Mechanistic Realism and Us Foreign Policy: A New Framework for Analysis by Johannes Gullestad Rø

Author:Johannes Gullestad Rø [Rø, Johannes Gullestad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, General, Political Science, Political Freedom, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781136202940
Google: zxBTJNEV3PwC
Goodreads: 20788553
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Mechanism 4: Counter-wishful thinking and fear

Typically, information shapes beliefs with inescapable force. When the Bush administration learned something of the threat of Iraq – the inability, say, of the IAEA inspector ElBaradei (2003) to identify WMD in Iraq despite his best efforts, saying for example on February 14 that “we have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq” – they would probably find it impossible to consciously repress that knowledge. This follows from their rational disposition. Yet some of the evidence from this period indicates that members of the administration somehow came to fear terrorists equipped with WMDs from Iraq despite information and arguments giving little reason for disquiet. They often arrived at strong judgments with a conspicuously sinister slant but based on limited evidence. As Hans Blix has noted (in Moens 2004: 188): “I think they [members of the Bush administration] were inclined to put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks”. This calls for an explanation.

The most prominent explanation offered in the literature invokes spurious motives. The administration, it is claimed, deliberately rigged their interpretations to make the threat of nuclear terrorism appear more urgent than they knew it was in order to justify a war they wanted for spurious reasons. Gurtov (2006: 67) writes: “The evidence concerning policymaking on Iraq under George W. Bush strongly suggests outright efforts to deceive the US public, Congress, and the world community”. Prados (2004: 17) adds that,

President Bush and his cohorts crafted a litany of largely baseless charges about Iraq, then repeated, escalated, and rearranged those charges in places and times calculated to contribute to their goal of opening the way to an unprovoked war.

Allegations of tortuous motives are hard to discard. Yet those liable to doubt the influence of political fraud will welcome explanations not invoking it exactly for that reason. Although explanations implying policymakers acted in good faith will strain credulity in the eyes of Gurtov and Prados, it is worth considering whether the mechanism of counter-wishful thinking can explain why many of the administration's judgments went in a worst-case direction. Although the suggestion is empirically weak, it is far from baseless.

It seems that information from Iraq, including Hussein's failure to comply with the UN's demands for transparency, left a “genuine ambiguity about the status of Iraq's WMD programs” (Litwak 2007: 164, my italics). The phrase “genuine ambiguity” captures the different opinions held by reasonable individuals regarding the Iraqi threat. The evidence of the existence, magnitude, quality and level of sophistication of the weapons, as well as the likelihood that Iraq would hand them over to terrorists, was open to reasonable disagreement.

Jervis writes that while “the preponderance of evidence indicated that Iraq had WMD, it was not sufficient to prove it beyond reasonable doubt” (Jervis 2006a: 14). Hans Blix, the person who presided over the UN weapons inspection in Iraq, noted that his

reports did not lend themselves to categorical conclusions…. At the time, no one – the UN inspectors and myself included – could guarantee that Iraq was without any weapons of mass destruction.

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