Blogospheric Classics

I sometimes forget that the aggregate audience for blog commentary is enormously larger than it was a few years ago, so it's quite possible that there are people reading this blog right now who have never heard of Daniel Davies' spring 2004 classic The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101, nominated today by Jim Henley for the august title of Best Blog Post Ever.

At any rate, give it a read. It's about Iraq — the pre-war debate specifically — but it's also about Iran. For that matter, it's also about forward-looking Iraq policy. Specifically, I know a lot of progressives who are still disinclined to fully endorse complete withdrawal from Iraq who ought to give some consideration to the principle that good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. Then they might ask themselves why it is that George W. Bush and the large team of professional political operatives he employs believe that sustaining the American military presence in Iraq requires the mission to be draped in a lot of lies about fighting them over there so we don't need to fight them over here, etc., etc.

Comments

brilliant

Posted by sv | October 30, 2007 9:54 AM

All of these lies need to be reexamined in light of the probability that intelligence about Iraq and Iran was obtained via false confessions as a result of torture. Bush and Cheney aren't just liars, they're war criminals.

Posted by Bill | October 30, 2007 10:01 AM

I never read that article, but yes, it is spot-on. It's amazing this guy learned those lessons at a Very Expensive Business school and then was able to apply those tools to analyze a situation in real time.

If only there was a person in the highest levels of government who went to a Very Expensive Business School and as such were taught the same tools as that blogger.

If only.

Posted by Joshua | October 30, 2007 10:17 AM

I'm not sure it was quite so obvious in '03 how big liars Bush and crew were as it is now. Hindsight is 20/20 naturally.

Posted by Ron | October 30, 2007 10:21 AM

It didn't take an MBA to see how Powell's woeful canine and equine show of pretty WMD pictures was proof that there weren't any actual Iraqi WMDs.

It didn't take a degree in Middle Eastern studies either to see how Iraq was a bigger, meaner Lebanon-in-waiting either.

Posted by David W. | October 30, 2007 10:28 AM

I'll admit it, I believed there must be WMDs. Otherwise how could they be so stupid and/or irresponsible to make the case as vociferously as they did? Indeed, how?

Posted by Bill | October 30, 2007 10:30 AM

Actually, I don't think it was just Bush's lies. It was also the tendency of the media to comprehensively omit news and analysis such that it amounted to a systematic lie. Specifically, news and analysis about Afghanistan. As Peter Bergen's article in the TNR makes clear - and really, as was clear in the month after Tora Bora - the Afghanistan campaign was inexplicably botched on the most basic level. Rumsfeld, america's favorite insane Defense secretary, seemed to be in a pout during the whole campaign, and used his position to make sure that there was an astonishing lack of American troops going into Tora Bora. Something that the newspapers could quite easily have highlighted at the time. As they could have highlighted - for it became known right away - the odd refusal to surround Osama Bin Laden and his core group at that moment. They could even have speculated that this insane maneuver was not the result of mere incompetence and vanity, but it might have something to do with the usefulness of retaining Osama as a threat. Even Bergen doesn't want to go there, but I see no reason not to look at the motives in play in Afghanistan in the light of every crooked and vicious Bush move since.

By the end of 2002, the media was celebrating Afghanistan as a huge success, without really, like, having any data from Afghanistan that would tell us that Afghanistan was a huge success. Although they doubtless received many a GOP email telling them Afghanistan was a huge success, and the media does like to take GOP emails, change a comma, and publish it as straight news. In fact, they still do that pretty often.

When you have a media that is basically in bed with a government on the front page, the people that read the stories on page a-10, go holy shit, and blog about said stories are going to have zero effect. Afterwards, of course, the media will defend itself by pointing to page a-10.

In other words; we have a slimy and mendacious media.

Posted by roger | October 30, 2007 10:43 AM

Ron --- by October 2002, right before the AUMF vote there was plenty of evidence available in other domains that the Bush Administration was full of shit on highly important topics. The easiest one to point out was the 2001 tax cuts, Paul Krugman since late 1999 had been deemed 'shrill' as he continuously noted that the numbers did not even vaguely make sense as stated by every Bush supporter --- throw in the fact that the justification for the same package of tax cuts changed every three months and you have the Bush administration caught red-handed lying on their most important domestic policy. Move onto the Texas budget in 1998 and 1999 where every problem was solved by pushing expenses into the next budget cycle. Throw in the rumbles about the Houston Drop-out miracle of fraud....

Throw in the known reports by mid-2002 that the administation did not think terrorism was a big deal pre-9-11 and throw in the horrendous crisis management of the anthrax scare and reasonable observers could make an informed judgement that Bush et al were full of shit by October 2002.

