Persian predicament

Over at Catallarchy, Matt McIntosh links approvingly to a piece by Matt Yglesias castigating what he sees as sloppy thinking on Iran.

Matt Yglesias: They’ll do anything to help the Palestinian cause unless it involves spending money, risking the stability of their own regimes, or deploying their military assets. Now we’re supposed to believe that, suddenly, the Mullahs are willing to guarantee their own destruction in order to turn the holy city of Jerusalem into a radioactive wasteland.

Matt McIntosh: One of the largest sources of error in reasoning about other people’s behaviour is paying more attention to what they say than to what they do. It’s the kind of error that causes people to continue to think of Republicans as being the party of small government, or that the unions stick up for “the workers” rather than just the unions, or that Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes actually give a damn about Israel as anything other than a useful political prop. (It’s often joked that if Israel didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.)

It’s a fallacy on par with the fundamental attribution error, and so ubiquitous as to deserve its own name – perhaps “the rationalistic fallacy”

This is certainly true. However there is a similar and similarly widespread error in reasoning which is to downplay or ignore outright evidence which points to an unsettling conclusion. This would be the kind of error that causes people to dismiss out of hand a plainly spoken intent in favour of some imagined unspoken "real intent" more congenial to the worldview one wishes to maintain.

There is also the type of "fundamental attribution error" I previously described as "homomorphism", which is to project one's own reasoning and rationale to another. Perhaps this might be called the "rationalistic" fallacy. It certain doesn't seem to make any sense for Iran to nuke Israel and/or provoke an attack from the USA. But plenty of things end up happening which didn't seem to make any sense.

For instance, Saddam's behaviour in the run-up to the Iraq war didn't seem to make any sense from the point of view of the preservation of his regime. Turns out he didn't have any wmd worth a damn. This could have been made amply clear by full co-operation with inspectors which would probably have fatally weakened the case for invasion. Instead, it seems that it was more important to maintain his self-image as a latter day Saladin than it was to save his own skin.

Prior to Sep 2001, it "didn't make any sense" to believe that terrorists would commandeer a plane to use as a missile - so much so that I (admittedly dimly) recall a report by a Guardian/Observer/Channel 4 journalist (Possibly Jon Ronson?) mocking the hubristic plans of Abu Hamza and his acolytes who had discussed this very possibility in a semi-public meeting attended by the hack in question.

The problem here, I'd suggest is the slide from estimating a low probability of a certain course of events - Matt (both of them!) may well be right that such a self-defeating turn by Iran following through on its sabre-rattling is unlikely - to the certainty that that course of events won't take place. The corrollary to the Matts' argument is that one shouldn't worry about Iran becoming a nuclear power. I don't think this is a safe conclusion at all. For example, let's say we could have flicked a switch a few decades ago and prevented Pakistan from going nuclear (hell, throw in India while you're at it) I think we would have. The world is almost certainly a more dangerous place with Islamic-terrorist-supporting generals a heartbeat (or a neatly timed assasination) away from the red button.

This is not to say that there is a cast-iron case for action against Iran. Rather it's to point out that this question - what Iran's "real intent" is likely to be in the event that they acquire nuclear weaponry - is the wrong question. For one, bellicose threats, however hollow, can tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies, particularly when delivered by a populist demagogue. The pertinent question is whether it is possible to stop Iran from going nuclear in the first place without either introducing perverse incentives for other "rogue" states (the danger in "soft" power"/bribery) or without leading to a conflagration worse than the threat represented by a nuclear Iran. I don't think this is a settled question but I'm certainly not going to seek consolation in the comforting notion that a nuclear Iran is ok because, when they rattle their sabres, they don't really mean it.

Comments

[Andrew]

My impression on the Saddam's weird pre-war behavior was that he believed that his regime would fall if people (internal dissidents, external enemies) believed he *didn't* have WMDs. I remember reading that even some of his top generals were shocked to discover that he had no WMDs. It's not that he didn't want to preserve his regime, it's that he had false information and assumptions. It's hard to imagine that Iran's leaders have false assumptions of this sort that would lead them to the scenario Matt Yglesias it talking about, nuking Israel when so far they've only provided tepid support to the Palestinians.

And, okay, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but I don't see how it didn't make sense for terrorists to try to blow up the World Trade Center before 9/11 - I mean, they already tried it once in 1993 and it's not as if suicide terrorism was unheard of.

[Matt McIntosh]

Yeah, it's difficult to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of various cognitive biases and fallacies. I agree that it would be just as wrong to assume that others think precisely the way we would as it is to treat them as some kind of inscrutable "other". Universality and variation in human cognition are two sides of the same coin.

