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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: spiral3 who wrote (48204)	9/30/2002 11:12:46 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the long post, spiral. I'm not at all certain just how to reply. But let me try just the portion on rationality and mirror imaging, which, incidentally, doesn't seem to me to be very important. Just an interesting wrinkle on thinking about foreign policy issues. If it doesn't help you, just don't use it. Ditto for Derek, if he reads this. All I meant by my post about the lack of a necessary link between judgments about rationality and mirror imaging, is, that as I read the brief reference to it in Pollack's book, it delinked the two. That's my interpretation. Pollack does not discuss this. And I only meant that one doesn't have to make judgments about one's own rationality or the rationality of the leader of some other state; just see that seeing that leader might act in unanticipated ways, given your reading of the situation and your own interpretation of what you might do in a similar situation. It doesn't do motives or intentions, assuming one could make an argument that there are serious differences between the two. It's much lower down the abstraction scale. It also leaves the analyst free to look into the reasons for the surprising behavior of the opposing foreign leader without jumping the evidence barrier to terms like "irrational" or "madman." Other explanations are different kinds of information (the other knows more or less than one does), different structures by which information is passed around (the tendency to listen only to yes folk at the top, any top); different cultural norms about contexts in which bargaining is important; etc. As for using the term "madman" to describe Saddam, I don't think there's any doubt he deserves it on his human rights record alone. But that's not about trying to decide what is the best course of action to pursue. Hope this addressed some of your concerns.