or they are actively trying to deceive you with partisan spin.

Now of course, there’s a big difference between changing your mind due to new information, and changing your mind due to political pressure or opportunity. And certainly, Kerry has been guilty of that as well — but then, so has Bush. In spades.

Bush’s flip-flops

Consider the case of the steel tariffs, which I blogged about previously. Bush has long considered himself a proponent of free trade, as would anybody familiar with David Ricardo’s economic theory of comparative advantage. However, he flip-flopped on this and enacted steel tariffs, a protectionist measure. This change was not due to new circumstances, and no new economic theories had emerged to overturn Ricardo’s theory. Instead, the move was all about political opportunity — Bush was hoping to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes in the next election. Of course, when the EU complained, Bush flip-flopped yet again under the pressure.

There are a slew of other examples involving the 9/11 Commission. At first he didn’t want to create a commission at all, but then he flip-flopped. At first he said Condoleezza Rice couldn’t testify due to separation-of-powers, but then he flip-flopped and ordered her to testify. And then he didn’t want to create a new Intelligence Director, and then he flip-flopped and agreed to create it, but without any budgetary authority, and then he flip-flopped again and supported full budgetary authority (more discussion on that from Drezner).

In each case, none of the underlying circumstances or facts changed. The only reason for the flip-flop was political pressure. And liberals like Brad DeLong and Center for American Progress have compiled lists of many, many other examples.

Politicians will be politicians

And really, this should not be surprising to anybody. Both Kerry and Bush are politicians. My reaction to the whole flip-flop claim was similar to Jane Galt’s snarky reaction to liberals whining about Bush’s lies.

But what about Bush? the Democrats wail. He lies all the time!

Children, gather round. I have something very, very difficult to tell you. You aren’t going to like it, I’m afraid. None of us likes it — it makes us all very unhappy. But it must be faced, just the same.

You see, difficult as you will find this to believe, politicians lie. All of them lie. Even nice politicians who agree with us, and are smart, and have really good hair and a nice speaking voice, lie. They lie frequently. They lie about the outcomes of their policies, and they lie about their reasons for enacting them. They lie about their past accomplishments, and they lie about their future plans. In the vast soulless meat market that is our political process, the guy who gives the most misleading impression, without actually getting caught in an out-and-out falsehood, generally wins.

Welcome to adulthood. Sorry I couldn’t break it more gently.

Lying is such a strong word anyway. Really, what they’re all guilty of is being intentionally misleading, like Bush when he talked of Saddam having WMDs, or Kerry when he blames unemployment problems on outsourcing (here’s my thought on the jobless recovery).

Similarly, almost every politician will change their mind due to political pressure, and Bush has been no exception. If you want to argue that one lies or flip-flops more often than the other, you can probably make a case — but you’ll have a long list for both sides, which is why neither party bothers. But otherwise, it’s a double standard to criticize just one of them for behavior that both exhibit.

Cognitive bias (link)

Of course, popular perception bears little resemblance to this reality, and conservative columnist Max Boot has an excellent piece explaining why Kerry is the only one stuck with the flip-flop label, as well as why the Swift Boat allegations are sticking more than Bush’s National Guard issues (registration required):

Just as with the Clinton scandals…the rhetoric about Kerry’s supposed wrongdoing has outpaced any verifiable facts. The story nevertheless has struck a chord with the public, because it plays to existing concerns about Kerry’s character.

Once a general impression forms about a candidate…a seemingly trivial event can assume outsized importance. Thus Gerald Ford’s reputation as a bumbler was inadvertently confirmed when he tripped on the Air Force One gangway. Likewise, Jimmy Carter’s reputation as a wimp when he claimed to have been attacked by…a “killer rabbit”; Michael Dukakis’ as a soft-on-defense liberal when he posed for a ludicrous photo inside a tank…

Kerry’s problem has been the persistent perception that he is a consummate opportunist who is willing to say anything to advance his own career…. The Swift boaters’ stories fit his image as a slippery schemer.

Much to Democrats’ chagrin, the claim that George W. Bush was AWOL during his National Guard service hasn’t caused as much of a stir, perhaps because it doesn’t fit his image — Bush is generally seen as too hawkish, not as someone who ducks a fight.

