Stupidest Woman Alive Nomination: Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle gets scores of 10.0, 10.0, 10.0, 9.8, and 5.6 from the Slovakian judge as she dives off the platform onto her belly in her play for the "Stupidest Woman Alive" crown. She tries to explain why we should pay attention not to those who got Iraq right but to those who got Iraq wrong:

Megan McArdle: Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success.... Failure tells us more than success... success is usually a matter of a whole system... development economists have proven... complex webs of interactions are impossible to tease apart.... Since [the invasion of Iraq] failed, the more interesting question is... what did you get wrong. The people who were right can (and will)... rewrite their memories.... This is not some attack on people who were against the war....

The people who failed... will have to look for some coherent explanation... the honest ones are vastly more interesting than listening to a parade of people say "Well, obviously, I'm a genius, and also, not mean."...

Update: To everyone who asked "Why would the behavior of the people you're arguing with matter?" I can only respond: so what have you learned during your visit to our planet?... Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be. And every word that you type mocking the repentant supporters of the war will, I guarantee, be hauled up and thrown in your face. It is best not to fling calumny about other peoples' decisions unless you are very confident that you will be able to bat a thousand for the next forty years or so...

And what are the "vastly more interesting" things we learn from closely and attentively listening to the people who were wrong on Iraq? Well, let us take one canonical example: Megan McArdle. Megan McArdle got Iraq wrong. Today--listen carefully and attentively--Megan McArdle writes:

Megan McArdle: One of my commenters asks what I got wrong on the Iraq war. I've posted on this before, but I suppose it's worth saying again what I've learned from the experience.... (6) I paid too much attention to the French. While in general, "Whatever France is doing, don't do that" is very good policy advice, it is not actually true that everything the French oppose is therefore a good idea...

This truly is self-pwnage of an extraordinary degree. "I laughed so hard I fell off my chair" is usually hyperbole.

But not in this case.

I am speechless.

But The Philosopher is not.

Here is the lesson:

Obsidian Wings: "Seriously Misguided": There's something right about what McArdle says, and something wrong. To start with the first: most of us sometimes get things right, and sometimes get things wrong. Suppose God grants you the chance to question someone about an important decision, and gives you the choice: would you rather question that person after she has screwed up, or after she has gotten something right? Other things being equal, I think I'd rather question the person after she screws up, for more or less the reasons McArdle suggests. Notice, though, that in this case, we have to choose whether or not to question one and the same person after a success or a failure. The identity of that person, and with it, her good or bad judgment, her wisdom or naivete, and so forth, is held constant; and this is essential to the example.

The question McArdle claims to be asking is a different one: given a particular decision, would you rather question the people who got it right or those who got it wrong? Here what we hold constant is not the people we question, but the decision itself. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Different people have different track records. On foreign policy, George Kennan had a very good track record: he got a lot of things right, including some very difficult ones. That is in large part due to the fact that he knew a lot and had exceptionally good judgment. Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, has a terrible track record: he gets things wrong all the time, and when he gets them right, it seems to be more or less by coincidence. That is because he knows almost nothing and has terrible judgment. Their respective track records mean that on any given decision, people with good judgment, like George Kennan, are much more likely to have gotten it right than to have gotten it wrong, while the opposite is true of people with bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg.*

If I ask myself whether I would rather hear from the people who got a given question right or wrong, I can assume that the people with good judgment on questions of that type will be overrepresented among those who got it right, and underrepresented among those who got it wrong; and that the opposite will hold true of the people with bad judgment. So one way to think about the question: who would I rather hear from? is that it is a question about whether I would rather hear from people likely to have good judgment, like George Kennan, or people who are likely to have bad judgment, like Jonah Goldberg. This is, frankly, not a hard call to make at all.

However, as McArdle notes, a given person who has just gotten something very wrong is more likely to have something interesting to say about it than she would be had she just gotten it right. If the differences between people with good judgment and people with bad judgment were very small, or the additional insight conferred by confronting one's own errors were very large, then the effects of having just made a mistake might be big enough to swamp the effect of having good judgment overall. In that case, even though the people who got something wrong would be likely to have had worse judgment initially than the people who got it right, the fact that they had just gotten something wrong might make them suddenly become more interesting and better to talk to, on the whole, than the group who got things right.

Obviously, though, this isn't the way it works. First, the difference between George Kennan and Jonah Goldberg is very, very large. Second, the fact that Jonah Goldberg has terrible judgment doesn't just lead him to screw up foreign policy; it also makes him far less likely to learn from his mistakes than George Kennan would. Someone who is thoughtful, perceptive, and insightful, and who had gotten the Iraq war wrong, might find his or her judgment changed forever, in very interesting ways. (Then again, George Kennan would be almost as likely to learn something really interesting from observing other people's errors. He would be interesting to talk to either way.) Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, seems to have learned nothing whatsoever from his mistakes. And this doesn't seem to be entirely unrelated to the defects that made him get Iraq wrong at the outset. He was a shallow, thoughtless idiot then, and he is a shallow, thoughtless idiot now.

