Home / Robert Farley / The “Was it Worth it?” Question

The “Was it Worth it?” Question

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My answer: Hell no.

The answer I expect historians will give fifty years from now: No.

The answer Iraqis are giving now and likely will continue give: Hells No!

The answer that the leaders of major US security institutions, from the President on down, have to give: A qualified yes, with important lessons learned, etc.

With this many lives lost and this much treasure squandered, a leader cannot simply say “It wasn’t worth it,” or “It was a terribly stupid decision.” This makes the sacrifice seem worthless and counter-productive, which is not a message that a bureaucratic organization like the Army or the Marine Corps or the CIA (or the USPS or the DMV, for that matter) can say to itself while maintaining any degree of morale and esprit de corps. This obviously isn’t ideal from either a CYA or a learning perspective, but it is nonetheless necessary for institutional survival. People genuinely hate to be told that they lost a son or a brother or a daughter or a leg or three years to wasteful stupidity. John Kerry’s fantastic question about the Vietnam War can only emerge in the course of external critique or private internal deliberation.

Organizations of any sort, whether ad hoc groups or massive bureaucratic entities, require a narrative of effectiveness and capability to underlie their performance. This narrative must be tolerable to the various entities that make up the organization. That the narrative have some truth content would be nice, but isn’t strictly necessary from an organizational health point of view. Narratives that suggest that some important constituency is worthless, incompetent, stupid, immoral and so forth only work when the constituency in question can effectively be excluded or expunged from the future of the organization. This was always part of (although not all of) the problem with the COINdistas; too many people in the Army understood COIN, correctly or no, to represent a denunciation of what the Army had done before.  COIN could provide part of a narrative (“The Surge was effective, and allowed us to leave Iraq with our heads high”), but at least thus far is insufficiently inclusive to be accepted by the Army as a whole.

Lest we think that these dynamics are restricted to military organizations, I suspect that the same kinds of choices and deliberations are going on inside the OWS movement.  Maybe the ports were too far; I don’t really know, but I do know that it’s extremely difficult to generate a critique of OWS from within the movement, because such a critique inherently detracts from organizational cohesion and the morale of protest groups.

Finally, I think that questions like “was it worth it?” whether applied to the Iraq War or to any other major political project, inherently divide the academic/analyst from the activist.  To take the public option as an example, I completely understand why activists were insistent that the public option was crucial to making the ACA a meaningfully progressive piece of legislation, and why analysts were less certain that including the public option was strictly necessary (although of course analysts differed on this point).  “Is the public option necessary?” is an organizational cohesion question to activists, and a technocratic question to analysts. Answers differ not always because one side is wrong, but rather because the actors are using the question in different ways.

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