*Author Daniel Ellsberg discusses the risks and gambles with human life that Bush is taking in his decisionmaking on Iraq...
Weblog Entry
January 7, 2003
In these excerpts from Dorian Devins's December 16, 2002 interview with Ellsberg on WFMU New York City, Ellsberg discusses the risks and gambles with human life that Bush is taking in his decisionmaking on Iraq, and the enormous uncertainties surrounding the impending invasion.
ellsberg.net
<<...DEVINS: You came in to RAND as an analyst, and I understand that your background is in game theory and negotiation theory?
ELLSBERG: Yes, "decision theory," so-called—decisionmaking under uncertainty, bargaining theory. I was a critic of game theory to a large extent, but I was interested in bargaining and adversarial decisionmaking.
DEVINS: You can see this as, not exactly a subtext, but almost a "meta-text" of all you did, in a sense, because you're leaking information, but you're letting the people that you're leaking information about know, so they can in fact react and do right by it.
ELLSBERG: Well, that's true. I've always been trying, in my government research, and then in my government career, to make people aware of uncertainty, and to try to improve the process of decisionmaking under uncertainty, and to start by understanding it better, and describing it. That's what my Ph.D. thesis, Risk, Ambiguity, and Decision, was on. That's totally abstract, and when I went into the government, it was in hopes of improving the process by which governments, and presidents in particular, made decisions under uncertainty.
The analogy that decision theorists use to such decisionmaking is gambling—horseracing, betting on things other than roulette wheels (where the odds are sharp and precise and well known), on things that are one time events, basically, and whose odds are very subjective and vague.
That's what all war consists of. There's an extreme fog of uncertainty surrounding all the decisions, and the stakes are very high, of course, involving many human lives, and the fates of nations and civilizations very often. That was true for the people of Vietnam in particular. We came close to destroying their society, although we did not. Cambodia was very close to destroyed by the war that we imposed on those people, following our support of the French, and it's what we face right now.
The President is gambling right now, with the planes he's sending over the no-fly-zone in Iraq, day by day, to bomb there. Saddam is gambling when he shoots at those planes. He claims the right to do so, and he has some basis for that—each side has some basis on the no-fly-zone issue. Each is gambling with human lives, each is taking very very reckless gambles, and I'm afraid the people of Iraq, above all, are going to pay a very heavy price for the gambles of both these men.
When I say that Saddam is gambling, I mean that he's taking a very high risk that his gunners will get "unlucky," and actually knock down an American plane, which he's actually trying to do, almost madly. But that's a very traditional kind of decisionmaking for men in power. If he does that, he's taking a very high risk that the invasion will occur immediately. That could be any time, even as we speak, or in the next few days. It will have nothing to do then, with the UN inspection process, or the UN resolution. It will just be something resulting from the reckless gambles of two men in power, each of whom feels it's his right—even his duty—to gamble with human lives.
DEVINS: It seems the UN resolution and inspection group is not even being treated seriously by the US government.
ELLSBERG: The president, following Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney, did not even want to go to Congress or the UN. Bush, to his credit, rejected the advice from Rumsfeld and Cheney, to be totally unilateral here, which was virtually batty advice. The risks involved in doing that are just—it's hard to comprehend grown men actually making such a proposal. So in this case, Powell's advice was, to say the least, a little more grown up here: that we should seek some degree of approval, from Congress in the first case, as our constitution demands, and from the UN, which the UN Charter, to which we're a signatory, demands.
By intimidation and persuasion and various things, they did get a degree of approval. Not, however, it seems, for initiating an attack on Iraq without going back to the UN. Virtually everyone in the UN has said that the resolution they passed, they thought, did not entitle the United States to decide on its own—that is, the president to decide on his own—that the time had come for war against Iraq without consulting the Security Council.
However, the President has made it clear to them, since the resolution and before, that he interpreted it as a license to determine when to go to war, and obviously he feels free to act on that. However, I doubt that his advisers, starting with Powell, will really encourage him to go ahead just on the basis of ambiguous evidence that Saddam has violated his assertions on weapons of mass destruction. There always is such ambiguous evidence. It exists now, it may get more persuasive or not.
But I think the American public, and certainly the world public, would be disapproving—whatever they would do about it—if he went ahead just on that evidence. I think instead he's more likely to go ahead on ambiguous evidence that American forces have been attacked, or are about to be attacked, or that American citizens may be about to come under attack. Or perhaps there will be a terrorist attack by al Qaeda, in this country or elsewhere, and the president will assert that he has evidence that is good enough for him that there is a link to Saddam. It might not convince anyone else in his own administration, but he will say, "I'm the president and it's good enough for me."
I think that will probably not persuade most people in the world. But it will persuade a lot of Americans, that the president was doing right, as Commander-in-Chief, to go ahead and attack Saddam, even though most people in CIA, or the State Department, or the Defense Department, might actually believe, with very good basis, that the president is increasing the dangers to American forces and American citizens by doing that.