As he says, it’s all about image and perception, and the Washington Post has a similar take.

This is the psychological phenomenon known as cognitive bias, where you tend to focus on new information only when it confirms what you already believe, and tend to filter, ignore, or discount information that challenges those beliefs. In other words, you only see what you want and/or expect to see. This is exactly why science tries to rely upon double-blind studies whenever possible. And why I strongly urged readers to be aware of this tendency and try to adjust for it by being more open-minded, for example, by reading blogs and articles that you disagree with.

Blind stubbornness is not resolve (link)

But it’s my impression Bush doesn’t seem to follow this advice. Indeed, his decision-making makes it clear that he doesn’t seem to really care about the pragmatic real-world consequences of a policy. Instead, his decisions seem to come out of gut feel or political expediency. Since he doesn’t care about the actual implications, when new developments unfold or new information comes to light that change the likely consequences of a given policy, Bush doesn’t adapt the policy to handle these changes, but instead continues to single-mindedly pursue the original policy. The only things that seem to change his mind are political factors.

I really don’t think this is a controversial point, and I think those across the political spectrum can agree. I’ve often read columns and blog posts that merely assume this to be true, so perhaps my entire post is merely stating the obvious. However, I haven’t yet seen anyone argue it example by example, so let me lay out the case as I see it as clearly as I can, gathering everything that I’ve found into one place. Perhaps I’ve fallen susceptible to cognitive bias myself while building this case, but that’s why I have open comments, so feel free to let me know where I’m cherry picking.

Now, there’s an obvious example, but as that tends to be a polarizing issue, let me start with a less controversial case instead: his tax cut. Nowadays, when he talks about it, he always mentions how it helped fight the recession and stimulate growth. However, you may recall that the same tax cut was the centerpiece of his campaign in 2000, long before the recession. At the time, a tax cut made little economic sense due to the high growth rate — additional stimulus would likely have been inflationary. So why did Bush propose it? Time provides an answer:

… Bush is stuck with a decision he made to improve his profile during the [2000] primaries. At that time, his advisers believed their most serious challenge would come from Steve (“Flat Tax”) Forbes. They were worried that Forbes would paint Bush as soft on taxes, like his father. To counter that, Bush proposed a tax cut massive enough to impress fiscal conservatives, but one that also included a pro-working family element. Result: a $1.6 trillion promise.

Emphasis mine. At the time, Bush pitched the tax cut as a way to return the surplus to the taxpayers (ignoring the still enormous Federal debt), and he also used supply-side arguments. This didn’t even make much sense. Supply-siders argue that lowering marginal tax rates can boost workers’ productivity, but the whole reason the boom lasted so long was that productivity was already unusually high, countering inflation and allowing Greenspan to leave rates low for much longer than usual. So it was extremely unlikely that productivity could have been boosted any further by a tax cut.

When the economic situation suddenly took a turn for the worse (through no fault of Bush’s), Bush immediately started marketing the exact same tax cut as a recession fighter because it would boost demand. This is a very striking flip-flop from supply-side economics to Keynesian economics. Of course, this tax cut was not designed as a demand-stimulating recession fighter, and thus was not targeted toward those most likely to spend it. And he made no attempt to change it to more effectively achieve the results he supposedly wanted.

While this was a decision somewhat based on conservative ideology, that’s not true for a host of other policies. For example, the aforementioned steel tariffs. Here, conservative ideology is to support free trade, meaning no trade barriers. This was Bush’s initial position, but then he flip-flopped and enacted the steel tariffs. While these make it easier for our uncompetitive and inefficient steel industry, they increase costs for all consumers and companies that need to buy steel or steel products. They also interfere with the free market, protecting inefficient companies from being forced to either compete or make room for companies that can. Instead, the effect is akin to a bailout or a corporate subsidy.

The only evident reason for the tariffs is political gain. The few people who gain from this will gain greatly — and they are all in the same geographical area, resulting in a significant gain of electoral votes, whereas the larger majority who are harmed are scattered around. Other questionable proposals that clash with conservative ideology include the space program, universal broadband, and relaxing of immigration laws. Not to mention that he expanded Medicare, increasing the role of government in healthcare greatly. Seems a lot more like political opportunism than conservativism. And ditto for his farm bill.