And this is what's so wrong about what Megan McArdle says. She is making an argument whose natural application is to the question: given one person, would you be likely to learn more from her after she had gotten something right or after she had gotten something wrong? And she is extrapolating it to the quite different question: would you rather talk to the people who got a given decision right or wrong? It would be fine to extrapolate in this way if the fact that someone got that question right or wrong showed nothing whatsoever about their wisdom or judgment; if the George Kennans and Jonah Goldbergs of this world were tossed at random into either category.

But that's not the way things work. Decisions reveal things about those who make them. People who get them right are, on average, more likely to have wisdom and judgment and insight than those who get them wrong. This means that they are both more likely to be worth talking to in general, and more likely to profit from any mistakes they make, than people who get them wrong.

This is what McArdle missed. It's an interesting omission for someone who, by her own account, got Iraq wrong.

In her post, McArdle suggests that people who get a decision right are likely to revise their memories "to show themselves in the most attractive light", and that this kind of self-deception is more difficult for those who got it wrong. Her own post, with its implicit assumption that major errors do not reflect anything about the judgment of those who make them, suggests that people who get things wrong are just as prone to self-deception as the rest of us.

(See also: Richard "we were right to be wrong" Cohen.)

There will be a quiz.

Comments

[Barkley Rosser]

Obsidian Wings is basically right, but makes it way too long and complicated. She is partly right that it can be interesting to see the remarks of people who were wrong and have realized that they were wrong. In some cases it may even be more interesting than the remarks of those who were right. However, for starters, what has been really annoying about this recent round of analyses has not been that people who were wrong and now admit it are being quoted, but a lot who were wrong and have never admitted they were wrong. The most obvious and loudmouthed case in point is Bill Kristol, who has been rewarded for his wrongness with the platform of a New York Times column, not to mention reputedly being a close adviser of John McCain, who was righter than Bush, but still wrong on a lot of it.

The more interesting part of Obsidian Wings argument has to do with recognizing that some people known more about what they are talking about than others, and are therefore more interesting to pay attention to in either case. So, most of the real Iraq experts, in the intel agencies and outside of them, were highly skeptical of the war upfront, but they got shoved aside by the neocon propagandists like Wolfowitz and his Office of Special Plans, which was created to distort the intel that was questioning the basis for the war. Only a very few real experts backed the war, with probably the most prominent one being Bernard Lewis, a genuinely deep scholar of the Middle East. I do not know what his current view is, but I would be more interested in hearing it than that of Bill Kristol or Meagan McArdle, whatever it is.

[tom f]

First of all, there are multiple dimensions of stupid from the above sited Megan McArdle. Scientifically & technologically, we actually learn alot more from success than from failure: failure to make something work or to predict something usually leaves no clue as to how to get it right.

Of course, this is assuming our primary concern is learning something about the world apart from ourselves. It is the height of narcissism for McArdle to presume that citizens should be more concerned with the personal growth of pundits and politicians than with the effects of the policies they advocate and implement.

But the discussion above from Obsidian Wings is terribly muddled. In matters of social policy, no objective criteria allow for a clear definition of "being right" and "being wrong". Iraqi people could have been worse off with Saddam still in power; the United States could be less safe than today. We can't run controlled experiments to create principles from empirical data.

Thus, the test of rightness or wrongness on policy relies not on the post-hoc interpretation of the results of policy. Instead, we inspect arguments for or against some policy for internal inconsistencies. Here were the inconsistencies.

1. The argument that Iraq in 2002 is an imminent threat is inconsistent with the facts as they are then known. The concept of "threat" is indeed established by reference to such facts.

2. The argument that Iraq was a potential threat applies all the more equally in reverse: the US was a potential threat to Iraq. Thus to argue for a US invasion of Iraq requires one to argue for not only an Iraqi invasion of the US, but in fact an unprecedented conflagration of global and regional conflicts that would likely bring about a new global dark age.

3. The argument that the US would, post invasion, seek the expansion of democratic and human rights in Iraq was inconsistent with the past and contemporary policies of the United States in the Middle East and beyond. The argument that words, not actions, are the barometer of State policy requires us to believe that Saddam, for instance, was also seeking Peace and Prosperity in Iraq.

4. The argument that the US should not be restrained by international law is inconsistent with the argument that Iraq was a threat because it broke international law.

A rational argument against the war would still hold even if today there were a stable, prosperous Iraq holding democratic elections. Future arguments about US acts of aggression might then be modified, but the architects and enablers of the '03 invasion would be just as "wrong" (i.e. be based on arguments that were internally inconsistent).

[MaryCh]

That she would respond seriously, even as the sixth reason she got Iraq wrong, was that she's a francontrarian, tells me I shouldn't pay any more attention to her.

And yet, her capacity to admit and attempt to learn from her mistake is still orders of magnitude greater than those of the Pres and VP combined. They make me miss most past presidents going back to Harding or so.

[jeff hoffman]

Megan McArdle's list of excuses which included number 6, and number 7 about invading France (jokes, she explains in the comments section)...

[An editorial interruption: they both are and are not jokes--they are of the form "ha, ha, only serious."]

