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What not to ask presidential candidates

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Giving Back in Baghdad
Creative Commons License photo credit: heraldpost

What is your plan for Iraq? At every press conference, interview and fund-raising event, the presidential candidates are all asked this same pointless question. And it’s pointless because next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq.

A planned withdrawal from Iraq should start now. To say longer is really just an embodiment of the Sunk Cost Fallacy where it is argued that the amount of time, effort, or money already invested in a project justifies the investment of yet more time, effort and money in order to complete the project.

The US no longer has the capacity to determine the outcome of that country’s civil war, so to ask candidates how they would fix it is merely to invite them to talk and talk without saying anything. Instead we should be asking President Bush’s would-be successors whether they can do what he cannot: acknowledge failure in Iraq and look beyond it.

Iraq, after all, was meant to be just the starting point of an open-ended global war on terror. Candidates who still find merit in that original cause should explain how we might prevail in such an enterprise in the wake of the Iraq fiasco. Where might we fight next? What will victory look like? Candidates who are sceptical of further military action, meanwhile, should be pressed to describe their alternative plans for dealing with violent Islamic radicalism. Will they isolate it? Subvert it? And by what means?

What’s your plan for Iraq? was the right question back in 2002 and 2003. Too bad nobody thought to ask George W. Bush then.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 12:59 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    I think that this is a valid assessment, but is based upon old facts. The situation in Iraq has improved considerably in the past six months. When failure seemed apparent the suck cost fallacy could be seen in many arguments for "staying the course", however, the significant drop in violence has allowed for plans to reduce troop levels even beyond pre-surge levels. It would seem that the cost-benefit analysis has shifted. Remaining in Iraq to help them achieve a stable government and economy that will not be immediately subject to larger regional influences like Iran has significant benefits, and given the change we're seeing on the ground, the cost is no longer prohibitively high. Even if you disagree with this assessment, you have to note that there are arguments for remaining in Iraq not based upon a sunk cost fallacy.

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