Ignoring your own people (link)

It’s possible that Bush simply didn’t know any better, but if so, it speaks directly towards his ability and competence to govern. Even a good delegator has to have enough working knowledge of the issues in order to be able to pick the right advisors and to be able to distinguish good advice from bad. Bush’s mistakes go beyond that. He seems to completely ignore good pragmatic advice just because it’s politically inconvenient.

O’Neill and Clarke, the whistleblowers

This was confirmed by Paul O’Neill. No, I don’t mean the former Yankee right fielder. I’m talking about Paul O’Neill, the lifelong conservative Republican who was appointed by the Bush administration to be Treasury Security. Of course, he ended up being fired, and then helped Ron Suskind write The Price of Loyalty, which pretty much describes exactly what I’ve been talking about. The uproar over the book focused on Iraq, but he also details how he tried to convince Bush not to implement the steel tariffs, but to no avail.

Ditto for Bush’s “recession-fighting” tax cuts. Many economists now dispute the Keynesian notion that government can fine-tune economic business cycles (and conservatives tend to dislike the notion altogether). So O’Neill made the argument that any tax cut would happen too late to provide any useful stimulus. He also pointed out that monetary policy (interest rates) was a much more effective and appropriate tool anyway. Furthermore, the cut would eliminate the surplus, which ought to be used to pay the transition costs necessary to reform Social Security. But again, to no avail. Same thing happened with Christine Todd Whitman’s attempts to address global warming, and so Whitman resigned. According to O’Neill, political motivations were used for practically every decision, with little thought as to the actual real-world consequences.

And not surprisingly, O’Neill said this applied to Iraq as well, confirming what was already beginning to become evident. This was later reinforced, of course, by Richard Clarke:

“Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq … We all said, ‘but no, no, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan,’” Clarke said in the interview. “And Rumsfeld said, ‘There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.’ I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].’”

This reaction alone is very revealing about the administration’s attitude and approach to inconvenient facts. And Clarke provided a lot more details about how he repeatedly tried to get the administration to concentrate on terrorism and Al Qaeda, but instead they were more concerned about Iraq, both before and after 9/11.

Now, much has already been said about these two, and you either listened to them or ignored them. If you ignored them, my advice to you would be to examine your reasons why. Sure, Clarke was selling a book. But my take is that the important thing is, as I’ve expounded upon before, the message, not the messenger. Especially since the message makes a lot of sense in light of everything I’ve laid out so far.

And of course, if I have to decide between the credibility of a bureaucrat who’s served under administrations of both parties (including Reagan’s), and of a politician facing reelection, that’s a no-brainer. Especially since the bureaucrat’s interpretation is corroborated by several other people appointed by the same politician — and who resigned for the exact same reason. Whereas the only one backing the politician are partisans.

Rand Beers

An example that didn’t get nearly as much press as O’Neill or Clarke is Rand Beers. You’ll recall that the Bush administration immediately unleashed a barrage of character attacks on Clarke, one of which was that he was a Democrat because of his friendship with Rand Beers. Notwithstanding the fact that Clarke was a lifelong Republican who served under Reagan, the example of Rand Beers is actually even more revealing of Bush’s policy-making. As Fred Kaplan notes in his excellent piece in Slate:

…Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later — five days before the Iraqi war started — for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, “The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They’re making us less secure, not more.” And: “The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded.”

And thus, so thoroughly disgusted with the Bush administration, he went to join the Kerry campaign (before Kerry won the primary). Not an example that really helps Bush’s case, and not surprisingly, they don’t really mention Rand Beers much anymore.

Etc. etc.

Back in February of 2003, the Bush administration ignored the assessment of General Eric Shinseki that “several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq,” an assessment that has since been borne out by the results and also recently echoed by Ambassador Paul Bremer, Bush’s administrator of the occupation. As far as I know, no reason has ever been given as to why they didn’t listen to Shinseki. But it would seem to fit the pattern, since putting more troops out on the streets probably means more troop casualties, which are politically damaging.

See the pattern yet? There’s also John DiIulio:

John DiIulio… [is] the guy the White House recruited to run the “faith-based and community initiatives” Bush promised in 2000. DiIulio quit in August 2001. A year later, he faulted the administration for caring more about politics than policy. “In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions,” he recalled. The result was “a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism.”

