Babysitting Iraq

Ted H. calls attention to a frequently overlooked fact about motivation, namely that people's interests can overlap.

"X did it for Y's sake" is not, I repeat not, incompatible with "X did it for X's own sake."  Perhaps X views Y's interests as including his own.  Or perhaps X thinks that promoting Y's interests will cause his own separate interests to be promoted as well.

We recognize instances of this all the time. If I offer to take my nephew to the park so he can play, I may very well expect to enjoy watching him, and spending time with him. I am doing this for his sake, and also for my own, since in this case furthering his interests also furthers mine.

Ted applies this principle to the Iraq war:

It is thus possible that the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq with the aim of promoting its interests by promoting the interests of the Iraqi people.  That's been my reading of the situation all along[...]

I think Ted is right to reject the notion that the Bush administration must have had some ulterior motive that was really responsible for the drive to war. Like him, I'm not quite to the point of believing that the decision-makers in this administration are so irredeemably evil that they couldn't possibly have been serious about helping the Iraqis.

Ted goes on to say:

To show that there's something unsavory about the Administration's motives, you'd need to show that prominent members of the Administration don't believe the unifying theory.

Here's where I have my reservations. I do think there was something unsavory about the administration's motives, or at the very least questionable about them. For another salient fact about interests is that they can coincide, or fail to coincide, in complex ways. To return to the example of my young nephew: it's easy enough for me to conclude that my interests (in enjoying his company) are furthered by accompanying my nephew to the park, or to story time at the library, or to a petting zoo. Suppose I were to offer to babysit my nephew for a week, in even greater furtherance of those interests. Might it be rational for my sister-in-law to be a little reluctant to accept that offer?

I think so, and here's why: while in some cases I might further my interests by furthering those of my nephew, there are bound to be other cases in which I do not. People's interests are complex. I might decide, after a day or two, that the law of diminishing returns renders my nephew's company considerably less entertaining than at first. Perhaps I'm now more interested in reading a novel, despite my nephew's vigorous entreaties to take him back to the park. If I intended to further both our interests, but now furthering his does not further mine, whose interests will win out? And if I'm torn over the question of whether or not to take him to the park again today, how will I react if he wakes up at 3:00 AM, badly in need of a diaper change? How robustly am I motivated to pursue his interests when they are directly opposed to mine? If my sister-in-law has any doubts on the matter, she'd be well advised to decline my offer.

Back to the Iraq case: no doubt many of the top members of the administration believed that they would further their interests, and the interests of the United States, by invading Iraq. Once that belief is exploded (and by this point it has been thoroughly exploded), what motives will dominate? To put it another way, does anyone think that the administration would have invaded Iraq if they believed that it would ultimately damage them politically? A commitment to help others only when I can profit from helping them is not a very deep commitment to their welfare. First and foremost, it's a commitment to my own. Their good figures only accidentally.

Unfortunately, the history of the occupation suggests that many of the military's and CPA's decisions in Iraq have been primarily about furthering the administration's ideology and making political capital, from Bremer's obsession with Polish-style privatization, to staffing the CPA with politically reliable Republicans, to the famous statue-toppling. In these cases, the likely benefit to the Iraqis has been of distinctly secondary importance.