...include the following gems: "I simply forgot to be skeptical that we could build a functioning nation in Iraq." Note to Megan: that's why they invented post-its. "I paid too little attention to how the Iraqis would feel." Are we talking about a war here, or snubbing them at a dinner party? "Despite my core belief that I live in the best country in the entire world, I'm basically a cosmopolitan." I'm not sure that the French would agree with this assessment. And: " I overestimated my ability to interpret Saddam's behavior." As he did yours, Megan. The problem that one gets into in asking people why they were wrong on this issue is that you either get this farcically naive world view, or alternatively that of Bill Kristol, for whom all the wrong was in the implementation. One at least has some hope of benefitting from her mistakes. But to suggest that an outsider can learn more from inquiring about them is a wee bit narcissistic.

[RKKA]

"And every word that you type mocking the repentant supporters of the war will, I guarantee, be hauled up and thrown in your face. It is best not to fling calumny about other peoples' decisions unless you are very confident that you will be able to bat a thousand for the next forty years or so."

This is actually an empty warning, since flinging exactly this sort of calumny is basic to the tactics of people like McArdle. As I voiced my concerns about the war as it was approaching, the McArdle's I dealt with denigrated my intelligence (which didn't hurt much considering the source) and my patriotism (which struck somewhat harder). Therefore, we pre-war war opponents have nothing to lose in waging intellectual war with the utmost vigor on the McArdle's we deal with.

[Neil]

I'd like to see those of us who "got it right" talk about our collective failure to influence policy choices before decisions were made. Thus asking those with "good judgment" what they've learned from their "mistakes." But that would be too simple and make too much sense.

[MostlyAPragmatist]

Mostly, I think McArdle is as widely read as she is because she adds energy and fun into a debate, not because she's intellectually interesting. Take this recent post, she's just making reasonable-sounding noises, but in fact we aren't learning anything interesting from most of the mea culpas. The reason it was a bad idea was:

1. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the US and anyone reading the news should have known (or at least strongly suspected) this to be the case.
2. Iraq could not be divided into three parts effectively and could not be kept united by the United States.

Has anyone heard any mea culpa which claimed any good or interesting reason why a war supporter would disagree with either of these two points?

[A]

Regarding reason #6: Brad and many of the other commenters seem to have lost their sense of irony--this is clearly a joke. (You can all now begin piously deriding her for "joking about people's deaths.")

I think McMegan makes a very good point when she says "no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be." Get over yourself!

[Neal]

Another quote from McArdle:

(quote)
My discussion of failure in the context of the Iraq discussion is part of my broader beliefs about innovation. I saw a great speech a little while back by the guy who's in charge of designing new products at Palm. He talked about an excercise that he does with various groups, where he gives them pieces of spaghetti and some tape and tells them to build the tallest structure they can.

Engineers do all right; MBAs do the worst, because they waste time arguing about who will be in charge. But the best performing group? Kindergarteners. Little kids don't try to design a structure. They just keep trying things, and stick with anything that works. Their structures certainly didn't look as elegant as the neat frames designed by the engineers. But they did the job, which is to be as tall as possible.

To succeed quickly, he said, what you want to do is fail. A lot. Failing eliminates wrong answers faster than any possible analysis. I was reminded of the famous Thomas Edison quote: asked how it felt to have failed to invent an electric lightbulb, Edison said "I haven't failed! I've discovered 10,000 filaments that don't work."

(end quote)

Yes, I agree, what you want is a bunch of kindergartners running foreign policy. They will make unbelievable mistakes that adults know wouldn't work, and they don't even know enough about the subject to even ask intelligent question or understand reasoned objections. And they aren't appalled by mistakes, death of thoudands and thousands of people, displacement of millions, burning trillions of dollars in resultless effort. What is all of that in the search a a tower of spaghetti and tape. Heck, they have the proper response to failuire of , "So?".

Bush says, "I haven't failed, making democracy is hard work!"

Spaghetti and tape, indeed.

F***ING IDOTS!!! Liars, war criminals, thieves, murderers, despoilers of the constitution, wasters of trillions of dollars, and...kindergartners.

[Ray Rl]

I suppose that, if McArdle were to contract some serious health problem such as cancer, she would select a health care provider who had failed to cure the patient more frequently as opposed to one who had succeeded most often.

[Ray Rl]

I suppose that, if McArdle were to contract some serious health problem such as cancer, she would select a health care provider who had failed to cure the patient more frequently as opposed to one who had succeeded most often.

[Neal]

By the way, has Bush built a tower of spaghetti and tape in Iraq in the five years that he has had? How many more wrong answers does he have yet to find and explore?

In the real world, there are an infinite number of wrong answers and very few right answers. Correspondingly, the cost of the wrong answers is infinitely greater than the right answer.

F***ING KINDERGARTNERS.

[Doodle Bean]

Forget about the Stupidest Woman Alive competition. This stupidity is so colossal that it merits a nomination for the Stupidest *Person* Alive competition!

[dcpi]

Can anyone point me to a cite of Moqtada Al-Sadr being a primary reason why invading Iraq would fail from prior to April 2003? I am not so sure that anyone really got this right. Yes, some people said don't invade, but I recall those who said that being the same people that always say don't invade, war is morally wrong. Among the nuanced crowd, everyone failed ... and everyone is still failing now -- even DeLong.