By now, these charges should sound familiar. And let’s not forget about Lawrence Lindsey, who was ridiculed and ousted for the crime of offering an accurate estimate of the war’s cost.

The Bush administration also faced a steady exodus of counterterrorism officials, “many disappointed by a preoccupation with Iraq they said undermined the U.S. fight against terrorism.” And Bush is apparently going through counterterrorism czars faster than Spinal Tap goes through drummers. The latest defection being Amit Yoran, the nation’s top cyber-security official, who gave just one day’s notice of his resignation.

Either there’s something to the notion that this administration doesn’t listen — or Bush is an extremely poor judge of character (which doesn’t bode well for someone who’s supposed to be good at delegating).

Hearing only what you want to hear (link)

Why would Bush ignore and antagonize his own people? Probably because they’re not telling him what he wants to hear. Remember cognitive bias? Well, here are some concrete examples.

The aluminum tubes: a debate covered up

Yes, those infamous aluminum tubes. The New York Times has a very enlightening and fascinating look into the policy discussions regarding those tubes. The whole thing is well worth reading, but by now, none of this should be surprising. In short, the purpose of the tubes was hotly debated between the CIA and the Energy Department from the start. The CIA argued the nuclear centrifuge theory, whereas the Energy Department argued that they were unsuitable for that, and instead were only useful in rockets.

But the Bush administration made it seem like there was no debate, and that the centrifuge theory was the only explanation.

Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News program Meet the Press and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration’s view that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program.
…
Not only did Mr. Cheney draw attention to the tubes; he did so with a certitude that could not be found in even the C.I.A.’s assessments. …Mr. Cheney said he knew “for sure” and “in fact” and “with absolute certainty” that Mr. Hussein was buying equipment to build a nuclear weapon.

“He has reconstituted his nuclear program,” Mr. Cheney said flatly.

Similarly, Condoleezza Rice told CNN that they “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs” — which was flatly wrong. Then, UN inspectors went into Iraq to get a closer look at the facts:

The inspectors found no trace of a clandestine centrifuge program. On Jan. 10, 2003, The Times reported that the international agency was challenging “the key piece of evidence” behind “the primary rationale for going to war.” …

The C.I.A. theory was in trouble, and senior members of the Bush administration seemed to know it.

Also that January, White House officials…sent word to the intelligence community that they believed “the nuclear case was weak,” the Senate report said. In an interview, a senior administration official said it was widely understood all along at the White House that the evidence of a nuclear threat was piecemeal and weaker than that for other unconventional arms.

But rather than withdraw the nuclear card — a step that could have undermined United States credibility just as tens of thousands of troops were being airlifted to the region — the White House cast about for new arguments and evidence to support it.

This behavior and attitude towards politically inconvenient information should be familiar by now. And in Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN, he “made claims that his own intelligence experts had told him were not accurate.” Shortly after that speech, David Albright from The Institute for Science and International Security (a non-profit, non-partisan institution) issued a report detailing numerous technical criticisms of the administration’s claims. And he also made some familiar observations:

…My reaction at the time was that the disagreement reflected the typical in-fighting between US experts that often afflicts the intelligence community. I was frankly surprised when the administration latched onto one side of this debate in September 2002. … I became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet.
…
By ignoring technical evidence and pushing flawed analysis, the proponents of the CIA analysis undermine the credibility of the President, Secretary Powell, and the CIA.

This is what happens when you succumb to cognitive bias and hear only what you want to hear.

The Niger forgeries

One of the earliest clues that raised my suspicions was the forged documents on Saddam trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger. I won’t take the liberal tack and try and claim Bush lied with those sixteen words in his State of the Union Address. Irregardless of that, what raised my attention was how anybody in our government could have been fooled by such a crude forgery — the document had numerous flaws like “incorrect references to the date of the Nigerien constitution, the incorrect name of the Nigerien foreign minister at the time the alleged documents were signed and the use of obsolete letterhead and the incorrect symbol of the Nigerien presidency.” And yet the Bush administration submitted this to the UN as evidence of Iraq’s WMD program. Not surprisingly, the IAEA uncovered the forgery within a couple of hours using a Google search.

