Seeing and nothingness
Moneyball, the classic baseball book by Michael Lewis, describes the conflict in the Oakland As front office between those who believe that prospects are best judged by direct observation — of their physiques, their ability to run , and even their faces — and those who believe they are best judged by statistical analysis. At first, this seems like a reasonable debate but by the end of the book, the only questions is not whether direct observation is as valuable as statistical analysis, but whether direct observation has any value at all (at one point, the general manager and hero of the book, Billy Beane, considers firing all of his scouts and replacing them with statisticians).
I bring this up because of analogies with the war in Iraq. In September, Randy Kuhl and Tom Reynolds (and probably Jim Walsh) will vote to continue (and perhaps even expand) the occupation of Iraq. General Petraeus will tell them that the “surge” is working. Some Republican lawmakers will be given tours of Iraq much like the one that led Brookings Iraq “experts” Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack to write an Op-Ed titled “A War We Just Might Win“.
It is unlikely that there will be any meaningful statistics that suggest progress in Iraq or any signs of the political progress that is far more important there than military progress. I’m sure some numbers will be thrown around — likely, casualties will be down in the summer from the spring, which typically happens in hot climates, for example — and the one political success — the so-called Anbar miracle — will be touted. But the overall picture, which shows increases in civilian deaths and a deteriorating political situation (see this piece by Juan Cole) will essentially be ignored.
Will this matter to Congressional Republicans? No. Why? Because Petraeus is reporting what he saw with his own two eyes, schools being rebuilt, patrols being cheered by grateful Iraqi kids, and so on. No doubt, the Congressmen who are given propaganda tours of Iraq will see the same thing; if they’re lucky, they may even see our servicemen enjoying lobster tail at the commissary. Meanwhile, there will be others who see different things with their own two eyes — for example, this Colonel, who describes a civil war in which “the security we helped provide for Sunnis gave them increased freedom to go out and kill Shiites”. Their observations will not be conveyed to Congress by General Petraeus.
That’s the trouble with things you see with your own two eyes: in a country as big as Iraq, there’s a lot to see and some of it is contradictory. When a president is intent on keeping our troops there come Hell or high water, his subordinates — and that’s what Petraeus is, one of Bush’s subordinates — will always be able to see some anecdotal evidence of progress.
The problem in Iraq isn’t the same as in Moneyball. In Moneyball, the two camps viewed all of the evidence, albeit with different perceptive mechanisms (eyeballs vs statistics).
In Iraq, the problem is that some people only see (either willfully or because the actions of others) only a portion of the evidence. And this happens not because Iraq is so big, but because, as you intimate, there is a great deal of pressure for certain individuals not to see bad things. As with everything, the Bush administration has managed perception more actively than they have managed anything else.
That’s not quite true: the scouts refused to look at the Sabremetrics type statistics. They chose to focus on the positives of how someone “looked in jeans” (or the corresponding negative) and ignored that the guy could or couldn’t get on base.
There are legitimate debates over the value of certain Sabremetric statistics. I guess that’s the main point of Moneyball: to show that these statistics are superior, but not everyone agrees. It’s still different than Bush and his thugs.
What Bush and his cronies have done is equivalent to the scouts looking at the first half of one swing and deciding whether or not the batter will be a good hitter. What Bush and his cronies have done is the equivalent of baseball statisticians looking at every statistic from every game for a player, and since he had a good game on April 29th, those are the only statistics used. Even Michael Jordan looks like a great baseball player using the Bush method.
Also, it’s not just the pressure, it’s the self-delusion.
Those Brookings guys are not under pressure to write crazy essays about how we’re winning. Neither is Bill Kristol. Neither are most right-wing “journalists.” And yet they do.
I wish it were true that what we’re seeing is willful ignorance, but I’m afraid that what we’re seeing is something worse and more dangerous: complete self-deception.
I believe the pressure is internal to these “journalistsâ€ÂÂ. If they admit failure, then they have to admit that they were horribly terribly wrong for many many years, that their ideology is a shambles and they have caused untold damage to individuals, to countries (ours and Iraq’s) and to our world. Clearly, they don’t want to admit that, and I predict they never will.
This is the problem with Bush style cult of personality politics, it’s the reason we’re there in the first place. Remember the rationale for war? Everyone just “knew” that Saddam had WMD, so they cherrypicked evidence supporting that idea, and refused to acknowledge evidence disproving that idea.
Keep up the good work, you write well.
I don’t know anything about Moneyball, but I think your basic point is correct. The Petraeus report will be full of anecdotal evidence, or at least carefully cherry-picked “statistics”.