As such, I don't think there's a superior replacement for good old profiling. Look at someone's past behaviour, look at the situations they find themselves in, and do the best you can to extrapolate from there to what they're likely to do. If you look at the profiles for people like Saddam or Hamza, they're markedly different from those of Khameni or Rafsanjani. Ditto for the dynamics of the situation they find themselves in. There's nothing there to lead me to believe they'd do anything to fanatically stupid as to actually lob a nuke at Tel Aviv.

I'm not saying we shouldn't worry at all; merely that we should keep our analysis realistic and worry in proportion to the actual magnitude of the problem without overinflating it. I'm not happy about a nuclear-armed Iran, but we live in the world of the second best.

I actually am not so sure that I'd press your magic nuke-removal button on Pakistand/India, though. I think it's compelling that relations between the two countries have cooled off markedly since they went nuclear. Does anyone think the situation would have normalized and improved so much absent the presence of nukes?

[Frank McGahon]

Andrew:My impression on the Saddam's weird pre-war behavior was that he believed that his regime would fall if people (internal dissidents, external enemies) believed he *didn't* have WMDs

I'm not buying that. For starters, just like he didn't have wmd worth a damn, neither did he have internal dissidents worth a damn. Surely one of the contributing factors in getting "realpolitikers" behind the Iraq war was the fact that there was no real possibility of an internally directed regime change. Secondly, his principal "external enemy" was the USA - the very power whose fire he drew.

It's hard to imagine that Iran's leaders have false assumptions of this sort that would lead them to the scenario Matt Yglesias it talking about, nuking Israel when so far they've only provided tepid support to the Palestinians.

Well, you know this is the connection Yglesias makes which doesn't make any sense to me. It's entirely possible to work yourself into a righteous frenzy about the fact that the holy city of Jerusalem is occupied by infidels and still not give a damn about the Muslims nearest that place. Indeed, perhaps the contempt displayed to Palestinians throughout the Muslim Arab world (both expressed and revealed!) might be best explained by considering that the Palestinians were the ones who surrendered Jerusalem in the first place.

And, okay, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but I don't see how it didn't make sense for terrorists to try to blow up the World Trade Center before 9/11 - I mean, they already tried it once in 1993 and it's not as if suicide terrorism was unheard of.

My point was that the idea of a plane-missile was considered absurd. Sure, it seems perfectly plausible now.

[Andrew]

"My point was that the idea of a plane-missile was considered absurd."

Okay, but this isn't relevant to the idea of it "not making sense" for someone to do something, which is an issue of motive, not technique. It made perfect sense for Al Qaeda to *try* to blow up the World Trade Center (in the way that Matt Yglesias argues that it does not make sense for Iran to nuke Israel), though the precise method they used was not something we really considered.

Re Saddam, my impression was that Saddam had a distorted picture of reality - like many paranoid dictators, he thought there were internal threats to his regime; and his picture of external enemies had Iran looming rather large, compared to the actual huge threat of the U.S. Now you might say that it's splitting hairs to draw a distinction between "acted as if he didn't want to stay in power" and "wanted to stay in power but grossly miscalculated" but this way of looking at his actions does provide an explanation that's not "he was crazy and irrational."

[Frank McGahon]

I'm not saying we shouldn't worry at all; merely that we should keep our analysis realistic and worry in proportion to the actual magnitude of the problem without overinflating i

Which is fair enough, except that the form of argument adopted by Yglesias - by sliding from "it probably won't happen" to "it definitely won't happen" - leads precisely to the conclusion you reject - removing threat of attack from the table.

I actually am not so sure that I'd press your magic nuke-removal button on Pakistand/India, though. I think it's compelling that relations between the two countries have cooled off markedly since they went nuclear. Does anyone think the situation would have normalized and improved so much absent the presence of nukes?

Well there is an argument that going nuclear has frozen both countries in a kind of poisonous embrace. Given that the choice is between stalemate and annihilation, India and Pakistan have (grudgingly) opted for a stalemate (which may yet fall apart). If they had no recourse to nuclear weapons, they might have fought out a conventional war over Kashmir, or the realistic prospect of conventional non-annihilation war might have led them to some sort of truce or treaty.

[Frank McGahon]

but this way of looking at his actions does provide an explanation that's not "he was crazy and irrational."

Actually I don't mean to claim that he was actually "crazy and irrational" but I do think his self-image as a great, powerful Arab leader was tied up in the, ultimately disastrous, pretence that he possessed the power to annihilate his enemies. If it is possible to have underestimated this rationale and overestimated his "conventional" rationale, it is surely also possible to underestimate the threat represented by Ahmadinejad's sabre rattling.