George Tenet took the fall for that one, but it seems suspiciously like the same Bush administration MO of seeing only what they want to see (besides, whatever happened to “the buck stops here”?). Certainly, CBS made a very similar mistake, but that’s par for the course when it comes to television reporting. Recall I’ve previously said that “television is a truly horrible way to get your news.” After all, it’s a medium that is overly motivated by sensationalism. Ironically, the National Guard memo story bumped a more substantive story on these very Niger forgeries.

But I think cognitive bias in the President of the United States is a bit more concerning than cognitive bias at a television station.

Postwar planning

Similar mistakes were made on the post-war planning. One of the best pieces I’ve read all year is James Fallows’s Blind Into Baghdad from The Atlantic Monthly. It’s only open to subscribers, but you can currently find a copy here. Yes, the whole thing is well worth reading.

In a nutshell, “The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge.” In other words, what’s surprising is not how wrong the predictions were, but how right they were:

… A recurring theme was the urgency of restoring electricity and water supplies as soon as possible after regime change. The first item in the list of recommendations from the “Water, Agriculture and Environment” group read, “Fundamental importance of clean water supplies for Iraqis immediately after transition. Key to coalition/community relations.” One of the groups making economic recommendations wrote, “Stressed importance of getting electrical grid up and running immediately-key to water systems, jobs. Could go a long way to determining Iraqis’ attitudes toward Coalition forces.”

A second theme was the need to plan carefully for the handling and demobilization of Iraq’s very sizable military. On the one hand, a functioning army would be necessary for public order and, once coalition forces withdrew, for the country’s defense. … One group…, in a paper on democratic principles, warned, “The decommissioning of hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel that [a rapid purge] implies could create social problems.”

Next the working groups emphasized how disorderly Iraq would be soon after liberation…. [One] report warned … that “the period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.” In the short term the occupying forces would have to prevent disorder. …

Each of the preceding themes would seem to imply a long, difficult U.S. commitment in Iraq. America should view its involvement in Iraq, the summary report said, not as it had Afghanistan, which was left to stew in lightly supervised warlordism, but as it had Germany and Japan, which were rebuilt over many years.

You see a similar picture from the inside, via Larry Diamond, a Senior Advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority who, as Dan Drezner reported, quit and left Iraq this past April:

“We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We just weren’t honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country.”

Also via Drezner, Diamond has an excellent, lengthy, and scathing critique in Foreign Affairs of what exactly went wrong:

Many of the original miscalculations made by the Bush administration are well known. But the early blunders have had diffuse, profound, and lasting consequences — some of which are only now becoming clear. The first and foremost of these errors concerned security: the Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq. … Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises to give the military “everything” it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome….

… The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban patrols…

But Washington failed to take such steps, for the same reasons it decided to occupy Iraq with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology. Contemptuous of the State Department’s regional experts who were seen as too “soft” to remake Iraq, a small group of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate postwar planning the State Department had overseen through its “Future of Iraq” project, which had anticipated many of the problems that emerged after the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners assumed that Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as liberators. …

Emphasis mine. This whole piece is also definitely worth reading.

Instead of listening to their own experts, the Bush administration chose to trust unreliable sources with vested interests, like Chalabi and Curveball, who were telling the administration what it wanted to hear. Given this tendency, it’s not surprising that Bush has chosen to isolate himself from tough critics who might otherwise tell him things he might not want to hear.

Nonpartisan critics like the business school professors (who generally tend to be more conservative) who signed an open letter to Bush rebuking his economic policies (via Brayden King). Or the Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change (many of whom were appointed by Republicans) who signed a statement “condemning the Bush administration’s foreign policy, saying that it has harmed national security.” Or the broad group of international relations scholars who signed an open letter making similar charges (via Drezner).

Large groups of experts from across the political spectrum, all coming to the same conclusion that I’m laying out in this post. That’s gotta tell you something.

Opportunity cost and threat prioritization (link)

While cognitive bias and blind stubbornness are bad enough to see in the media or in bloggers, it’s an absolutely fatal flaw in a leader. Especially during wartime. One important concept I’ve learned about in my economics class is on opportunity cost. The real cost of a decision is not just the consequences of the decision itself, but on how it compares with what you could have done otherwise in that same timeframe and with those resources. This should be fairly intuitive. The true cost of wasting your time watching television is not just the monetary cost of your electric bill, but also what you could have accomplished doing something more productive with that time you wasted.

