The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgement of a president. But it has also condemned the judgement of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.
Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life.
I’ve learned that good judgement in politics looks different from good judgement in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalising and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.
The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgement at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: the costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.
But they must decide, and soon. Procrastination is even costlier in politics than it is in private life. Those who make good judgements in politics tend to be those who do not shrink from the responsibility of making them. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed.
In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success. Samuel Beckett’s ”Fail again. Fail better” captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the political art. Churchill and De Gaulle kept faith with their own judgement when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their willingness to wait for historical validation now looks like greatness. In the current president, the same faith that history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.
Machiavelli argued that political judgement, to be effective, must follow principles more ruthless than those acceptable in ordinary life. He wrote that ”it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity”. Roosevelt and Churchill knew how to do wrong, yet they did not demand to be judged by different ethical standards than their fellow citizens did. They accepted that democratic leaders cannot make up their own moral rules, a stricture that applies both at home and abroad — in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. They must live and be judged by the same rules as everyone else.
Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgement. It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America’s foreign policy serves God’s plan to expand human freedom. Ideological thinking of this sort bends what Kant called ”the crooked timber of humanity” to fit an abstract illusion. Politicians with good judgement bend the policy to fit the human timber.
In my political science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgement meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed.
We might test judgement by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgement but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.
The people who truly showed good judgement on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued, but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They laboured, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They avoided all these mistakes.
I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions.
Good judgement in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound. — Â