[robertdfeinman]

A technical suggestion.
If there is some way that long postings like this could be partially hidden on the front page it would make navigating the site much easier.

As it is now, one has to scroll down quite a distance to get past items that may not be of personal interest. Many sites have a mechanism whereby the first several paragraphs appear in the FIFO list followed by a link to the rest of the article.

So, Brad, if you can find some bit of code that you can insert in your postings that would allow for this, it would be a service to your devoted readers. Even the most fervent followers can't be interested in everything...

[Dantheman]

Did Ms. McArdle learn anything from the runup to the Iraq war, other than what a 2 by 4 is? (Her suggestion as to how to deal with anti-war protestors was to hit them over the head with 2 by 4's, and then backed off once she was told that they are large pieces of wood which can inflict grave injuries to persons, which seems remarkably unlike a libertarian response to peacable protest). If not (and it does not seem so), that by itself is refutation of her position.

[MostlyAPragmatist]

dcpi--

Many people got it right. For example, prominent republican foreign policy expert Brent Scowcroft got it right: http://ffip.com/opeds081502.htm

I don't recall hearing about Muqtada Al-Sadr before the invasion, but I do remember thinking that it would be hard to keep Iraq united when Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds all had divergent interests. The fact that a particular name (Muqtada Al-Sadr) didn't come up isn't very significant--many people know that someone among the Shia would pursue a separate agenda.

[Neil]

dcpi:
As Al-Sadr was the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, and had been "underground" for some years after the assassination of his father, I think a lot of the general misgivings people had based on the sectarian element could be applied to him as a sectarian leader, even if he wasn't named.
I take issue with your assumption that everything was A-OK until his militia started causing trouble. The mission (to forcibly disarm Iraq) was doomed from the beginning, because it had already been accomplished through a regime of sanctions, verified by inspectors, verified again by the Blix group, and then disastrously verified by our armed forces. The casus belli was wrong on a factual basis and many analysts "got that right." Their general tendency to ask questions before shooting doesn't make this point less valid. Where we failed was in persuading enough of the Congress to behave responsibly in the face of an administration hell-bent on being irresponsible. By pursuing a romantic fantasy, we failed--the details of the consequences aren't what we should be quibbling over.

[bakho]

An economic model that fails to make correct predictions is discarded or substantially revised.

Those who supported Bush and his "pre-emption doctrine" were supporting a model of foreign conduct that is naive, stupid and self-defeating. Until they recognize the limits of military power and the need to support international institutions, they will continue to be wrong because they are using a discredited model.

[johne]

"By the way, has Bush built a tower of spaghetti and tape in Iraq in the five years that he has had? How many more wrong answers does he have yet to find and explore?"

On to Tehran!

[Neal]

dcpi--from a rudimentary Google search

(quote)

Analysts' Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed
Senate Panel Releases Assessments From 2003

By Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 26, 2007; Page A01

Months before the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and "probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" in the Muslim world.

The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be "a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge." The assessments noted that Iraqi political culture was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" to support democratic development.

(end quote)

So it wasn't just dodgey intertube neterweb bloggers who questioned the effect of the invaision on the stability of Iraq it was US intelligence agencies.

Yes, dcpi, they were warned.

They were told, authoritatively, that there was a BIG risk of sectarian unrest.

They chose to ignore it--after all they were creating reality, not living it.

[Bloix]

Hilzoy is responding to McArdle as if she were making an argument that she intends to be taken seriously. This is a mistake.

The point is that for someone like McArdle, judgment and knowledge are secondary concerns. The paramount character trait is loyalty. Those who opposed the war were disloyal and therefore should be shunned. That's all there is to it. The rest is obfuscation.

[aimai]

I thought the obsidian wings piece was ridiculously long. The only thing you have to grasp about McCardle's absurdity, aside from its stupidity, venality, and narcissism is that most of the rest of us weren't actually born yesterday. You see, its not really interesting, or merely interesting, to watch some young person with little education, historical understanding, self critical knowledge or basic humanity grapple with big questions like "should we bomb a civilian population in a capital city without having definitive proof that their dicator possess both the weapons to do us harm and the intent?" Its not really an *abstract question* since the wrong answer will cost trillions of dollars, result in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and an entire society, and so on and so forth. Its not an *intellectual excercise* really. But its also not something that should be left to *anti intellectuals* and people with no past. See, its not really even a "thought experiment" like "I wonder how that would work out..to bomb a civilian population pre-emptively?" Its actually been *done before* and we have actually *seen the results* and they aren't really all that good. So while megan is priding herself on not being as dumb as people who had, you know, read some history and knew something about wars she is simply wrong again. If you weren't born yesterday, or terminally stupid, you knew that the downside to the war was going to be much steeper and deeper than any projected upsides (with ponies! and more democracy! and whiter teeth and thinner thighs). Only somebody who was essentially and deeply shallow and childish would have thought otherwise. So is that all megan's explanation amounts to? If you didn't know anything about anythign you could support the war wholeheartedly as some kind of gedankenexperiment? Its not much of a self defence. Although as we see from the boob up above who posted that people who were anti the Iraq war "aren't as smart as all that" and "need to get over themselves" the fundamental sin of the war supporters remains their ineradicable conviction that this was some kind of "test" that they would have scored well on if they were only given more time. BZZZZT! I'm sorry! when history called you were sitting on the potty reading Foreign AFfairs and watching Fox news! You were asked "does it make sense to bomb an innocent civilian population right now!" and you answered "yeah...why not?" and fell off the toilet into a light doze.

aimai

[Mr. Noah]

I second, third, and fourth this nomination.