This is why prioritization of threats is so important. Even with the best military in the world, we can only do a finite number of things with it. So if you are going to tie up the military for an extended period of time occupying a country, that country had better be the biggest threat our nation faces. Otherwise, the countries that are the biggest threats will essentially have a free hand to do what they want (develop nuclear weapons and whatnot) while we have our hands full.

The Bush administration has not demonstrated mastery of this concept (and James Fallows has another excellent article making this point, which you can find excerpted here). Note that it has never even tried to make the argument that Saddam Hussein and Iraq posed the biggest threat to our security. Even now, when reminded that Bin Laden attacked us, not Saddam Hussein, Bush’s response in the debates is that Bin Laden is not the only target in terror. No, he isn’t. But the argument is that the others are higher priority targets in the war than Saddam Hussein. Note that Iran has closer ties to terrorism, and both Iran and North Korea have much more advanced nuclear programs. Indeed, Iraq doesn’t even have its own nuclear power plants. So instead of enriching their own uranium, they have to get it from somebody else. This is an argument Bush never addresses, merely making the case that Iraq posed a “grave and gathering danger” and an “imminent threat”, and claiming that he had weapons of mass destruction. Even if that were true, due to other, bigger threats, it would not necessarily have made the war worthwhile.

The Duelfer Report — no WMDs (link)

But it wasn’t even true. By now, you’ve probably heard about the final weapons inspection report issued by Charles Duelfer:

The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.

Charles A. Duelfer…said Hussein’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”

Emphasis mine. Of course, this merely confirms what David Kay already told us several months ago (David Kay was the chief weapons inspector who — surprise, surprise — resigned in January and was replaced by Duelfer). The Bush administration’s spin on this is that it’s old news. Indeed, it is — except that when Kay made that announcement, the Bush administration’s reaction was that it still expected to eventually find weapons of mass destruction. So while this is old news to the rest of us, this should be news to them. But instead, they are dodging the issue by pretending they’ve already addressed it.

To be sure, the Duelfer report also had an important revelation that Bush defenders often bring up. I’ll get to that later. But first let me continue on the “grave” and “imminent threat” issue:

But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that “WMD helped save the regime multiple times,” the report said.

This is why I pointed out why the situation in North Korea is so troubling. It’s possible to want a nuclear weapon for defensive purposes and to deter other countries from invading you. Presumably, this is why Israel has a nuclear weapon. So Iraq and Iran wanting nuclear weapons doesn’t necessarily mean anything (obvious now in Iraq’s case). But why would a country which already has one or two nukes want a half-dozen more? The most likely explanations are that it wants them for offensive purposes — or it wants to sell them to other rogue nations or terrorists. That tells you right there that our number one threat in the world is, without question, North Korea.

Our widely different approaches to Iraq vs. North Korea send a very telling mixed message to our enemies. You better get the nuke as quickly as you can, because otherwise we’ll invade you. Even if you’re not really developing weapons of mass destruction, we won’t believe you or any weapons inspectors. But once you have the nuke, we’ll leave you alone — even if it’s against the best interests of our national security.

Now, let me get back to that revelation I mentioned earlier:

Saddam Hussein made $11 billion in illegal income and eroded the world’s toughest economic embargo during his final years as Iraq’s leader through shrewd schemes to secretly buy off dozens of countries, top foreign officials and major international figures, according to a new report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector released yesterday.
…
Russia, France and China — all permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — were the top three countries in which individuals, companies or entities received the lucrative [oil] vouchers. Hussein’s goal, the report said, was to provide financial incentives so that these nations would use their influence to help undermine what Duelfer called an “economic stranglehold” imposed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Emphasis mine. There are also several U.S. companies on this list, but are apparently not named “because of privacy laws.” Anyhow, Bush defenders are spinning this to mean that sanctions weren’t working. But remember what the goal of the sanctions is. The goal isn’t to remove Saddam Hussein, nor to keep him from trying to develop weapons of mass destructions — and it’s definitely not to keep him from trying to lift the sanctions themselves! The goal is to keep him from actually developing weapons of mass destruction. That he wants to get rid of the sanctions is a sign that they were working.

