![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If any of you guys can follow the tortured logic of Jane Galt in this seminal "you-a culpa" blort, well my hat's off to you:
Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein's actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government--and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.
However.
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It's just that independantly, things they didn't predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.
I...huh? R. Porrofatto in the comments over at TBogg gives it the old college try:
It's a variation of this, which is all the rage in liberal hawk land: Those who were pushing for the invasion of Iraq were wrong but for all the right reasons. Those opposed to the war were right but for all the wrong reasons. Get it?
Moreover, being wrong was the right thing to be at the time, so anyone opposed to the invasion was irrationally refusing to be properly misled.
Finally, those who turned out to be right about the war are most decidedly the wrong kind of people, so the right people can ignore them now, just like they did then.
Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein's actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government--and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.
However.
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It's just that independantly, things they didn't predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.
I...huh? R. Porrofatto in the comments over at TBogg gives it the old college try:
It's a variation of this, which is all the rage in liberal hawk land: Those who were pushing for the invasion of Iraq were wrong but for all the right reasons. Those opposed to the war were right but for all the wrong reasons. Get it?
Moreover, being wrong was the right thing to be at the time, so anyone opposed to the invasion was irrationally refusing to be properly misled.
Finally, those who turned out to be right about the war are most decidedly the wrong kind of people, so the right people can ignore them now, just like they did then.
