How smart people can be very very dumb indeed

Matt Yglesias was one of the earliest liberal blogging “superstars”, still a student at Yale when he first started blogging, bright, wonkish and always comfortable inside the Beltway, looking to be a Washington insider himself before too long. A centrist by nature, he gets along well with both Democrats and sensible Republicans, not afraid to go against established opinion on his own side. Analytical rather than passionate, he’s not very ideological and approaches politicals rationally. In short, Matt was the perfect candidate to be suckered by the Bush administration into supporting the War on Iraq. Unlike some however, he’s been big enough to admit his mistakes, so I feel a little bit bad picking on him still, but then his recent post explaining why he made that mistake was such a perfect example of how very stupid an intelligent guy can be:

1. Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. […]

2. Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously.[…]

3. Misreading the politics: […] I figured Bush wouldn’t be doing this unless he said some reasonable plan for extricating our forces and stabilizing the situation.

4. Kenneth Pollack: The formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” […]

He also adds that “being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite” which is an obnoxious motivation but honest of him to admit that. What’s clear from Matt’s explenations is that he just didn’t think things through at the time, letting others (Pollack, elite Democratic politicians like Clinton or Daschle) do his thinking for him, relying on their honesty, assuming the reasons the administration and its supporters gave for the war where the real reasons and there were no ulterior motives. This lack of critical thinking is shown even more in reason one, in which he reveals how uncritically he swallowed the myth of American reluctances to get involved in foreign adventures.

The common factor in all these errors is I think a lack of ideology, of being able to look beyond a given issue to the greater framework in which it takes place. He would’ve done better had he reflexively rejected the cause for war rather than to try and judge it on its merits, as he wasn’t smart enough or suspicious enough to reach the right conclusion. His supposedly rational approach to politics and the war blinded him to the real interests of those promoting it. It’s a trap any of us can fall into if we think we’re more clever than we are: rationality has its limits and you can’t reach the right conclusion if you don’t have all the facts.

Because there was of course an ideology driving the war, just one that was never stated explicitely. If you buy into the idea that America has the right to invade other countries if it decides they have trangressed the international order, then the only question is whether or not the reasons for invading Iraq are serious enough, with the more fundamental question of whether it’s right to do so not on the table. And sinces the cause for war was built on lies, it became impossible for those who like Matt took those lies seriously to reach the right conclusion. Matt’s arrogance, combined with his naivity ensured that these lies were swallowed.