More on hawks and doves
A prominent example of what I was talking about in the last post is the bitterness of the debate over the Iraq casualty study. Given the extraordinary difficulties of collecting data in Iraq, I expect that had the study concerned something that the study's supporters had no opinion on--say, pet ownership in Iraq--those supporters would have readily accepted the conclusion that any such estimates were likely to vary widely from whatever the unknowable true figure is; had it reached a really surprisingly high estimate, like every house in Iraq has an average of five dogs, three cats, and an iguana, they would be willing to entertain suspicions that something had gone a little bit wrong. Yet they reacted with furious anger to anyone who suggested that an estimate that indicated over 15% of military-aged males in the Sunni triangle may already be dead could be just a mite high.
One anti-war friend to me said during the flap "I sure hope it's not true. That's a lot of people!" That did not seem to be the prevailing attitude. Rather, the study's supporters seemed to want it to be true, because it supported their prior beliefs. I'm no stranger to that emotion: I eagerly anticipated a stock market crash to validate my prediction that we were in a speculative bubble, and it is only poetic justice that I lost my job when it did. But the study's supporters seemed so focused on winning, on proving that the hawks were bad, wrong, stupid people and the war was an awful, awful, awful thing that the meaning of the numbers got lost in the argument. No one seemed to have any sense that for them to be right, an extra half-million people would have to be dead. The admirable attitude would have been a hopeful attempt to prove the study wrong, laced with a powerful fear that it was not. That attitude was almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it was about beating the hawks...
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