But, despite their misgivings, these people in the government will do their best to go along with it, and carry out his wishes, just as I did for a number of years, in '64 and '65 and '66, when I knew that my president was lying us into a hopeless war. I didn't think of it as a wrongful war then—that was years later—but at the time I thought of it as hopeless, and that we were killing people to no end. But I did the same—I'm not pointing fingers here at others. I kept my mouth shut.
What I'm saying is likely to happen now is, after all, simply what I saw happen when I was in the Pentagon, what I describe in my book, in 1964-65: a president, with some degree of authority from Congress (in that case, the UN wasn't involved) not relying on that authority, but rather, provoking attacks on our forces—using our men and women (then it was almost all men, now there's a lot more women) as bait, to urge our adversary to kill them, so that we could get the support of the American people in going in and doing a lot of bombing and invading over there. That's what we did do [see the excerpt from Chapter Four of Secrets], so I'm not saying anything out of the ordinary when I say that I think this president may do the same.
DEVINS: There seems to be a lot more involvement on the part of other countries, and how the world sees the U.S.—perhaps the balance is a little difference than it was back in the Vietnam era.
ELLSBERG: Not strikingly. What has come out since the Pentagon Papers, and since I worked on this, in a book, for example, called Choosing War by Fredrick Logevall—it's a University of California Press book that came out a couple of years ago—and revealed to me, as late as that, that virtually all of our allies thought earlier than I did, and stronger than I did at the time, in the early sixties, in '64 and '65, that this war was hopeless, and totally foolish.
Some of them tried to convey that to the president. Others kept their silence, and waited for an opportune moment, which never actually came, to antagonize the president of the United States, and most of them never found the right occasion to do that. When Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister of England, voiced criticism to the president, the president almost picked him up by the lapels—and Wilson was a big man, but Johnson was a bigger man—and said, "Don't you butt into our business here—you keep your mouth shut." And Wilson backed down.
I'm afraid a lot of that is going on right now. There's obviously great misgivings being voiced around the world, and yet, nearly every government around the world is lining up. They feel that the U.S. train has left the station. They have a last chance to climb aboard, and they have taken it.
I think people in these countries could very well ask themselves, and ask their representatives, to the extent they live in democracies, "are our leaders doing what they should be doing to question this president and to avert this war?" There isn't one national government in the world that could stand up to that question and say "we've done all that we can to avert this war."
DEVINS: You used the word "abstract" before, and it made me think of your position before you went to Vietnam. You worked as an analyst, and then you went to Vietnam, and you saw things that a lot of people making decisions never saw. They had reports through the press, or through their advisors over there. So your thought evolution occurred in a very unique way.
ELLSBERG: You know, honestly, I'm not sure how much being in Vietnam made a difference in what I did later, because, as I say, I was very skeptical of the war to begin with. For a months while I was there, I was more hopeful, I thought, "maybe we can make something out of this." That only lasted a few months.
I wouldn't say that one has to have seen combat to be against this war. That's obviously not true, since we're surrounded by people who see perfectly clearly that we should not be attacking Iraq, and many of them have never been to war. Still, it is quite striking that the only person in this administration, high-up, who has seen war up close, and by the way who has also seen high-level decisionmaking up close, is of course Colin Powell, who was I think a battalion commander in Vietnam. He's the only one who has actually been close to combat, and he's the one who has been most reluctant among the civilians—he's a former military—to see us go into this war.
It's impossible to find a single military man that I've heard of who is for this war. I haven't seen one quoted to that effect. It's all civilians. But the civilians include Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, all of whom were of age to be close to combat in Vietnam. To extend the range here a bit, I was 34 when I went over, and 36 when I came back. So if you really wanted to see war up close, rather than watch it from Washington, which is the way I did feel as a government official, you could do it. You didn't have to pull strings, and I did get to Vietnam. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and Bush did not manage to do that. That may be related, or not, to the fact that they are all enthusiastic about this video game that they feel is about to be played, on the model of the way they see the Gulf War, or Afghanistan, or Kosovo, where nearly all the people who die are adversaries, and not Americans.
I don't know how much of a difference it makes. But it is there. General Zinni, a Marine general, who was Bush's representative to the Middle East did point to the fact that all the people who were enthusiastic about going into this war, without exception, did not manage to get close to what combat really looks like.
I don't think, by the way, it's a matter of courage. I don't really doubt the physical courage of any of these people at all. I don't think that's the issue. So what is the difference? Well, seeing it up close, you see two things very strikingly. One, the extreme uncertainties—almost hard to imagine, if your only contact with war has been through press reports or simulations or games of some sort or other. You just can't imagine how wrong things can go and how regularly. And the other part is, you do see, if you're anywhere near populated areas in the war you're in, you see the effect on humans of that war. Not only on soldiers, but of course, the women and children, and the impact on that.
I do think the one difference it made to me to be in Vietnam was that the people of Vietnam became more real to me than could ever have happened otherwise. There are plenty of places in the world where I read about suffering, but it remains, as you say, abstract—at most, it's a matter of pictures, perhaps very moving pictures. But in the case of Vietnam, I knew people, I know there names, or if I didn't know there names, which was usually the case, I knew what they looked like, up close. I saw what the meaning of war actually is, and the main impact in on civilians.
