1 Boring Old Man

I’ve spent several weeks watching the British Chilcot Inquiry. The distinguished members of the panel are impressively bright as they sort through the proceedings that lead England to join with the United States in an invasion of Iraq that, in retrospect, seems to have been an incredible folly. The people being interviewed are equally impressive – the Statesmen who officiated this decision – pro and con. The purpose of the hearings is advertised to be "lessons learned."

Thus far, they’ve kind of floundered on the "lessons learned" part. They talk about better planning, or more transparency, things like logistics. They discuss the impatient Americans, or the blood oath between the President and the Prime Minister. But, thus far, in the interviews I’ve listened to, only one person has directly alluded to the fact that they were all wrong as rain. They seem to be having a hard time stepping back far enough to see the picture – the one they were a part of. Even the distinguished panel seems caught up in the details.

It’s obviously only one part of the story. I think what they’d like to believe is that the British were caught up in the swirl of the American march to war. That is certainly true, but already, it’s abundantly clear that their Prime Minister was part of the game. While he was, indeed, caught up in the American tangle, he was himself also part of the march to war – as embroiled in rationalizing going to war as his American counterpart.

In situations like this one, people look back at the things that were in their minds in the lead-up to a bad decision, and present them in a particular way. It’s hard to get knowledgeable people to genuinely embrace looking at their own thinking with an ear cocked to what was wrong with their thoughts. They continue to be caught up in explaining their logic as if it were correct. In these hearings, they often end up with something like this:

RIGHT HONORABLE TONY BLAIR: Responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think that he was a monster, I believe he threatened, not just the region but the world, and in the circumstances that we faced then, but I think even if you look back now, it was better to deal with this threat, to deal with it, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result. I know sometimes, because this happens out in the region, sometimes people will say to me, "Well, Saddam was a brake on Iran". Let’s be clear, there is another view of foreign policy in this instance, which is the way, if we had left Saddam in place, he would have controlled Iran better. I really think it is time we learned, as a matter of sensible foreign policy, that the way to deal with one dictatorial threat is not to back another, that actually the best answer to what is happening in Iran is to allow the Iraqi people the freedom and democratic choice that we enjoy in countries like ours.

There are four characters in this story that are at the center of their deliberations – now as then: Saddam Hussein [Iraq], Richard Cheney [US], Osama bin Laden [al Qaeda], and Mahmud Ahmedinejad [Iran]. Much of the discussion of the witnesses in the Chilcot Inquiry centers of their various attempts to deal with these four men – ways to influence their behavior. One has been executed [Saddam Hussein]. One is out of office [Richard Cheney]. One is the most feared and wanted person on the planet [Osama bin Laden]. And one is now the second most feared man on the planet. [Mahmud Ahmedinejad] These pictures are lumped together because of two things: They are men whose behavior cannot be influenced. And second [and related], they are paranoid men.

Paranoid people have fixed beliefs – meaning beliefs that are impervious to logic or persuasion. It’s kind of sad to listen to all these high level statesmen talking about their machinations while trying to influence the un-influenceable, persuade the un-persuadable. And it’s not hard to understand why they concluded that the only solution was murder [regime change]. If there are lessons to be learned from all of this, it’s that we still don’t know how to assess dangerousness in paranoid despots – an issue that dominated the last century [Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, etc]. We still don’t know what to do about paranoid despots, dangerous or not. And we’ve seen again that paranoid despots drive other people crazy – particularly the leaders that have to deal with them.