The same old mistakes

Here’s paragraph 863 of Chilcot:

Ground truth is vital. Over‑optimistic assessments lead to bad decisions. Senior decision‑makers – Ministers, Chiefs of Staff, senior officials – must have a flow of accurate and frank reporting. A “can do” attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK Armed Forces – a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances – but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears. At times in Iraq, the bearers of bad tidings were not heard. On several occasions, decision‑makers visiting Iraq…found the situation on the ground to be much worse than had been reported to them.

This looks familiar. It echoes Kenneth Boulding (pdf):

All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

He wrote those words in 1965.

There’s a depressing inference here. The mistakes Blair made in Iraq were well known - or at least they should have been. This is not just true of the importance of ground truth. In the day job I list nine errors of judgment described by Chilcot, most of which were familiar in the early 00s. Kahneman and Tversky’s classic Judgment under Uncertainty was published way back in 1982, for example, and Richard Thaler’s collections of papers, Quasi-Rational Economics and Advances in Behavioral Economics appeared in the mid-90s. Any serious decision-taker in the early 00s should therefore have been well aware of the vast research on cognitive biases.

But as Chilcot documents, the decision to go to war in Iraq seems to have been taken in utter ignorance of this research.

Why? It would be nice to think that the error was Blair’s idiosyncratic one and now we are rid of him, there’s no problem.

I fear this is too optimistic. It is itself a manifestation of cognitive biases (the optimism bias and fundamental attribution error) and of the “leader-?????-success” fallacy. The very fact that the country is again embarking upon a risky venture without a plan unsupported by good evidence and fuelled by wishful thinking suggests we’ve learned nothing from Iraq. And when we have a semi-credible candidate for Number Ten wanting to “banish the pessimists”, it seems we are still plagued by the mindless optimism that led us into Iraq.

Instead, I fear there’s a deeper problem here. We should ask: does politics select for rationality by weeding out cognitive biases or not*? I fear not. Politicians are selected for overconfidence, and the narrow class background and lack of cognitive diversity of politicians and journalists can promote groupthink.

For me, Chilcot thus poses a systemic question: how can we ensure that political structures favour rational decision-making?

This question will, of course, be ignored. For some, the mere fact that the report discredits Blair is sufficient. And others, of course, have no desire to let politics be tainted by even the faintest whiff of rationality: as Gove said, people “have had enough of experts”. I fear that British politics is like English football: people love talking about it, but they hate thinking about it.

* There’s an analogy with markets here. One argument for markets is that well-functioning ones select against stupid businesses or strategies. Sadly, though, this is only sometimes the case.  

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

“leader-?????-THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON THE PLANET!”

[Hilary Richards]

I think in the case of the Iraq it was a case of Bush and Blair convincing themselves it was something they wanted to do and then since they were at the top of the power structure other politicians and most of the media seeing themselves as enablers of that decision ignoring truth and rationality.

The phrase 'perception is reality' has been around a long time and it gives politicians and the media the illusion that whatever they say becomes reality. Thus we had the austerity narrative which fooled the public and convinced Labour they could not oppose it despite the fact it was a rank bad policy and therefore going to have bad real world consequences which they could have taken advantage of. Labour was in such a disarray on the economy that Osborne threw in the enormous fib that their lax spending had caused the crash. Their response was so meek that certain Labour politicians ended up considering apologising for something that had never happened. This would never have happened I think without Labour too believing in the 'created reality' myth.

My response to all this nonsense is generally a curt 'reality bites back' but politicians and the media are also incredibly short-termist and may feel that any downsides of constructing complete myths may end up as someone else's problem.

[Dave Timoney]

"Politicians are selected for overconfidence". True, but there are significant differences between countries, reflecting history and national self-image. For example, pessimism is always admired in a Russian politician.

Blair is part of an establishment obsessed with the UK "punching above its weight". Ironically, what will finally put us in our place (and end the delusion of the special relationship with the US) is not Chilcot but Brexit.

[Ariel Ledesma Becerra]

I see an analogy with a Market too... Market Garden Operation, to be precise.

[Blissex]

«a case of Bush and Blair convincing themselves it was something they wanted to do»

Not quite, I think: there are quite a few reliable reports (quotes from GW Bush, from B Cheney, etc.) that a large part of the USA elites were just waiting for an excuse to smash Iraq, for various reasons:

* Most importantly to please Israeli interests. S Hussein had launched missiles at Israel during Gulf War #1 and this had to have fatal consequences.

* To show that if you don't align with USA interests you get destroyed. This *worked*: the immediate result was that M Ghaddafi etc. bent over rather suddenly and quickly. Surely Iraq did not have a WMD programme, but Lybia did, and immediately destroyed it. To no avail, as M Ghaddafi and others were still smashed at the earliest opportunity.

Also I think that part of the story was to ensure that a large oil producer was taken off the market for a long time.

As to A Blair, I think that he could not care less about Iraq one way or another. But as some history people say, the very harsh lesson that the USA taught the UK and France at Suez in 1956 resulted in the same analysis but completely different conclusions in the two countries: both realized that the USA elites would always do whatever they wanted and would ignore the interests of their partners, but the french elites concluded that therefore you cannot deal with the USA, the english elites that you must go along with whatever the USA does, and occasionally the USA will throw them some precious crumbs off their table, like during the Falkands war.

My conclusion that seems absurd is that A Blair, in getting the UK complicit in whatever the USA elites decided was in their interest, participated in a great crime as an act of (misguided) patriotism. Anyhow, he has surely been hugely rewarded for that (see Kuwaiti contracts etc.)

[Blissex]

«but the french elites concluded that therefore you cannot deal with the USA,»

So they did not participate in the:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing

Note the countries that supported the invasion were the USA, UK, Australia and Poland, that all had a version of H Guofeng's "two whatevers":

"We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairmain Dubya made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Dubya gave".

:-)

[Keith]

For Blair there was no mistake he has done well out of the death toll. Bought and paid for like the leaders of the chicken coup.