Now, he apparently was making some headway in getting them removed, but I think it’s just a bit premature to conclude he would have succeeded — just like it’s premature to conclude from the insecurity in Iraq that the war effort has failed. And also I think it’s clear that our window of opportunity for action was a lot, lot wider than our administration made it out to be. Given Saddam’s inability to even restart his weapons program, we could have held off on the decision to invade until (and if) the sanctions were lifted. Heck, given Saddam’s defensive intentions (and if you’re going to focus on his intent, you cannot ignore that part of the report), any lifting of sanctions still probably would not have elevated the threat of Iraq past North Korea. Most likely, Iraq and Iran would have eventually become another India and Pakistan. Certainly not a good thing — but not nearly the threat they were made out to be.

And in the meantime, we could have used this opportunity to put some military leverage on North Korea and Iran — not to mention keeping resources focused on catching Bin Laden in Afghanistan instead of diverting them towards Iraq. When I made this point earlier on the Motley Fool’s Current Events board, hawks argued that we could finish off Iraq quickly and move onto the other threats. But apparently, I had a less naive view of the occupation effort. Remember, the occupation of Germany took seven years — and they didn’t have nearly the same ethnic issues.

The 9/11 Commission report — no ties with Al Qaeda (link)

As you probably heard, the 9/11 Commission found no ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

The staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks sharply contradicted one of President Bush’s central justifications for the Iraq war, reporting on Wednesday that there did not appear to have been a “collaborative relationship” between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Also old news. Indeed, the Bush administration never directly claimed that there was, mostly using innuendo and mentioning Iraq and Al Qaeda together to try and imply a connection. So this should not be much of a surprise. But what about Zarqawi?

A CIA report has found no conclusive evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein harboured Al Queda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which the Bush administration asserted before the invasion of Iraq.

This was long obvious to some of us. After all, Zarqawi based his operations in northern Iraq — controlled by the Kurds, not Saddam. So we didn’t need to invade Iraq to go after Zarqawi. Indeed, Jacob Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy discussed some disturbing allegations (which have yet to be addressed) that the Bush administration actually passed up an opportunity to take out Zarqawi and an Ansar al-Islam camp:

According to anonymous military officials, on three occasions in 2002 and 2003 detailed plans were drawn up for attacks on the Ansar enclave, which was nominally in Kurdish-controlled Iraq but effectively uncontrolled by either Kurds or Baghdad. The plans, according to NBC, were vetoed each time by the National Security Council. Officials said that the administration, as paraphrased by NBC, “feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam,” though the story didn’t say whether the sources were in a position to know the NSC’s reasons for inaction.

This opportunity may or may not have been realistic (and ditto for the opportunity to get Bin Laden during Clinton’s term). But Zarqawi continues to kill today, and this is the sort of thing that happens when an administration lets political considerations outweigh actual real-life consequences.

In addition, the 9/11 commission also found out this little tidbit:

While there is no credible evidence of collaboration between Mr. bin Laden’s network and Iraq, there is extensive evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and the fundamentalist Islamic leaders of Iran, including possible collaboration in the 1996 bombing of an apartment building in Saudi Arabia in which 19 Americans were killed.

Which should not have been a surprise, as Iran has long been thought to be the country with the closest ties to terrorism. Indeed, since Iran also had its own nuclear power plants (unlike Iraq), this was the prime reason I opposed the war. I knew that the Bush administration was not telling the whole truth, because all of their arguments against Iraq could be applied more so to Iran. I wasn’t yet aware that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and I hadn’t yet noticed the administration’s pattern of decision-making based on political reasons instead of pragmatic ones. But I knew that the war couldn’t really be about the threat posed by Iraq if we were willing to overlook an even bigger threat — never mind North Korea, which has probably been building nukes while Bush is waiting around for China.

Not having enough troops is one thing. Invading the wrong country is entirely another. Because so many of our troops are now bogged down occupying Iraq, we don’t have any military leverage over Iran or North Korea, and those worsening situations have surely made this nation less safe.

