producing? Did Wolfowitz appear before Congress conscious that the war might easily cost more than $1 trillion, with no known economic benefit (or indeed any other kind) while killing more than a hundred thousand Iraqis and displacing from their country an additional four million? Seems doubtful. Of course, it could simply be a mistake—computational error—or a symptom of underlying mental illness or whatnot. By definition, one can’t prove self-deception through examining people’s behavior alone, but I find the notion of simple, unbiased “error” naive on its face. Wolfowitz and others at the top practiced one of the most elementary forms of self-deception: they made sure they were not exposed to information that conflicted with their optimistic fantasies.
It is certain that among the decision-makers, little effort was made to learn relevant information about ruling Iraq once the invasion succeeded. No national intelligence estimate was made on the conditions to be expected during and after the war, yet such estimates are routinely produced for a large range of less important (and certain) contingencies (such as invading Bolivia). The CIA began war-game exercises in May 2002, to plan for what might happen after the fall of Baghdad, and people from the Defense Department attended the first of these sessions, but when their superiors found out, they were ordered not to attend again. The key is that postwar planning was seen as an obstacle to war itself. Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer in the CIA for both the Near and Far East, points out that no one had any appetite for such assessments and gives two general reasons:Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much. The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the selling of the war.
These are the two great drivers of self-deception: overconfidence and active avoidance of any knowledge of the potential downside to one’s decisions. The contrast with World War II is instructive. Before the United States even entered that war, teams at the Army War College were studying what went right and wrong when Germany was occupied after the previous world war. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, an entire School of Military Government was created at the University of Virginia whose mission was to plan for the occupation of both Japan and Germany. But of course this was much closer to a just war and was designed and thought through without the need to sell the war under false pretenses likely to induce self-deception. Injustice always requires justification and special pleading, justice less so.
CREATING KNOWLEDGE AND THEN WALLING IT OFF
As in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, where top management did not want to know about safety problems, during the Iraq war, no one wanted to hear about the problems on day two in Baghdad. Such knowledge interferes with the sales job. In the case of NASA, the safety unit was degraded to a caricature of what such a unit should look like. In the case of planning for Iraq, a truly bizarre partitioning took place. A set of working groups was duly created, then walled off from the decision-makers and the rest of the government to render the working groups impotent. Each involved knowledgeable people from throughout the US government, the army, the CIA, State Department, USAID, and so on. The State Department’s Future of Iraq project began a month after 9/11 and was publicly announced in March 2002, eventually comprising seventeen working groups and producing fourteen volumes of detailed findings. The project was headed by a man who was skeptical of the wisdom of the war but certain that planning for its aftermath was essential.
Given the chaos that ensued, it is worth noting that in the summary report, stress was placed on (1) the need to get the electrical grid up and running and with it the water system, (2) the need to plan carefully for the change in the Iraqi army by removing its leaders without losing the ordinary soldiers, and (3) the need to plan for civil disorder, including the emergence of common criminals