Megan McArdle is an unending font of stupidity. She flows, bursts out, overflows; she pours herself into universes beyond our comprehension.

I stole that line from a Jewish prayer service...how cool is that?

[Roger Bigod]

"I paid too much attention to the French."

Der Fuehrer's explanation, as well.

[dcpi]

Thanks MostlyAPragmatist and Neal:

The Scowcroft piece from 2002 carries more weight than the WaPo article from 2007 since retrospection has a strong tendency to skew perception. I was able to attend a Scowcroft speech at that time (2002) and he made no secret of his deep disagreement with the Bush policy -- despite his being a Republican from the Reagan years and a peer of Cheney and other Bush advisors while they were together in the Ford administration.

It seems ironic to me that Scowcroft -- a practitioner of Kissingerian RealPolitik and the national security advisor to two Republican presidents -- is the person I was pointed to for getting it right. Especially as Kissinger is now universally condemned for getting everything wrong.

Perhaps Brad can ask Scowcroft for a five year retrospective from someone who got it mostly right so we can learn what he recommends now.

Neil:

I agree that the problems did not start with al-Sadr's militia in the sense that the problems started day one on the invasion (or, really, much prior to that). The issue is that the problems always start prior to day one. It is their emergence from the shadows that makes life so difficult. I would be willing to bet you that al-Sadr started planning his moves prior to the invasion and that he was working on his post-war plans even as the army was gathering in Kuwait.

Someone who knew of al-Sadr's potential prior to the invasion would be someone who truly knew what was going on and someone whose views would be worth hearing now. Not sure that person exists.

[kharris]

What has Ms. McArdle learned? Lessee –

She argues that everybody on the wrong side of the issue will learn from their mistakes while everybody on the right side will bathe in hubris. A simple dichotomy in which everybody in each group shares similar thought processes. But, that sounds just like arguments we heard from the absolute stupidest, most partisan and dogmatic of those who got the war question wrong.

She finds a way to make getting the right answer an issue of character – that hubris stuff is bad, and the people who got it right have it. People who got the right answer will rewrite their memories, claims McArdle. She is calling people who get the right answer liars before the fact. But, that sounds just like arguments we heard from the most unethical, most partisan and dogmatic of those who got the war question wrong.

She offers no evidence for her claim that there is a parade of people who got it right claiming to be geniuses. She claims to "know" facts not in evidence. "Most of us know that we have learned more about the world, and ourselves, from failing than from success...." She imples that people who led us into war have benefited from the experience, with no evidence. Claims based on no evidence were the very sort of thing we got from the most partisan and dogmatic of those who got the war question wrong.

She implies that those who got the war right are somehow gobbling up all the attention, which seems pretty much like push-back against those pointing out that she and others like her who were wrong on the war have gotten far more public attention than those who were right. More of just the sort of tactics that were used shout down opponents to the war when listening to them could have done some good.

She offers a fatuous "frenchy" explanation for getting the most important policy question of the Bush presidency wrong – ha, ha, let's not think about my mistake too seriously. Misdirection and trivialization were part of the bag of tricks war-husksters used to sell us the war. McArdle is simply falling back on the tricks she learned from her masters five and six years ago.

This is McArdle at her best, as she really is. She is using her considerable rhetorical skills not to clarify an issue, but to argue for a position that cannot win on its merits. "Listen to those of us who were wrong, not the ones who were right." This is not, absolutely not, a candidate for "Stupidest Woman Alive". She is far worse than stupid.

So here's my question for McArdle – If getting it wrong confers so much additional wisdom, why are you acting like this? Why are you stooping to the same low tactics as you did before realizing you were wrong? Why have you not learned to make an honest argument, to give credit where credit is due, to give place when you fail?

McArdle stands as evidence against her own argument.

[Mr. Noah]

By the way, Megan's comment about the French is very interesting, because one of the reasons George Bush actually invaded Iraq was probably that all his critics were urging him not to. It just goes to show that what was once conservatism has degenerated into a weirdly contrarian anti-liberalism.

[Neal]

dcpi--

my point was that the people who were paid to know, knew, and told this administration of the problems.

Read http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf which is a summary of the problems that were to be encountered. This was all known before the war. Not my doing, nor a mere hind-sight justification-fest by the WaPo.

Are you arguing that intertube neterwebbers are supposed to guide policy? Are you arguing that they should have better intelligence than the CIA/NSA/DIA?

Who would satisfy your "demand" of who pointed out al-Sadr as the reason why the invaision would fail prior to 2003? Is him as the prime stumbling block even a defensible position to have?

