Thoughtful comments from one of the great Americans:
ELLSBERG: ... 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....
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