The Limits of Knowability
When I first started practicing law, all the practical stuff I didn't learn in law school fell into three categories: What I knew, what I didn't know, and what I didn't know I didn't know.
The first, no problem. The second, no problem, really, either -- if you know what you don't know, you know what you need to find out. The really scary stuff is what you don't know you don't know, because that leads to the big mistakes.
Michael Barone's piece at Real Clear Politics today talks, in a sense, about the limits of knowability in a world where we must deal with hostile regimes and flawed intelligence. Even at its best, using intelligence to piece together reality is more like trying to interpret a poem than read an instruction manual. There will always be conflicting reports, ambiguities, questions whose answers we don't know -- and possibly, questions we don't even know to ask.
Part of being a grown up -- and a mature citizen -- is learning to deal with the fact that sometimes, one has to cope with uncertainty and make decisions without having every piece of knowledge that would be optimal. On occasion, policy, like everything else, requires the exercise of judgments that carry substantial risk once all the facts that are obtainable have been obtained. The issue isn't how one avoids risks, because that's impossible. The question is how one balances them.
In Iraq, given what we knew, the President decided that it was riskier to possibly leave Saddam Hussein developing or sitting on WMDs than it was to take him out, notwithstanding the risks that such a course of action also entailed. It's easy to judge and blame in retrospect, but at the time, there was no other reasonable course of action, given what we knew.
Now we are confronted with Iran. And it's worth noting that, sometimes, making no decision is making a decision. If, in the wake of the difficulties in Iraq, the American left succeeds in paralyzing the government's ability to address threats, we're not just restraining President Bush from exercising his judgment. We are, effectively, entrusting the world, and our own lives, to the like of Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The first, no problem. The second, no problem, really, either -- if you know what you don't know, you know what you need to find out. The really scary stuff is what you don't know you don't know, because that leads to the big mistakes.
Michael Barone's piece at Real Clear Politics today talks, in a sense, about the limits of knowability in a world where we must deal with hostile regimes and flawed intelligence. Even at its best, using intelligence to piece together reality is more like trying to interpret a poem than read an instruction manual. There will always be conflicting reports, ambiguities, questions whose answers we don't know -- and possibly, questions we don't even know to ask.
Part of being a grown up -- and a mature citizen -- is learning to deal with the fact that sometimes, one has to cope with uncertainty and make decisions without having every piece of knowledge that would be optimal. On occasion, policy, like everything else, requires the exercise of judgments that carry substantial risk once all the facts that are obtainable have been obtained. The issue isn't how one avoids risks, because that's impossible. The question is how one balances them.
In Iraq, given what we knew, the President decided that it was riskier to possibly leave Saddam Hussein developing or sitting on WMDs than it was to take him out, notwithstanding the risks that such a course of action also entailed. It's easy to judge and blame in retrospect, but at the time, there was no other reasonable course of action, given what we knew.
Now we are confronted with Iran. And it's worth noting that, sometimes, making no decision is making a decision. If, in the wake of the difficulties in Iraq, the American left succeeds in paralyzing the government's ability to address threats, we're not just restraining President Bush from exercising his judgment. We are, effectively, entrusting the world, and our own lives, to the like of Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
posted by LadybugUSA at 9:27 AM
1 Comments:
Wrabkin:
You and I disagree on some basic premisses.
Saddam was giving $10,000 to the families of suicide bombers.
Saddam may not have had nukes (yet?) however Gas is easy to make. He DID use it on the Kurds
If Israel had not interceded, he would have had nukes.
Saddam was a very public face for a very dangerous man. He was using money from the "Oil for food" program to arm and support international terrorism. His people were starving. The public utilities - electric, gas, water, road, etc, were being ignored, (Long before we started bombing)
OK , I'll give you the fact that the entire world was wrong about SOME WMD's. However any decent high school chemistry student can make poison gas! It's been around for about 100 years. He had it and more importantly - He Used It on his own people.
He was indeed a great threat. We're better off with him out of power. I honestly think that history will look upon the war positively.
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