We were, and still are too ignorant of the internal politics of countries such as Iraq (and Iran) to even know the specific spark.

Try that on for size.

[Rob]

Ahh, Megan the market fundamentalist is arguing the market should reward failure and punish success! Then again she did turn being wrong into jobs with the Economist and the Atlantic....

[Barbara]

Not even a kindergartener would mistake unsuccessful spaghetti and tape structures with killing civilians. I watched a science show on earthquakes with my six year old and she left the room in tears because she realized that boys and girls might have been in those crushed buildings.

It's that kind of conflation of actual foreign policy decisions with abstract intellectual exercises that continues to plague the reasoning of pro-war pundits. Ask that same manager if he would actually market these structures as a means of figuring out whether they would succeed and he would look at you like you were completely daft. Of course not.

And yet, Ms. McArdle evidently fails to see how criminally insane her analogy is, essentially endorsing the killing of human beings as an experiment to see if this or that foreign policy approach might work. That kind of thinking is always going to fail because live people don't like being treated like they're abstract ideas. Please excuse the rest of us for not thinking we have anything to learn from such pathetic rationalizations.

[dcpi]

Neal:

Let me take your points in rejiggered order:

1. Tried that on hat for size, it fits (see: "Not sure that person exists.") We are all fallible and often wrong human beings. To believe otherwise is to not learn from our mistakes, which are legion in every case.

2. I don't trust a report from the Senate based up research that was begun in February 2004 as much as I would trust a brief written in February 2003 -- link me to one. Hindsight colors everything differently than the original by removing or amending context (ie. we know what the Senate committee thinks the expert got right, but what did they get wrong?).

My point is that I remain unconvinced that anyone got it 100% right in 2003 and what those people got wrong then has a bearing on how much importance should be placed on what they got right. I agree that Scowcroft got it more right than most, which segues to point 3:

3. Yes, the pros can be good. Scowcroft headed the NSA under two different presidents. What I notice in his being right, though, is that he for most of his career he was openly vilified by many Democrats and others who generally oppose war. His mentor was no other than Henry Kissinger, the devil incarnate to some here. Does that context increase or decrease his credibility?

[Barbara]

Nor, I am assuming, would the manager let the kindergarteners fail in an exercise that would actually harm others, like operating cranes in actual construction projects in the middle of mid-town Manhattan. "Oops! They took out another four apartment buildings! Nice try!" There is a difference between a simulation and the real thing. Is that so hard to grasp as a basis for not using war as a means of ideological experimentation?

[dcpi]

And, to answer Brad Delong's original point and Megan McArdle's follow-on ... of course they agree that most everyone being asked to write the retrospectives got it wrong at the time. The simple explanation is that most people think they are right and there are no other "as right" viewpoints. My working hypothesis is that this belief is a core aspect of human nature.

Over 40-odd years I continue to meet people of all persuasions who are convinced that that are more right than others. Calling people "stupid" accomplishes nothing other than hurt feelings, raised passions and higher click throughs for Brad DeLong.

Bet that is why he does it so often and I can't say I blame him.

[tom f]

Curious: despite offering opinions that I mostly agree with, why are so many thoughtful, intelligent posters satified with the obscurist "got it right/got it wrong" concept?

"Getting it right" or "getting it wrong" contains three words, none of which is defined satisfactory in the context it is most often used.

Fuzzy thinking 9 times out of 10 will allow the powerful to define the world in their interests. If the expectations of political discourse are founded upon augury -that's what "getting it right" seems to be about- you cede your rational faculties to the vagaries of a history that is written by the victors.

War opponents didn't get it right in retrospect, they (we) were right at the time. No outcome of the war could possibly effect that.

[rea]

"Can anyone point me to a cite of Moqtada Al-Sadr being a primary reason why invading Iraq would fail from prior to April 2003?"

Napoleon was right to invade Russia--can anyone point me to a cite of someone in early 1812 predicting the bridges on the Brezina would break?

[dcpi]

rea. If you could I would want to hear more from him! And so would Napoleon's ghost.

[sm]

Time to start finding the people who are right on the tough questions and publicizing them via blog.

Just compile one big annotated list of the warmongers and the "I was right even though I was wrong" brigade and forget them otherwise. Or there could be one designated hitter to call them down while the rest of us talk about how to turn good ideas into US Govt policy.

[dsquared]

[Megan McArdle (March 18, 2008) - Famous last words: I've long thought that Jim Cramer should be illegal, along with everyone else who purports to pick stocks on the telly. Further proof that I am right:]

and this was because he got a stock call on Bear Stearns wrong! I am, to be honest, not a big fan of Brad's "Stupidest Man/Woman Alive" series - I think it's a bit needlessly nasty. But to be calling for a man to lose his career and be banned from the media over a missed stock call, and then literally one week later to write the essay above, is pretty egregious.

[Roger Bigod]

"Calling people 'stupid' accomplishes nothing other than hurt feelings, raised passions and higher click throughs for Brad DeLong."

Three worthy outcomes in this case.

[dcpi]

To clarify for rea ...