Posted by fester | October 30, 2007 11:16 AM

I'm not particularly impressed by this blog post. It basically boils down to:

I opposed this war because
1) I didn't trust the Bush administration
2) I didn't trust the Bush administration
3) I didn't trust the Bush administration

Not sure you need to go to business school for that.

Posted by Ben | October 30, 2007 11:25 AM

Before the AUMF was passed, Bush stood out in public and said that a major threat was that Saddam Hussein would send unmanned drones to attack American with WMDs.

At that point, I said to myself, "he's got nothin' on Saddam. If he didm, he'd have come up with a more believeable threat."

Posted by Tyro | October 30, 2007 11:56 AM

Not sure you need to go to business school for that.

Er, right. So:

Basically, it's been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve.

is just the same as 'I didn't trust the Bush administration'?

The point about Bush being heralded as the 'MBA president' has already been made.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | October 30, 2007 12:09 PM

This is an old chestnut of mine, but just for sport I'll throw it into the fire one more time:

If the Bush administration was prepared to lie--actually lie--about the presence of WMD in Iraq before the war, why were they not prepared to continue that lie through to the present?

Given that they have in fact deliberately propagated a falsehood that is contrary to their real beliefs . . . Why not plant some weapons? Why not claim to have destroyed some? Why send David Kay to tell congress the truth? In short, why stop lying?

I've never yet seen a satisfactory theory to answer these questions. And so I still maintain that the incompetence "dodge" is a far better explanation for what happened than malicious deceit.

Posted by southpaw | October 30, 2007 5:17 PM

To me, this fablog entry is the all-time classic:

Wednesday, December 22, 2004
still not the end of the world

"It sure was a long way till the end of the world," says me.
"The way was guarded by lions and chimeras and manticores and logicians and other ferocious beasts," says Giblets.
"Fortunately we are impervious to logic," says me.
"Modus ponens has no hold on Giblets!" says Giblets. "He swats antecedents like flies!"
"Do you think there are antecedents over the end of the world?" says me.
"No, there's just God and God's giant pile a God-treasure!" says Giblets. "Where God keeps all the best crap to himself cause why else would he be God?"

Posted by piotr | October 30, 2007 7:05 PM

Why not plant some weapons?

Ha, does anyone of you, young shrimp and old lobsters, have any relevant experience?

Suppose that we would bring one of our ICBMs and surreptitiously dropped it into some bunker, which could be later unveiled due to anonymous tips. Of course, engraved tags of quality inspectors and lot of other identifying details would have to be removed, filed away etc. You see the problem -- nobody anywhere would believe that Saddam's Iraq could produce something as advanced.

OK, something more primitive. More primitive than anything we have in stock. We would actually need a design. Something so crappy it could be believed, but decent enough that it would not blow up in transport. This is actually a non-trivial engineering task, so you must have some nuclear engineers whom you would trust, I mean, really, really trust with the darkest of your secret. An atheist cannot be trusted outright (not by this Administration), and who can guarantee that a religious guy will not develop concience?

And it is still not clear that anything like that is possible. Perhaps not a weapon but a set of, say, 5 centrifuges skillfully utilizing the aluminum pipes that detractors claimed were not appropriate. Given that there were really not appropriate, we are back to impossible feats of engineering.

OK, a chemical weapon. Saddam used to have piles and piles of them. Now we have opposite difficulty. Foreign experts have an idea how Iraqi stuff looked like. And just how new and shiny you want you, say, chemical gas artillery shell to be? How degraded should the chemicals be? How to make somewhat degraded chemicals quickly? And mind you, some forgotten shells were actually found and only total loons and tools viewed them as vindication.

So, why couldn't we actually make the bio-weapon lab on wheels? I think we are back to the problem of constructing technologically impossible centrifuges.

Mind you, once such a gizmo would be found, there would be an investigation to find the companies guilty of supplying the components, We could of course hide it instantly and declare that UN inspectors botched inspections so totally that we will not allow them within 10 miles from the stuff we have found. In which case you do not have to have anything at all!

Been there, done that., My little girl, see that trailer dread on the hill yonder? Details are too terrifying to spell them out -- would you like terrorist to know how to make such artrocities -- but this is the most dreadful of all trailers. Tell it to the readers of NYT.

Posted by piotr | October 30, 2007 7:37 PM

piotr,

So the plan then, by your lights, was:

a) Lie about weapons we know Saddam doesn't have and we know we can't fake in order to goad the country into war.
b) Go to war.
c) Expose own lies. Call "my bad" on the whole weapons thing with five years left in office
d) Hope no one notices, finish out term with high popularity.

That's not exactly evil genius level thinking. In fact, it's a pretty incompetent plan, isn't it?

Posted by southpaw | October 30, 2007 8:26 PM