[Matt McIntosh]

Yeah, Yglesias goes slightly further (rhetorically at least) than I would. It's not completely inconcievable, but very highly implausible. My position is somewhere between his and Ed Luttwak's -- I'm not as hung up on nukes as Luttwak is, but I'm more willing to employ credible threats than Yglesias is.

My main cause for worry is that this would give Iran greater leverage to throw its weight around in non-military ways, but I think this is manageable if the US gets in early and offers them rewards (e.g. diplomatic renormalization, the end of sanctions and the unfreezing of assets) on the condition that they behave responsibly WRT Iraq and cut their funding of terrorism.

I am of the opinion that Pakistan and India probably would have gone to conventional war absent the nukes, so I'm pretty sure nuclear stalemate is a vast improvement over that alternative. There have been some touch and go moments just as there were during the Cold War, but my impression is that any kind of hot war between the two has gotten less likely with each passing decade.

Re: Ahmadinejad's babbling, I've said many times that I don't understand the obsessing over him. It's particularly striking to me that many of the same people who rightly noted how powerless and ineffectual the reformist Khatami was suddenly do a 180 and are now acting as if Ahmadinejad is hugely relevant. If anything the President has been made weaker since he won the election. So what gives?

[Jon Ihle]

While I can imagine several scenarios that end with Iran lobbing a nuke at Tel Aviv, and it's a possibility worth avoiding, I don't think that it will be the first, most probably or most significant consequence of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Nukes will basically give Iran a free hand in the region by securing the regime against all external military threats short of nuclear war. It will create a kind of cracked mirror image of Israel's nuclear trump card: "Never again. But if again, not us alone." The Iranians would be able to say: "If we go down, you're all coming with us." So really we're trying to avoid all the trouble Iran could cause should they ever have a get out of jail free card to play.

[Frank McGahon]

Jon, I think this is right and I should have spelled it out. Nukes would make Iran pretty much untouchable and in a great (from their point of view) position to boss their neighbours, near and far*, even if they never did attack Israel.

*Remember also that long range delivery systems would put Europe within range.

[dsquared]

the Guardian journalist you're thinking of is almost certainly Jon Ronson, but his relationship was with Omar Bakri Muhammad, not hooky, and he certainly did take OBM seriously and (now my own memory is failing me) actually grassed him up to the police on a couple of occasions. Ronson is actually a pretty sharp cookie behind that bumbling style.

[This could have been made amply clear by full co-operation with inspectors which would probably have fatally weakened the case for invasion]

Would it? My take at the time was that there was *nothing* that Saddam could have done to prevent the invasion and he knew it. Everything that's come up since the war, as far as I can see, supports the view that WMD were a pretext and we were going to invade him anyway. So whatever he did, we would define "full co-operation" as one step more. Given that there was no reason at all for Saddam to believe that we were negotiating in good faith, it was IMO rational of him to not let us take detailed photographs of his military installations and (particularly) to hand over the Ba'ath Party's personnel files.

I have my own solution to the whole problem and it involves sending Ahmadinejad a letter saying "Dear Mahmoud, Allah's a wanker, love, Kim Jong-Il".

[Frank McGahon]

the Guardian journalist you're thinking of is almost certainly Jon Ronson, but his relationship was with Omar Bakri Muhammad, not hooky,

I stand corrected, although my impression of his report on the plane-bomb incident was of one that poked fun at such absurd hubris, rather than concern that he represented a genuine threat.

Would it? My take at the time was that there was *nothing* that Saddam could have done to prevent the invasion and he knew it. Everything that's come up since the war, as far as I can see, supports the view that WMD were a pretext and we were going to invade him anyway.

Oy Vey! that slippery "we" again. Of course it's a counterfactual and we can't know for sure but I'd say that full co-operation would have peeled off the UK, Australia, pretty much the rest of the Coalition. Even granting (for the sake of argument, not that I agree with this) that Bush wanted to get Saddam anyway, it would have been politically more difficult for him in the absence of the cover provided by the rest of the coalition and the apparent danger Saddam posed.

I have my own solution to the whole problem and it involves sending Ahmadinejad a letter saying "Dear Mahmoud, Allah's a wanker, love, Kim Jong-Il".

Which would be fine if the nukes just took out their respective leaderships and not the rest of the populations...

[dsquared]

Of course it's a counterfactual and we can't know for sure but I'd say that full co-operation would have peeled off the UK, Australia, pretty much the rest of the Coalition

If you were in Saddam's shoes, though, would this be the way you bet?

[Frank McGahon]

Well this is kind of my point above. If I was in Saddam's shoes I wouldn't be in his shoes in the first place. If you are to try and have a stab at his thought processes, you're not going to get anywhere by just plonking yourself in his place. You'd have to also take into account his own particular personality and culture.