My overarching point is that the reason for the retrospective is to learn lessons from the past in order to apply them to the future. There are at least two sets of lessons to be learned that would be useful:

a: Whether regime change can work, how to identify those times when it can work and when it won't and how to go about it.

b: Why we are failing in Iraq specifically and what that means to what we should do in Iraq going forward.

The underlying logic of Brad's post (whether he realizes it or not) is that the moral implications of the Iraq war are off the table. There is no point in learning the lessons if our conclusion is that it was simply immoral to depose Saddam.

[Neal]

dcpi

This:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf

is a collection of PREWAR assessments. Check it out.

[Neal]

dcpi--

And if you want to find the next al-Sadr, learn to read the language in the area of interest and go live there for a decade or so.

[A]

Kharris says: She offers no evidence for her claim that there is a parade of people who got it right claiming to be geniuses.

Have you read any of the comments here and on her posts? Many of them use phrases like "it was obvious" or "anyone could see." I think these are the people McMegan is saying are claiming to be very smart. The general tone of massive self-righteous condescention implies that the commenters think they're a couple orders of magnitude above her in wisdom. Since she propably doesn't think she's a zero, this implies the commenters think they're geniuses. If more of them said something like "I'm not an expert, but even I can see that you used flawed thinking to miss an obvious point," I would buy that no one is claiming to be a genius.

[aimai]

dcpi,
is an example of how reason gets tortured by war supporters eager to obfuscatre the facts, the history, and even the state of knoweldge. You see, it was *both* immoral to attempt to bomb an innocent civilian population into democracy *and* badly carried out *and* counterproductive to the hypothetical "war on terror" and to America's standing in the world. Lots and lots and lots of people pointed this out at the time. Some pointed out one thing, while leaving the others to be understood. Some pointed out all three vociferously. Just because there were some pacificsts who also pointed out one, two, and three doesn't mean that the rest of us were pacifists whose entire opposition to the war rested on its "immorality." And, of course, the reason Scowcroft was listened to was not because he suddenly agreed with us and we forgot that he had been a right wing apologist and apparatchick all those years but because we naievly thought that bush and his neo con supporters might at least listen to the *voice of experience* in foreign policy even if we had never agreed with the kinds of experiences Scowcroft et al thought were normal. Here's a newsflash--we even publicized Cheney's statements explaining why during gulf war I we didn't march on to take baghdad. That's not because we weirdly love the old cheney and hate the new one--its because the old cheney admitted some political and ecomonomic and military realities that the new one was brushign under the rug. Its possible for people to be right at one historical time and wrong at another--history, their motivations, and their information can change. What doesn't change is the fact that *invading another country* and bombing a helpless civilian population for geopolitical concerns utterly divorced from their interests is *not an experiment* or rather it has been *tried before* and the educated, thoughtful, people actually had kind of read up on that shit and knew that. Only McCardle can pretend that aggressive war is some "new" thing that has never been tried and only now can we see its a bad idea.

And this continued insistence that someone fix Iraq for you fuckers? Its been said before but it bears repeating. You are like a child who throws a priceless vase against the wall, smashes it to pieces, and then shrieks "its all your fault! you fix it!." Its.Not.Going.To.Be.Fixed. The dead will remain dead. That is a very serious charge. And, by the way, quite old...humpty dumpty might have clued you morons in.

aimai

[dsquared]

by the way, does anyone else think that this sounds like bullshit?

[I saw a great speech a little while back by the guy who's in charge of designing new products at Palm. He talked about an excercise that he does with various groups, where he gives them pieces of spaghetti and some tape and tells them to build the tallest structure they can.

Engineers do all right; MBAs do the worst, because they waste time arguing about who will be in charge. But the best performing group? Kindergarteners.]

I simply don't believe that five-year old children do, actually, build taller structures out of spaghetti than adults with a background in engineering.

I only bring it up because "BE VERY CAREFUL ABOUT TAKING POLITICALLY CONVENIENT ANECDOTES AT FACE VALUE, IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY CORROBORATING EVIDENCE" is kind of one of the important lessons that we need to learn.

[dcpi]

Neal: The Senate report is a postwar assessment of the prewar assessments, not verbatim copies of the pre-war assessments warts and all...

[OK. That's enough. That's across the troll line...]

[slog]

dsquared says: "But to be calling for a man to lose his career and be banned from the media over a missed stock call, and then literally one week later to write the essay above, is pretty egregious."

Isn't it clear that the Cramer stuff was hyperbolic, like saying someone "should be taken out and horse-whipped" without actually desiring physical harm? It's pretty cool how everyone suddenly has never heard of off-the-cuff blog posts, jokes, or hyperbolae once someone says something they don't agree with.

[Barbara]

dcpi, it just seems kind of ironic that you are demanding the kind of evidence in hindsight to validate opposition to the war that war opponenents begged to see from war supporters in advance as a reason to support it.

You seem to be saying that war opponents cannot be viewed as justified or "100% right" because we didn't KNOW in advance that one reason the war would be problematic was because this guy named Sadr would really create problems for us, when most logical people who have ever studied wars knows that one very good reason that the default position is AGAINST war is the near certainty that we don't and can't KNOW such things in advance but that such difficulties are so virtually certain to arise out of any extended occupation that uncertainty itself is a reason not to invade in the absence of a compelling threat.

