Learning Lessons
Daniel Finkelstein comes up with the goods 'week-in week-out' in his opinion pieces he writes for the Times - here's one on the much-trumpeted 'learning the lessons from Iraq' which preoccupied MPs in the House of Commons last week.
But as Danny 'the Fink' points out many of these 'lessons' were not really lessons at all - and there's no easy formula for deciding when and if to intervene against a murderous dictator - or in the face of a humanitarian disaster which has human not natural causes.
At the end of the day it always comes down to political judgement - which is often finely balanced - and sometimes governments and even the United Nations (when stirred to action) make the wrong call - as they did in Rwanda, for example.
‘Lessons from Iraq’ are not lessons at all
By Daniel Finkelstein
When it comes to Syria we cannot look back to 2003 and be certain what the endgame should be
I want to make a point that is less about Syria than it is about the debate we have been having about Syria. And if you will forgive me I am going to start with something that happened in Iraq. Don’t worry, I am not intending to refight the battles about the overthrow of Saddam, but I do just need to touch on the issue.
On August 7, 1995, the night before the anniversary of the end of Iraq’s war with Iran, there were some very wild, uninhibited parties attended by members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle. There were guns, drink, women and murderers. Just like Pinner really.
Anyway, at one of these events Uday Hussein, Saddam’s psychotic son, shot Saddam’s half-brother, Watban al-Tikriti, and wounded him badly. Watban was drunk, Uday was mad and they were arguing about a girl. In the hospital afterwards a huge row broke out, which split the family into factions. And changed what we in the West understood about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Fleeing from the family dispute, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, taking two of Saddam’s daughters with him. Kamel was in charge of Iraq’s WMD programme and was willing to tell much of what he knew. As the weapons inspector Charles Duelfer says in his invaluable book Hide and Seek, the evidence contradicted the recent optimistic UN reports. Saddam had a more extensive WMD programme than had been realised.
Now, let’s say that at the beginning of the millennium someone was trying to use this episode to “learn the lessons of Iraq”. Quite reasonably, they would conclude that the regime always lied about WMD. Before 1995 Iraq had done everything possible to deny inspectors the documents and access necessary to determine the truth. So when after 9/11 it remained evasive about WMD, the “lesson of Iraq” seemed to teach that Saddam had WMD and was trying to avoid detection.
Except that now we know that this conclusion would have been wrong. Saddam was lying, as in 1995; he was cheating the inspectors, as in 1995; but he did not have WMD.
The mistake being made was actually quite a simple one. And amazingly common. It was to try to draw a lesson about probability from too small a sample size.
The Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman describes as his great intellectual breakthrough the realisation that social science experts (including him until he realised the mistake) too often rely on research using samples that are too small, prompting highly unreliable conclusions.
When drawing lessons from history, politicians and commentators take this error to extremes. It is quite usual to rely on a single incident or historical event and try to draw lessons from it. In other words, it is respectable in debate to generalise from a sample size of one.
It is, for instance, a standard tactic to talk about Munich, evidence that it is always wrong to appease dictators. But when Eden applied this rule in Suez it was a disaster. And who is to say whether Yalta — where Churchill reached an agreement with Stalin that wasn’t all that different from the one Chamberlain reached with Hitler — was terrible betrayal or acceptable realpolitik?
It is quite common in political debate to accuse the other side of fighting the last war instead of the next one. But it is rare to reflect on the real mistake being made. The problem is not that the last war was being refought but that a single, individual episode was being relied upon to produce lessons.
So for years American statesmen were being warned not to engage in military action lest it be another Vietnam. And, indeed, the Vietnam war was a disaster that repays careful study. But it should not be removed from the entire history of Cold War engagement, the outcome of which was not a disaster.
Generalising from a single incident is like tossing a coin, having it land heads and concluding that when you toss a coin it always lands heads.
This conclusion may be ridiculous, but it is also comforting. It suggests that you can know with a great deal of certainty what will happen the next time you toss a coin. It obscures the annoying truth that the outcome is unknowable, that you have to rely on common sense and on a huge sample of coin tosses and that at the end of all that work all you get is a probability. A coin toss remains, well, the toss of a coin.
Armed with this, it is worth revisiting last week’s debate on Syria. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the “lessons of Iraq” were critical in determining the outcome. But the lessons being relied upon were not those of 1995, they were those of 2003. In other words, the lessons not even of a single conflict, but those taught by part of a single conflict.
The Iraq war, apparently, taught MPs that when the intelligence community reported its findings it was probably exaggerating them and couldn’t be trusted. We should wait until we really know, can be absolutely certain, what went on, that’s what Iraq tells us. And it also tells us, apparently, that before we get into something we need to know how to get out. We need to know an endgame.
And, as with the coin toss, this is very comforting. It holds out the promise that one day it will be obvious what to do as long as we hold out long enough.
The truth, I’m afraid is rather different. If you study the lessons of conflicts with a large enough sample size it becomes obvious that in the end you are relying on probabilities.
It is, for instance, right not to appease dictators because on the whole that has proven a sensible and morally correct policy, taking the great sweep of events all together. But sometimes the policy will not work or will not be sensible.
The evidence of the intelligence community is always ambiguous and sometimes this means, as it did in the Iraq war, that it is flat out wrong. On other occasions, as in the Cuban missile crisis, it is right. You are left with common sense and judgment, and a degree of risk, certainty being impossible.
