On Libya

Count me among those quite skeptical about this war. I think some swift linking to Andrew Sullivan posts can easily summarize this:

1. This will probably give people in the Islamic world a more negative view of the West, which is not good in regards to the “fight on terrorism,” or whatever you want to call it. The big hope with Obama’s election is that he could turn this around a little, but with the drone attacks and the continued support of many other — not just the Egyptian — regimes, it’s becoming clearer how false this hope was.  

2. There are tons of better ways that we could allocate our resources to help people around the world. I think this is a salient point. Just because their deaths are more gruesome and we can better cognitively grasp human to human violence means that we should always favor defense against violence instead death by disease…? It’s odd that there are ways that we know are proven to save lives and help people — the example Ezra Klein uses is malaria — but we don’t because a lack of will-power. I have posted on a related topic like this before, but I really think that this is one of the areas/questions that will figure with much greater prominence in ethical discussions in the future. I just wish that this would happen sooner.

3. The whole Arab League endorsement should have been taken with much, much more skepticism than it was — a point that’s been proven by their backing out. 

4. It puts a stain on Obama’s reputation as being cool and measured, which will most likely have negative consequences for him in the future. 

5. There’s really no reason not to have a congressional debate about this. Maybe Obama wants to make this seem like not that big of a deal — which might also explain why he’s in Brazil. But this 1. goes against a lot of what candidate Obama said about the importance of the democratic process and 2. allows the right to raise their voices about him, even though they probably agree with him. 

6. I understand the realist concerns of not getting militarily involved in every humanitarian conflict like this. For instance, we aren’t involved in the Ivory Coast or the Congo — though if examine Obama’s rhetoric that makes the case for not being there much harder to construe. But, I understand, rhetoric and real action are two different things. But the least we could do, to not be big hypocrites, is stop the funding of the Bahraini and Yemeni governments. Those guys are on the wrong side of this whole Arab Spring revolutionary wave, and what’s more, they have taken some very real action that goes against the beliefs that we so loudly espouse in regards to other contexts.  

It might just be me, but it doesn’t seem that Obama was particularly keen on this war, so if he brought this to a congressional vote, he could have at least abstained from the official U.N. resolution vote and had the excuse of domestic politics for not getting involved. Maybe it would make it seem like Congress is calling the shots and not him, but I’ve always been under the impression that that’s how it’s supposed to work anyways. 

I’ll add that I think James Fallows has a good bit on this:

 ”I didn’t like the “shut up and leave it to us” mode of foreign policy when carried out by people I generally disagreed with, in the Bush-Cheney era. I don’t like it when it’s carried out by people I generally agree with, in this Administration.”

———-

Having said all that, I think I understand much of the logic behind this move — except for the part about not having a debate in Congress about this. But, in my understanding, it’s largely  about not creating incentives for other Arab regimes to just violently crackdown on protestors. But there are so many other things that are out of our control that trying to instate logical incentives on such a mess like geopolitics seems like a folly bound to happen. 

Maybe it creates good incentives for Yemeni and Bahraini leaders to peacefully transition out of power or peacefully reform — though cutting off our support would probably be a better way to create those incentives. But, on the other hand, what does this say to Iran. As a blog post Sullivan linked to says

 It struck me as ironic that just under eight years ago Gaddafi specifically engaged in a course of action [by giving up his nuclear program] clearly intended to forestall US military action against his regime and that, despite that, he is now under military attack from the US and its allies. Moreover:  if he had actually acquired just one nuclear weapon, the current actions would likely not be taking place.

 Says Doug Mataconis: “If you are Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or one of the Iranian mullahs, what lesson do you derive from Libya’s experience?”

It reminds me of one of my favorite Malcolm Galdwell parables. It’s in an article about overconfidence and the Wall Street meltdown. Basically, it’s about a very talented bridge player who thinks, because of the similarities of bridge and the financial sector, that his skills at bridge predestine him for success on Wall Street. As Gladwell writes, 

It makes sense that there should be an affinity between bridge and the business of Wall Street. Bridge is a contest between teams, each of which competes over a “contract”—how many tricks they think they can win in a given hand. Winning requires knowledge of the cards, an accurate sense of probabilities, steely nerves, and the ability to assess an opponent’s psychology. Bridge is Wall Street in miniature, and the reason the light bulb went on when Greenberg looked at Cayne, and Cayne looked at Spector, is surely that they assumed that bridge skills could be transferred to the trading floor—that being good at the game version of Wall Street was a reasonable proxy for being good at the real-life version of Wall Street.

It isn’t, however. In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse. Cayne must have come back from the Spingold bridge tournament fortified in his belief in his own infallibility. And the striking thing about his conversations with Cohan is that nothing that had happened since seemed to have shaken that belief.

Not to accept Gladwell’s thoughts as the God-given truth, but that seems pretty relevant to the logic for this war. I know there are a hundred of other important pieces, especially politics with other allies… but this whole talk about incentives, all which can be set out in a paragraph or two, seems to simplistic and a little too seductive. That’s one point, I think should be made more often. 

I haven’t even got into to the possibilities that something might go wrong, which I think is really important to consider and I’m glad others have been so forceful on that… But I think I’ll leave it there.