The real reason for the war? (link)

I’m not one of those conspiracy-minded liberals who think it’s all about oil. I imagine economic reasons did play a role, just like they did for the first Gulf War, but I’m not convinced it was the primary reason. But the real reason isn’t obvious. The WMDs argument makes no sense. Bush’s own intelligence was hotly debating the issue, and both Iran and North Korea had far more advanced nuclear programs. It seems that WMDs was merely the easiest argument to sell to the public.

I also don’t think it had anything to do with humanitarian reasons. Human rights have never been a foreign policy priority for conservatives, who generally favor realpolitik. This often involves supporting brutal dictators to further a larger goal, for example Augusto Pinochet, Ngo Dinh Diem, Joseph Mobutu, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the shah), and, of course, Saddam himself. I’ve seen no signs that Bush is any different, or else he would have been a lot more enthusiastic about intervening in Haiti or Sudan.

And although Neoconservatives were clearly key supporters of the war movement, I’m not at all convinced that Bush is a Neocon who believes Iraq is the first step in democracy promotion throughout the Middle East. First of all, from what I can tell, the Neocons have been thoroughly discredited due to their unrealistic post-war expectations, and thus are unlikely to retain the same level of influence. Secondly, after it was becoming clear that there were no WMDs, Bush had an obvious opportunity to “come clean” and admit the war was really about democracy promotion. Instead he made unconvincing noises about human rights. Thirdly, given the moving up of the timetable to hand over power and the administration’s seeming desire to have on-time elections even if whole cities are not represented, this sure sounds a lot like an administration looking for an exit strategy instead of a way to use it as a stepping stone towards other endeavors.

Instead, what I think is that Iraq was just like any other Bush policy decision — made for political reasons. More specifically, to be able to “show progress” in the war against terror. No, it didn’t end up helping him politically, but like his other policy decisions, he just didn’t think through the actual real-world consequences of the decision (besides, what the heck does Karl Rove know about military occupation?). And it’s not like the steel tariffs, Medicare reform, or space program had the desired political effect either.

Contrast with other leaders (link)

While you might chalk this up as par for the course for a politician, the degree in lack of pragmatism is actually pretty unusual. Compare him to Reagan. Everyone remembers his big tax cut, but people forget that followed it up with two tax increases when it became evident that the first cut might be fiscally irresponsible. George H.W. Bush also raised taxes despite his “no new lips” promise and suffered greatly for it politically (and I greatly admire him for that). And Clinton? Clearly a very political guy, but he did go against his own party by passing NAFTA and helping keep a lid on spending, thus using up his political capital and leaving him completely handcuffed against the Republican majorities in Congress.

So I think all of them had very clear ideas of the results their policies would have, and were willing to make corrections when new information surfaced. And Kerry? While he has his own fair share of political opportunism, this is a guy who very obviously thrives on analyzing information. While Bush eschews the newspaper, Kerry is clearly a guy on top of all the issues and proud of it (perhaps overly so). As for whether he’ll keep us safe, I personally would much rather have a wartime leader like Kerry than one where it’s bloody obvious where he stands and will be standing years from now. Such a leader is so much easier for an enemy to predict and manipulate (and arguably, Al Qaeda may have done just that to Bush).

In short, I think Bush’s record speaks for itself. And I think Bush knows it, which is why he talks more about Kerry than he does about his own accomplishments.

What’s a conservative to do? (link)

Of course, if you’re a conservative, Kerry’s ideology makes him an unattractive choice, even if you agree with everything I’ve said. So what should you do? Well, for this election, I think you have three viable choices: hold your nose and vote for Kerry, vote for a third party candidate (like Badnarik or Tyler Cowen), or stay home.

But beyond this election, conservatives should look at the bigger picture and consider how flawed the two-party system is. Realize, this quandary is entirely due to our plurality election format which cannot handle more than two choices. But there are other voting methods that do not have this weakness, such as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) or my personal favorite, the Condorcet method. Under these voting systems, you can vote for your own favorite conservative (be it McCain or Buchanan or Badnarik or what have you) without splitting the conservative vote and handing the election to someone you dislike (and for liberals, realize that that’s exactly what happened with Nader in 2000).

I hope to post more details on those in the future, but hopefully I’ve given you something for you to chew on. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my discussion of Rumsfeld, Iraq, and Troop Levels.