And conflicts always have endgames that are hard to be certain about and aren’t always desirable. The Second World War didn’t end until 1990, with a messy stand-off lasting 45 years. And it could be argued that the Iraq war happened partly to provide a clear endgame because there had been years without one after the Kuwait invasion.
The lesson of history, I’m afraid, is that the lesson of history can never release you from making judgments, ones you sometimes get wrong.
When it comes to Syria we cannot look back to 2003 and be certain what the endgame should be
I want to make a point that is less about Syria than it is about the debate we have been having about Syria. And if you will forgive me I am going to start with something that happened in Iraq. Don’t worry, I am not intending to refight the battles about the overthrow of Saddam, but I do just need to touch on the issue.
On August 7, 1995, the night before the anniversary of the end of Iraq’s war with Iran, there were some very wild, uninhibited parties attended by members of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle. There were guns, drink, women and murderers. Just like Pinner really.
Anyway, at one of these events Uday Hussein, Saddam’s psychotic son, shot Saddam’s half-brother, Watban al-Tikriti, and wounded him badly. Watban was drunk, Uday was mad and they were arguing about a girl. In the hospital afterwards a huge row broke out, which split the family into factions. And changed what we in the West understood about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
Fleeing from the family dispute, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, taking two of Saddam’s daughters with him. Kamel was in charge of Iraq’s WMD programme and was willing to tell much of what he knew. As the weapons inspector Charles Duelfer says in his invaluable book Hide and Seek, the evidence contradicted the recent optimistic UN reports. Saddam had a more extensive WMD programme than had been realised.
Now, let’s say that at the beginning of the millennium someone was trying to use this episode to “learn the lessons of Iraq”. Quite reasonably, they would conclude that the regime always lied about WMD. Before 1995 Iraq had done everything possible to deny inspectors the documents and access necessary to determine the truth. So when after 9/11 it remained evasive about WMD, the “lesson of Iraq” seemed to teach that Saddam had WMD and was trying to avoid detection.
Except that now we know that this conclusion would have been wrong. Saddam was lying, as in 1995; he was cheating the inspectors, as in 1995; but he did not have WMD.
The mistake being made was actually quite a simple one. And amazingly common. It was to try to draw a lesson about probability from too small a sample size.
The Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman describes as his great intellectual breakthrough the realisation that social science experts (including him until he realised the mistake) too often rely on research using samples that are too small, prompting highly unreliable conclusions.
When drawing lessons from history, politicians and commentators take this error to extremes. It is quite usual to rely on a single incident or historical event and try to draw lessons from it. In other words, it is respectable in debate to generalise from a sample size of one.
It is, for instance, a standard tactic to talk about Munich, evidence that it is always wrong to appease dictators. But when Eden applied this rule in Suez it was a disaster. And who is to say whether Yalta — where Churchill reached an agreement with Stalin that wasn’t all that different from the one Chamberlain reached with Hitler — was terrible betrayal or acceptable realpolitik?
It is quite common in political debate to accuse the other side of fighting the last war instead of the next one. But it is rare to reflect on the real mistake being made. The problem is not that the last war was being refought but that a single, individual episode was being relied upon to produce lessons.
So for years American statesmen were being warned not to engage in military action lest it be another Vietnam. And, indeed, the Vietnam war was a disaster that repays careful study. But it should not be removed from the entire history of Cold War engagement, the outcome of which was not a disaster.
Generalising from a single incident is like tossing a coin, having it land heads and concluding that when you toss a coin it always lands heads.
This conclusion may be ridiculous, but it is also comforting. It suggests that you can know with a great deal of certainty what will happen the next time you toss a coin. It obscures the annoying truth that the outcome is unknowable, that you have to rely on common sense and on a huge sample of coin tosses and that at the end of all that work all you get is a probability. A coin toss remains, well, the toss of a coin.
Armed with this, it is worth revisiting last week’s debate on Syria. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the “lessons of Iraq” were critical in determining the outcome. But the lessons being relied upon were not those of 1995, they were those of 2003. In other words, the lessons not even of a single conflict, but those taught by part of a single conflict.
The Iraq war, apparently, taught MPs that when the intelligence community reported its findings it was probably exaggerating them and couldn’t be trusted. We should wait until we really know, can be absolutely certain, what went on, that’s what Iraq tells us. And it also tells us, apparently, that before we get into something we need to know how to get out. We need to know an endgame.
And, as with the coin toss, this is very comforting. It holds out the promise that one day it will be obvious what to do as long as we hold out long enough.
The truth, I’m afraid is rather different. If you study the lessons of conflicts with a large enough sample size it becomes obvious that in the end you are relying on probabilities.
It is, for instance, right not to appease dictators because on the whole that has proven a sensible and morally correct policy, taking the great sweep of events all together. But sometimes the policy will not work or will not be sensible.
The evidence of the intelligence community is always ambiguous and sometimes this means, as it did in the Iraq war, that it is flat out wrong. On other occasions, as in the Cuban missile crisis, it is right. You are left with common sense and judgment, and a degree of risk, certainty being impossible.
And conflicts always have endgames that are hard to be certain about and aren’t always desirable. The Second World War didn’t end until 1990, with a messy stand-off lasting 45 years. And it could be argued that the Iraq war happened partly to provide a clear endgame because there had been years without one after the Kuwait invasion.
The lesson of history, I’m afraid, is that the lesson of history can never release you from making judgments, ones you sometimes get wrong.
