RSSI Came, I Saw, Iran
April 11th, 2006 | View Comments
Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader today that includes the following statement in support of Bush:
Should events continue to unfold in the direction we have been seeing, and should bombing Iranian nuclear sites become the only way to stop their pursuit of the Bomb, would John Kerry ever have the guts to pull the trigger? I think not.
There is an interesting assumption embedded in this statement: that the events in Iran would have unfolded in exactly the same way under a Kerry administration. I’m not convinced this assumption holds up.
Now, Iran has never been a great friend of the U.S. and Ahmadinejad has gone on record threatening the U.S. I’m not disputing that point.
The question is, how much of the current situation was going to happen anyways, and how much of it was fueled by Bush’s own actions?
There is a concept in social psychology called the self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically, because you believe something to be true (although it may not actually be true), you act in a way such that it eventually becomes true. There are many examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in literature, from Oedipus to Harry Potter.
How do we know that Iran’s current stance on nuclear weapons isn’t a direct result of Bush threatening to invade everybody and their mother? From an Iranian point of view, Bush’s threats against Iran might now create a dire need to develop nuclear weapons for self-defense.
Which then Bush interprets as stubborn defiance of Bush’s will, and he responds with more saber-rattling, which then confirms the Iranian view that they need to get serious about their nuclear program and create a convincing show of arms, ad infinitum, or until someone pushes the big red button and annihilates us all.
If that’s what is happening, then electing the relatively non-threatening Kerry could have prevented this entire mess, because Iran wouldn’t have perceived Kerry as a threat and thus they would feel less urgency about developing their nuclear program.
Of course, this sort of thinking will enrage a certain segment of the population and I will get accused of “Blaming America First”. Well, no. It’s not about blame, it’s about realizing that politics and societies don’t exist in a vacuum and that what we often attribute to internal dispositions (”Iranians just irrationally hate Americans.”) is often actually caused by external circumstances that we’ve helped create (”A country that feels threatened will take steps to defend itself and its way of life. Duh.”).
It’s about not making the fundamental attribution error.
I guess my other point is to be really, really skeptical about statements like these, because if you work backwards from those conclusions, you often find that they require you to start from questionable assumptions/premises in order to be logically valid.
Take the “the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein in power” that’s still trotted out every so often. If you think about it, it assumes that “goodness” and “badness” have more-or-less universal definitions, that people and situations can be easily classified as “good” or “bad”, and that “good” and “bad” people and situations exist in some sort of stable quantities, as in people and situations don’t move from “good” to “bad”.
If those assumptions are true, then absolutely: remove Saddam, an element of badness, and improve the goodness/badness ratio for the world and for the Iraqi people. Rejoicing ensues.
Unfortunately, the truth of those assumptions is highly questionable. If you understood that Bush was operating on this sort of overly simplistic logical calculus that is really unbecoming in a President, then you were royally unsurprised when things in Iraq started falling apart.
But yeah, hopefully people have realized by now that sophisticated thinking isn’t exactly a hallmark of this administration.
Yvonne posted this on April 11th, 2006 @ 4:51pm in News/Politics, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "I Came, I Saw, Iran"
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