Victoria Ellington
Second Blog Post
In this blog post, I would like to
address the reading , “What caused the Iraq War: A Debate” and address the
arguments made by these bloggers in regards to U.S. motivation and the role of
security and threat in each decision made by each nation involved. First of all, the issue was always of
traditional or physical security because Iraq was suspected of having weapons
of mass destruction. I agree with the
second point made by Debs and Monteiro, that the terrorist attacks on September
11th may not have necessarily heightened the actual threat to the
United States, but did, however, drive the U.S. into more of a state of fear
and made military leaders realize the reality of greater threats. While, I agree with Debs and Monteiro on
their opinion that the threat of WMD may have been over exaggerated by U.S.
actors, I do not think that they were wrong in their choice of action. When a nation is as powerful as the U.S., any
threat to any type of their security is greater and in order to maintain power,
any threat that is somewhat noteworthy should be handled in the most efficient
way possible. The ‘one percent doctrine’
mentioned in the blog is completely reasonable when considering not just 9/11,
but other terrorist attacks, such as the First World Trade Center bombing or
even Pearl Harbor. I am usually a huge
supporter of rational thinking, but war, because it is literally a concept
created by humans cannot really be rationalized.
One issue with rationality and war,
especially in terms of nuclear weapons or the Iraq war, is that the budget, and
the need for protection and management of threats rarely coincide well with one
another. Debs’s response post makes this
point. The government has to determine
whether a threat is worth disregarding the budget for or not or they must
diligently calculate the extent of action the budget will allow them to
take. Then another issue arises and that is the question of if you can only
take minimal action, should you take any action at all? In my opinion, if an attack is justified
because of a worthy threat, then the nation should only take action with a high
probability of bringing about favorable results. This may seem overly aggressive, but in the
long run it would actually save money.
The perfect example of being proactive and aggressive at the right time,
in my opinion, is Desert Storm. The
action taken was quick and effective, so as to avoid beginning an on going
conflict.
In conclusion, there are clearly a lot of misconceptions, in
regards to the start of the Iraq war, but at the heart of the issue lies a lack
of accurate information. The U.S. could
possibly have chosen more effective courses of action, but when criticizing
their choices, the situation they were in must be considered first. War will continue to occur until there is a
total balance of threat and security, but considering every ideology and different
ways of life, for now war seems unavoidable.
If we always apply the '1% doctrine' then we would constantly live in fear and likely be constantly at war. How would you resolve this?
ReplyDeleteIt may sound strange but I like to approach the 1% doctrine from an economics perspective. Every nation, America included, has a limited amount of power (economic, military etc.) while they also have an almost unlimited number of uses for that power. In other words we do not have enough power to commit every action we would like and so must find a way of allocating that power.
ReplyDeleteWhile allocating power is far from an exact science I believe that one must take into account three things when choosing how to allocate power.
1) What is the cost (in power) of the action.
2) What is the benefit (in terms of gains or in terms of costs avoided) of the action
3) What is the likelihood of these outcomes (both costs and benefits)
By treating small likelihood outcomes as certain the 1% doctrine distorts the allocation of power and would lead a state to an inefficient use of power. This happens because the 1% doctrine leads a state to ignore the difference between high cost/high certainty actions and high cost/low certainty ones. In a world of infinite power a state could simply do bother but we do not have infinite power so ideally we would choose the high certainty outcome when the costs and benefits are the same.
If the goal of the 1% doctrine is to prevent highly destructive but highly uncertain attacks on a state that could be better achieved by putting greater weight on the benefits of stopping a highly destructive attack (part 2 of my allocation model) rather than ignoring part 3. That way a state could align its allocation of power formula with the needs of the time while still efficiently allocating power.
You make a lot of unique points. One that stands out to me, is that you say that you believe war is not rational, but you say you don't think that the US was wrong in their actions taken against the United States. Would you argue that their actions were irrational but still agreeable and ultimately the right decision?
ReplyDelete