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Never Give Known Liars the Benefit of the Doubt

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** FILE ** White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer reacts to a journalist’s question during his last news conference at the White House in Washington in this July 14, 2003, file photo. Four years after President Bush’s State of the Union speech touched off a stormy debate over the threat posed by Iraq, former White House aide “Scooter” Libby goes on trial Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007, in the CIA leak investigation, and former press secretary Fleischer is expected to be a key witness. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

A reminder that claims from the Trump administration that assassinating Suleimani stopped an immediate threat to American lives not only shouldn’t be repeated uncritically, they shouldn’t be given literally any credence whatsoever:

Every international crisis generates more than its fair share of insta-experts, charlatans, and Wikipedia-summarizers, so it’s probably best for political pundits to try to stick to subjects we’re genuinely knowledgeable about. 

For example: President Donald Trump is a deeply dishonest person. 

Since long before he was a politician, he’s lied frequently and even written in multiple booksabout his profound belief in the value of lying as a means to get ahead. And he’s good at it. After his Atlantic City casinos went bust, he successfully duped a bunch of mom-and-pop equity investors out of their money to get out of debt and had them pay him a salary for the privilege. He then got himself elected president and immediately started bullshitting about everything from the size of his inaugural crowds to the way NATO works to Chinese currency manipulation

When someone has proven over and over again that they are not trustworthy, you can, and in important situations should, stop trusting them. 

Unfortunately, in the escalating crisis with Iran, many people seem to have forgotten this basic principle. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went on CNN earlier this morning to explain that the Trump administration killed a top Iranian general to forestall an “imminent threat” and that the decision to do so “saved American lives.” Those remarks are simply echoed uncritically in the Washington Post’s main write-up of the story, along with the observation that Pompeo “stressed that Washington is committed to de-escalation” — a fairly dubious assertion given the current cycle of escalating hostilities dates to Trump’s unprovoked decision to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal. An ABC News write-up of the story stresses the risks of Iranian retaliation, but simply takes Pompeo’s claim of an imminent threat at face value. 

It’s obviously possible, in theory, that this is true. But it’s somewhat at odds with the Department of Defense’s statement last night which said merely that Suleimani was “actively developing plans” for attacks and that the American bombing was “aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans” rather than disrupting an ongoing one. And indeed, David Sanger’s News Analysis piece in the New York Times takes the Pentagon’s deterrence account at face value without noting that the secretary of state actually claims the attack was about something else.

Beyond the contradictions, the basic fact is that telling the truth about something would be a kind of strange, new departure for the Trump administration and it seems unwise to assume that’s something they would do. 

“Donald Trump is lying” is one of the safest default assumptions in the world, and the odds that his impulsive decision to kill Qasem Soleimani is an exception are remote indeed.

Evergreen:

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.

The Vital Importance of Audit. Emphasised over and over again. Brealey and Myers has a section on this, in which they remind callow students that like backing-up one’s computer files, this is a lesson that everyone seems to have to learn the hard way. Basically, it’s been shown time and again and again; companies which do not audit completed projects in order to see how accurate the original projections were, tend to get exactly the forecasts and projects that they deserve. Companies which have a culture where there are no consequences for making dishonest forecasts, get the projects they deserve. Companies which allocate blank cheques to management teams with a proven record of failure and mendacity, get what they deserve.  

I hope I don’t have to spell out the implications of this one for Iraq.  Krugman has gone on and on about this, seemingly with some small effect these days. The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.

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