It meant that, when I realized that the war was going to go on, and that it was going to get larger under a new president, it had a newer sense of urgency for me. Nixon did not feel that he was prepared to see Saigon go communist whatever the people of Vietnam wanted in the way of ending the war. He wasn't going to end the war under such circumstances. That meant it was going to go on. He was making threats of escalation which he thought might succeed. I thought that contrary to his own expectations, his threats were extremely unlikely to succeed, and that meant the war was going to get larger. His threats did not succeed, and the war did get larger, in terms of the impact on Vietnamese civilians. [See Secrets, pp. 257-261, 414-421] He hoped he was going to win it with these threats.
I thought not. Just as when I see, these days, the president making open threats of nuclear weapons in response to possible use of nerve gas by Saddam, a lot of people will support those as threats, as deterrence. The first point in response to that view is, I don't think they're bluffs. The second point is that I don't have any confidence that they will deter Saddam if we are invading Iraq. If we are trying to kill Saddam, and he is faced with death, I don't think our threats will deter him from using what he has. That's what the director of CIA, George Tenet, said: he's very unlikely to use this weapons if he's not attacked, because that would be suicide, and he's not suicidal. But if Saddam is attacked, Tenet says, Saddam will use—not "might" or "probably," that's their prediction, he will use—what he has. Bush is claiming that he has sure knowledge that Saddam has nerve gas. He may or may not be right. But that's the gamble Bush is taking.
So in effect, by making this threat—and I don't think it's a bluff—Bush has passed the trigger on our nuclear arsenal to Saddam Hussein, under attack. I think that's madly reckless. It's outrageous, and not because Saddam has the ability to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons in return. The inspectors have managed, possibly, to destroy his ability to attack even Israel. But he does have the ability to attack our troops, for sure, and that means that, in the face of death, he could trigger, with his nerve gas, a precedent that would have enormous risk for the people of this country, and the rest of the world. There couldn't be a more dangerous precedent to set than for anybody, and above all the United States, using a nuclear weapon—the first actually used on humans since Nagasaki, over fifty years ago—in response to chemical weapons.
That precedent, I believe, will send very many people in search of nuclear materials to buy in Russia. They will say, "it's too dangerous, it takes too long to try to produce our own. Let's raise the price we're willing to pay for blackmarket nuclear material." And some Russian, some Pakistani, some Indian is going to find that price high enough, and provide them with it. I think the effect of that on Israel, and on cities in the United States, is going to be catastrophic.
DEVINS: Do you think Bush is even conscious that he's created this power shift when it comes to nuclear weapons? Aren't there people in the government who are laying this out clearly for him? Or is he just surrounded by toadies and yes-men?
ELLSBERG: Well, good question. We are in a situation where it's just mind boggling what's happening, and one has to ask--I've been working for thirty years to try to understand how men of good will, by most standards, certainly patriotic, and in most cases very very smart—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rice, these are very smart people—can take these kind of risks with American and foreign lives. It's not a matter of intelligence. You're asking, can't they see what I see? I'm a former Rand analyst, don't they have Rand analysts right now who can see what I see? I'm sure they do. I have no question about it. They can see every risk that I can see. I was very good at this—that's why they hired me. I might see one possibility that somebody else might not see as fast, but they would see lot's of things that I wouldn't see. I wasn't the only person who was good at this. So, they can see the risks we're running. How can they possibly be taking these risks?...>>
The excellent interview is continued here...
ellsberg.net
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Here's what The New Yorker said about Ellsberg's latest book...
“. . .fascinating. . . . ‘Secrets’ is not the hasty memoir of somebody in the news who is aware of how fast his star is fading. It's long and meticulous; every scene is thoroughly researched and carefully paced, and fitted to its place in Ellsberg's over-all political progression. Ellsberg encapsulates each of the anti-war movement's main phases. The Pentagon section of ‘Secrets’ is a wonderful evocation of the intoxicatingly frantic routine of the overachievers who populate the next-to-the-top level of government. . . . The publication of ‘Secrets’ is uncannily well timed. Ellsberg's first day of work in the Pentagon, in the summer of 1964, coincided with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the basis for a congressional resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson almost unlimited authority to pursue the Vietnam War. Ellsberg establishes that the incident was not the military attack on an American ship that Congress thought it was, and that the Administration was cooking up evidence to justify a course of action it had already decided upon. Just a few weeks ago, Congress passed a resolution authorizing a war with Iraq, which gives the President the widest war-making latitude since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.”
—The New Yorker
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Here's what The Seattle Times said about Ellsberg's book...
“Daniel Ellsberg has released this memoir with an exquisite sense of timing. As Congress considers the third war resolution in 12 years—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again—Ellsberg begins his book with its Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964. That was the vote authorizing Lyndon Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia 'as the president determines' . . . . Remarkable. . . . Conservatives, who resented Ellsberg 30 years ago, might tackle ‘Secrets’ with a new appreciation. His targets are just as often Democrats as Republicans, and one can easily accept his entire story as a tale of the mendacity of Big Government.”
—Seattle Times |
