Muddle Through

America's brilliant strategy for Iraq

Jonathan Rauch | October 6, 2003

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Fair enough; the second group had the benefit of experience. That isn't bias, it's learning. But wait. Ask the hindsighted group whether they themselves would have foreseen the danger, and they will generally say yes—even though the correct answer is generally no. They will blame the boys and the authorities for negligence. That is what psychologists call hindsight bias: the translation of what I know today into what you should have foreseen yesterday.

Iraq is ridden with hindsight bias. For instance, the Bush administration should have—must have—seen the gaps in its prewar intelligence (they are pretty evident now). And the notion that the occupation could be run with a few divisions—how naive was that? And wasn't it obvious that the military would need to patrol the streets from the day the war ended?

Hindsight bias raises false expectations and nurtures conspiracy theories. Perhaps worst, it leads to ricocheting errors as people look backward through distorted lenses and then overcompensate looking ahead.

War critics who today revel in hindsight bias might do well to recall an earlier instance: the claim that the first President Bush's failure to march to Baghdad and unseat Saddam was a gross error. It was not. In early 1991, the smart money was on Saddam's soon being toppled, and the first Bush wanted to avoid precisely the sort of ugly occupation that the second Bush now finds himself conducting. The second war grew partly from hindsight bias in evaluations of the first.

Planning bias. Again and again, critics charge the government with having no plan or strategy. Whenever the Pentagon or administration changes course, they charge it with having planned poorly. Headlines speak of events "out of control" in Iraq.

More than just hindsight bias is at work here. Many people, particularly the sophisticated sort, hate messiness. They like to know that smart managers are in charge, figuring out everything. Surprises are defeats.

In truth, the planning mind-set is exactly wrong for Iraq. Anything might have happened after the war: a flood of refugees, a cholera pandemic, a civil war—or, for that matter, the discovery of an advanced nuclear program. The fact that the Bush administration keeps adjusting its course, often contravening its own plans or preferences, is a hopeful sign. The administration's decisions to raise rather than reduce troop levels, to ask for $87 billion that it never planned on needing, to go looking for help from the United Nations—all this suggests not that the Iraq effort is failing but that the administration is more flexible than its rhetoric.

Only trial and error, otherwise known as muddling through, can work in Iraq. There is no other way. Muddling through is not pretty, but never underestimate America's genius for it. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington never enjoyed the luxury of planning, but they were two of the finest muddlers-through the world has ever known, and they did all right.

Whether Bush will prove a gifted muddler is at present unclear, to say the least. Bush might be a better president if he took fewer risks. But risk-takers must be judged by their results.

The 2004 election could not be better timed. In a year's time, Americans will know lot more about the outcome in Iraq, and Bush will be held to account. With Saddam toppled less than six months ago, however, a rush to judgment today reflects badly not on Bush's vision, but on his critics'. Hindsight, after all, is not 20-20.