Leap of Faith
Metadata
- Author: Michael J. Mazarr
- ASIN: B07GPKT831
- ISBN: 1541768361
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GPKT831
- Kindle link
Highlights
This is a profound truth: The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends. The fatal conceit—fatal to the fecundity of a spontaneous order—is the belief that anyone, or any group of savants, is clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems. GEORGE F. WILL2 — location: 89
Super-forecasting and Black swan
We plan a political strategy in order to achieve a certain result, but the result, more often than not, has only a very remote relation to what we intend. — location: 95
How was it that the United States, steeped in liberal values and devoted to norms of nonaggression, — location: 157
Lol
America’s worthy global ambitions — location: 182
How was it that a man who on an individual level possessed such a caring touch could be so disconnected from decisions affecting the lives of millions? — location: 240
“Bush defied easy description,” his former White House aide David Kuo wrote upon first meeting the man who was then Texas governor. “He seemed not just charming, but weighty, seductive yet pure, likable yet mysterious.” — location: 255
a vision that strongly reflected America’s missionary tradition and proved vulnerable to the appeal of passionate moral imperatives that overrode conceptions of risk and cost. The result was, as many commentators have noted, a form of astonishing certainty. “I know it is hard for you to believe,” he told Bob Woodward in 2002 about the ballooning war on terror, “but I have not doubted what we’re doing.… There is no doubt in my mind we’re doing the right thing. Not one doubt.” — location: 265
No wonder he and Blair got on.
Invalid statements about weapons of mass destruction were made and endlessly repeated not in order to bamboozle the American people, but because—based on years of seemingly iron-clad intelligence reporting—American senior officials unquestioningly believed them. — location: 301
the judgment reflects an all-too-common case of American foreign policy decision-making gone wrong, undertaken by senior officials hoping to sustain American power and safeguard the American people and yet producing outcomes that undermined both of those goals. — location: 310
“They were not its driving force.… Britain’s ‘deciders’ are remembered as deft propagandists, but were idealists at the core.” — location: 313
Combination is important
the dangerous marriage of deeply embedded national beliefs about the country’s role in the world with a passionate, urgent, even desperate imperative to act—a feeling that overrides concerns about risks or costs. — location: 325
Rather than a rigorous focus on consequences and careful cost-benefit analysis, major national security judgments are often much more unconscious, instinctive, and emergent; and in certain circumstances, they reflect something far closer to the application of moral imperatives than reasoned analysis. — location: 344
The sense of strategic self-righteousness so characteristic of debacles in places like Iraq is rushing through the US national security community in torrents today, propelled by the perceived authoritarian challenge from Russia and China. — location: 364
“destructive ambiguity” — location: 403
As a result, the evolution of US policy toward Iraq during the 1990s illustrates one of the primary engines behind the eventual decision to invade. Profound strategic judgments like the choice to go to war are usually grounded in what can be called evolved collective beliefs—about world politics, the identity and role of a nation, the character of an adversary. When dealing with complex, ambiguous choices brimming with uncertainty, as all major national security decisions will be, decision-makers rely on taken-for-granted certainties. The most influential of these can usually be traced to the essential principles that inform a nation’s foreign policy. — location: 440
Judgments of that sort, grounded in creeping certainty rather than rigorous evaluation, pose one leading danger—they are all too often blind to risks and consequences. — location: 458
And so in 1989, US secretary of state James Baker met with Iraqi officials to express a desire for improved relations—just a scant few months before the two countries would be at war.18 These embraces were soon constrained by a growing suspicion of Saddam’s intentions.19 US interagency sessions and intelligence reports from this period catalogue an escalating series of disputes over human rights and Iraq’s weapons programs.20 One State Department report concluded that “we believe Iraq judges a nuclear weapons capability to be essential to meet its security needs and further its regional ambitions.” — location: 473
Such wishful thinking was typical of Saddam. Former Iraqi officials describe him as a solitary decision-maker who would retreat into private reflection somewhere in the endless expanse of his many gaudy palaces and emerge with wild-eyed proclamations based on dreams, or intuition, or religious guidance.27 CIA interrogator John Nixon—who had multiple sessions with Saddam once he surrendered to US forces in 2003—reports that “much of what Saddam did was improvisational.” There was no grand plan at work; often, “there wasn’t enough discussion of the pros and cons of a particular course of action.” And when “things finally went sour, there were no plans to clean up the mess.”28 Saddam shared these traits, as it would turn out, with those who would eventually order his destruction. — location: 489
What would they do once they had “won” the military campaign? Powell found the planning sessions “disorderly,” with “people talking at random.… They were all looking for a military option but had no clear idea what they wanted to achieve.” — location: 504
There was “a lot of wishful thinking going on” within an administration that wanted to believe its work was done, the official added. “Just how the psychology takes hold” of senior decision-makers at such moments, he said, is “often lost in histories.” — location: 528
The route Cheney traveled from this pragmatic and nuanced analysis to the vehement conviction that Saddam had to be immediately driven from power is one of the most important—and, frankly, puzzling—aspects of the eventual US decision to invade Iraq. — location: 545