And if you are saying that the only reason the war turned bad is because of Sadr, well, I am pretty sure that the Sunni insurgency predated Sadr's rise, which, in turn, was funded by Iran, which we did know was in the area, did know was shi'ite and did know has no compunction about making life difficult for U.S. interests. The fact that the guy was named Sadr is such an irrelevant detail it's almost comical. If he hadn't existed, Iran would have invented him.

[Matt Austern]

Chalk me up as someone who opposed the war in 2003, and who had never heard of Moqtada al-Sadr until after the invasion.

And that's one of the reasons I opposed the war. I knew that I knew next to nothing about Iraqi politics and society, and I knew that the people who were pushing for war didn't know much about it either, and I knew that trying to conquer and rule a country that you know nothing about is likely to be a disaster. No, I couldn't have told you which specific people would play which specific role in the disaster--that's sort of the point.

[dcpi]

I hope I am not crossing a line, but I found this interesting as a "prospective retrospective" so to say. A lot of good questions in it that can now be answered.

http://tinyurl.com/2v2p8r

[barn]

dcpi,

Thank you for not rickrolling us. That was a perfect opportunity, and you restrained yorself (perhaps noticing this crowd's lack of humor).

[Bernard Yomtov]

"by the way, does anyone else think that this sounds like bullshit?"

Yes. Though I can believe that she heard the guy make the claim. It's the kind of nonsense that speakers spread all the time to try to sound deep and insightful.

[Ginger Yellow]

"I think McMegan makes a very good point when she says "no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be." Get over yourself!"

Aargh. The whole point of the "why are the people who 'got it right' ignored" position is that it didn't take a genius to 'get it right'. Most of the population of the world got it right. All it took was not being boneheadedly naive and/or arrogant.

[wes]

I remembered this thread and dcpi's trolling when watching Frontline's "Bush's War (part Two)" from their website. They interview senior people in the CPA who talk about knowing Sadr would be a problem from the start, when a religious figure they flew in was brutally murdered on Sadr's doorstep. They made three separate plans to confront him. This is Bremmer and General Sanchez btw, who tried to persuade Washington. But no one in the Bush administration (Rumsfeld, Rice's security council) wanted to make a decision to implement them.

But dcpi is a classic "move the goal posts" troll. The original topic was about being right or wrong about invading Iraq - and right or wrong on the justifications (WMD, yellowcake, curveball). But by moving the goal posts dcpi wants to create a whole new topic - knowing if Sadr would be a problem in advance. Not about debaathification, not dissolving the military.. but this one guy, as if the entire success or failure depended on Sadr. And if you found someone who in fact wrote about Sadr, trolls like dcpi would want to change the subject. They'd invent some new test, shift the goalposts to some new detail while desperately wanting to ignore the overall topic.

And that was, they were wrong on Iraq.

[dsquared]

[Isn't it clear that the Cramer stuff was hyperbolic]

No it isn't at all. She certainly does think that Cramer's program shouldn't be on television and she certainly does think that the BSC call validates her assessment of Cramer's judgement.

[rea]

"To clarify for rea ..."

And to clarify for dcpi--it is not necessary to foresee every detail about how an enterprise would go wrong in order to have been correct in foreseeing that it would go wrong.

[Auditor]

Robertdfeinman makes:

"A technical suggestion.
If there is some way that long postings like this could be partially hidden on the front page it would make navigating the site much easier.

As it is now, one has to scroll down quite a distance to get past items that may not be of personal interest. Many sites have a mechanism whereby the first several paragraphs appear in the FIFO list followed by a link to the rest of the article."

Please don't take it. I at least find waiting for the rest of the post to come up far more annoying than pushing the page down key a few times.

[Dr. BDH]

Two ways of understanding why McArdle's rationale is desperately wrong:

1) You are sick. You go to two doctors. One says, "You have cancer, you need surgery and chemotherapy or you'll die." The other says, "You have illness which requires you to rest and rethink how well you protect yourself against infection: are you vaccinated, do you wash your hands enough, are you engaging in risky behaviors?" You choose to follow the first and, after a long and painful series of medical catastrophes, you die. Your brother, wishing to know what to do now for his own health, has a choice: whom should he consult?

2) John McCain, during the Vietnam War, a war that posed no threat to our nation, chose to go fight. Many others chose to protest and resist. He, and countless Americans and Vietnamese, suffered grevious injuries (and death). Now America is embroiled in another endlss war with a country that posed no threat to our homeland. Would you ask him what to do? What if he said, "Fight on for a thousand years?"

Given this, where should you look to for advice about Iraq? Maybe that guy with the grey ponytail standing beside the highway with sign saying, "Fool me once, shame on me," deserves a shot at the title.

[hack]

McArdle seems to have saturated some sort of Shannon limit for transmitting the maximum amount of stupidity in the fewest number of words.

[Reader]

Megan "affirmative action case, if I ever saw one" McCardle strikes again.