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January 29, 2005

Motives and Consequences

In my ongoing discussion regarding when it is advisable to go to war, one comment caught my eye for its naivete:

1) The use of violence is a last resort (other methods have been tried and have failed).
2) The odds are the use of violence will improve the situation (i.e. the expected benefits of using violence exceed the expected costs).
3) One is not likely to harm the very person or persons one is attempting to rescue.
4) The intentions behind going to war are to achieve the good.

I suppose there's something to be said for purity of purpose. When we're confident someone is doing things for the right reasons, it becomes easier to forgive mistakes on the assumption the motives are correct. Conversely, if we think that someone is doing things for the wrong reasons, any failures will immediately be held against him on the assumption he should have known better. We need look no further than Iraq to see these forces in action. Hawks who believe that war with Iraq was the right move tend to believe that the President is trying to do the right thing and therefore are willing to accept a certain level of mistakes. (This is being used purely for sake of example, so please spare me a litany of those mistakes in the comments as I am well aware of them.) Those who opposed the war, conversely, tend to assume the President went to war for nefarious motives and that errors made in the conduct of the war are evidence of this duplicity.

The above example demonstrates the problem with this theory of judging wars. As it is impossible for one person to ever be certain of another's motivations, it is impossible to be certain why he or she is taking a certain action. It would therefore be impossible to ever know if criteria number four were being fulfilled. It is my personal belief that President Bush and his administration went to war in Iraq because they honestly believed it was the best available target in the larger war against Islamofascism. Many other people believe that President Bush went to war in Iraq for oil, or to avenge his father, or for Halliburton. Short of the ability to read minds, there is no way to prove which of us (if any) is correct. Point four fails as a checkable item.

Point four also fails as a practical matter. A few thought experiments may make this clearer. Let's assume that the Iraq war was demonstrably the best available alternative to us in early 2003. (I understand that many readers strongly disagree with some or all of these points; I ask that you set aside your feelings on the matter and stipulate these points for the sake of argument.) But President Bush didn't care about it being the right choice, he only wanted to set up good profit opportunities for his buddies at Halliburton. Under this test he would be wrong to go to war in Iraq because his motives were impure, even though it was the best option available to him. Or let's assume that Iraq was a bad idea, the worst available option, but President Bush and everyone on his staff honestly thought it was a good idea. In which case would it make more sense to go to war? In option one, we've stipulated that war is the best possible course of action, but we will avoid it because the motivation is wrong. In option two, we may still avoid war if we can clearly see it's a bad idea, but if the decision is less clear, we'll go to war because the motivations are pure? Illogical.

There will almost never be an ironclad case for going to war. The more I look at history, the more I come to believe that we could have avoided just about every war in our history had we chosen to do so. The decisions would have come with costs: staying out of the Civil War, for example, might have meant the end of the United States as we know it. Nonetheless, Lincoln could have avoided fighting that war had he gone along with conventional wisdom and agreed to let the South go. In some cases (the Civil War, WW2) it's pretty clear in retrospect that we made some good choices (although Jim Henley notes that our participation in the Pacific may have offered extremely limited benefits). In other cases (the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War) it's pretty clear that we acted almost entirely from a desire to be an imperial power. In plenty of other cases the question is far more difficult: were our decisions to defend South Korea and South Vietnam good wars of choice or bad ones? I don't propose to answer those questions here (if, indeed, they are empirically answerable in either direction), only to point out that every war we engage in for the foreseeable future is likely to be a war of choice and our ability to discern which we should participate in and which we should avoid will be questions without easy answers.

Should the elections in Iraq result in a generally-accepted Iraqi government taking power and a general decline in violence in Iraq as foreign troops leave, will that make Iraq a good war of choice? Conversely, if the elections fail and Iraq dissolves into chaos, will that mean Iraq was a mistake? Judging actions by their consequences at least offers us reasonably empirical standards for right and wrong. They don't help us make decisions, however, because there is no way to look into the future with certainty at either option and declare it the right or wrong choice. Nobody on either side of the argument even now can say what Iraq will be like in six months with any certainty. Therefore ex post facto consequences are of little use to us in assessing whether or not to go to war.

Motives are likewise useless to us. For those who oppose the war, it is unlikely their views on the war would change if it could be proven that the administration acted in good faith every step of the way. A mistake made in good faith is, after all, still a mistake. Conversely, if a man does the right thing for the wrong reasons, he has still done the right thing. Assessing motives may offer excellent emotional arguments, but it helps us not at all in logical decision making. (See Arnold Kling's valuable essay about Type C and Type M arguments.)

Ultimately all we can go on are logical extrapolations of what consequences are likely from a particular course of action. For example, there is some talk now about carrying the war into Iran or Syria in order to eliminate other sources of problems for the West. Setting aside the practicality of such wars at a time when our armed forces are already stretched thin, such decisions should be informed by our experiences in Iraq. Iraq hawks are in a much weaker position than doves in these arguments, because Iraq has followed the doves' projected consequences far more closely than those of the hawks. While neither Syria or Iran is a mirror of Iraq, it is not implausible to assume that an invasion of either state would evolve along lines generally similar to what we have experienced in Iraq. When this knowledge is added to the fact that what I and many other hawks considered the prime selling point of the Iraq invasion, establishing self-rule in a Middle Eastern nation to undermine the appeal of terrorism, will either be an accomplished fact or a failure before we can turn our attention to Iran or Syria, the case for another war seems weak indeed. The motivations of the President would not change this analysis. No matter how honestly the administration might believe in the rightness of an invasion of Iran, that would not overwhelm the logical consequences of the course of action.

Motive-based arguments are powerful because they appeal to our emotions. Speakers have long recognized that appeals to emotion are often far more effective that appeals to reason; we are an emotional species. 'Remember the Maine' is an excellent example of the use of ethos to push a policy for war when logic wouldn't do. I therefore do not expect to see motive-based arguments disappear from the public square. When it comes to trying to establish what the best courses of action are, however, I will continue to set aside appeals to emotion in favor of more reasoned discussion.