9/11 as mindkiller

Fight Club was probably a better movie to watch to understand the people who attacked us than The Battle of Algiers. All the efforts to ascribe a meaning to the events – the terrorists hate our freedom, or they hate that we are supporting dictators in their region, or they hate that we are infidels, or they hate that we are engaged in wars of aggression against Muslims, or whatever – were responses to our need for meaning rather than to the events themselves.

Just as some say "they hate that we are supporting dictators in their region" and some say "they hate that we are infidels", Millman says "Fight Club was probably a better movie to watch to understand the people who attacked us than The Battle of Algiers."

Millman has a particular political position. From the inside, one's political position looks like just common sense, above the petty politics of trying to fit every event into a narrow world view, which is what the other sides do.

It is hard for him to see this as a political position because it identifies multiple other political positions, rather than just one (which would be a sure sign of it being political). This is analogous to the "don't be a dick" crowd's thinking they are (uniquely) above irrationality in a debate about religion in society, cue xkcd.

In general: if one thinks one has a unique, common sense, apolitical third way, one probably doesn't. It looks basically the same from the inside whether one is toked out in Berkeley or in church in Arkansas.

Basically. The wars are largely funded through separate bills, so the deficit probably wouldn't have been incurred at all. Other similar bills that were limited largely by total debt, such as the bailout and stimulus bills, would probably have been the most different had the wars not been waged.

I think of the Iraq war as more "a waste of money" than something causing "massive numbers of people dead." The succession after Saddam was not something that was ever going to go well, which is what what actually happened should be compared to.

In politics, the argument is perfectly normal and unreasonable. It means (borrowing the idea from novalis' link):

"This program was the worst waste of money in the budget, because it was against my political views. It was only funded because of people abusing the process to advance political views different from mine. If it was not for this program, so many other programs could have been funded which agree with my political views and were only blocked for political reasons."

You assume that the government would divide the pool wisely. (Not that it necessarily wouldn't, but not that it necessarily would either.)

I'm not sure if this is really the way upvotes are supposed to be used, but I voted you up from -1 because I don't think "Can you explain why?" is a question that should be censured.

The way I understood it was that "the-worst-waste-of-money" (and possibly "the-most-worthy-unfunded-program" as well) is a label applied in retrospect. To fund the most worthy unfunded program, you'd need to unfund one of 100 programs. It's likely that of the 100 programs, one will turn out to be an abject failure, but it's hard to predict which one it will be ahead of time. Conversely, just because the unfunded program seems most worthy now, doesn't mean that earlier one could have predicted the need for it.

Another difference is that Hitler's program of ethnic cleansing was not cited as a cause for war at the time that the allies went to war. That happened after the war.

By what metric can it be said that WWII had a "good outcome"?!

The destruction of two oppressive empires which were engaging in largescale genocide would be the most obvious success criterion. A more cynical point is that for the US at least it really did help the economy. Before the US entered the war we were still in the Great Depression. Things were picking up but not by that much. Also, a major result of the war was funding which went into research that lead to a lot of useful new technologies like radar.

The Axis was defeated, and the reconstruction brought Europe to the West of the Iron Curtain back to a high standard of living in a relatively short period of time, without the lingering hostilities and hardship which led to a second world war so shortly after the first one.

Comparison to other plausible outcomes.

At least WW2 ended.

I disagree. I think the Vietnam war does loom very large in American's consciousness. It is the counterpoint to WW II. I remember Cheney complaining in an interview that no one could even wait for the Iraq war to be underway before asking "is it Vietnam yet?". In fact there was a LOT of vocal skepticism about the war in Iraq before it started and as it unfolded.

I agree that you can't reason by historical analogy alone, but do you think historical analogies should be left out entirely?

I strongly agree that American character has been shaped by the feeling of just war, and if one identifies with the north, then with victory in just wars.

I suspect that people here overestimate both the advantage of intelligence and the advantage of rationality in making predictions about the world.

Overestimate the advantages to making the best prediction in a field of predictors, are right about the advantages to avoid making the worst prediction in a field of predictors.

Right and wrong are difficult concepts here; are we looking at the stated goals, the (hidden) real intentions, the outcomes... to what extent do tactical mistakes influence this. I mean, suppose things had stabilized after major combat; I bet many more people would consider it a 'just war' then, without such outrages like Abu Graib or the helicopter shooting video.

It's interesting to see how some of the problems on the tactical level seem to have influenced the Libian approach, where western powers are pushing their agendas and determine the outcome of the conflict, but keep their hands relatively clean.

Finally, I'm impressed how well most LW'ers handle such a 'mind killer' topic.

That's a solid outside view reference class.

There's another issue that also doesn't come up much: there's a certain fraction of the population which wasn't in favor of the Iraq war, and they like saying "I told you so" but in fact they didn't. Most of their argument was meaningless slogans. Iraq wasn't about blood for oil. And there wasn't an intrinsic moral problem with it.

I'd be careful about that kind of thinking. When you get something wrong, dismissing the people who got it right as low status and wrongheaded is a convenient way to avoid updating on the evidence. A bit under half the US population opposed the Iraq war, including many prominent people (Senators, opinion writers, policy analysts, etc.), but you seem to be focusing on a small fraction of opponents ("no blood for oil", war is intrinsically wrong) who mostly opposed the Afghanistan war as well, which puts them in much narrower company.

Arguments made against the Iraq war at the time (many of which are at least hinted at in this short piece by Dahlia Lithwick) included:

1. that an immediate war was not necessary because Saddam Hussein was not on the verge of doing terrible things
2. that the US was likely to face a lengthy and costly military engagement
3. that the new Iraqi government which replaced Hussein's regime wasn't likely to be a very good one (liberal, democratic, effective at maintaining peace & stability, etc.)
4. that the war would be led by the Bush administration so we'd end up with the outcomes of the Bush administration's war, not the imaginary Iraq war that you might want (this is one response to djcb's point: if you can predict in advance that things will be handled badly, then that means that the war as such is a bad idea)
5. that much of the available information about the reasons for war was coming from the Bush administration, and there were reasons to be suspicious about significant parts of the case that they were making, which cast doubt on the foundations of the whole enterprise (see also Daniel Davies on this point)

But the simplest case is just that war is a destructive, costly thing, so if you're going to get involved in one you'd better have a damn good reason and you'd better get it right. The war needs to accomplish something at least as big as its cost, which means the bigger the war the higher the standard. Iraq didn't meet that standard at the time, still less once it turned out that there were no nuclear/chemical/biological weapons. Most of the arguments were variations on that theme, demonstrating the high costs of this particular war or poking holes in the various reasons given for the war.

I really don't think this is the place to relitigate the Iraq War, but for the record, there were people opposing the war for reasons that were a)not easily compressed into slogans and b)to a greater or lesser degree validated by the evidence. For my part, I opposed the Iraq war despite overestimating the probability that Iraq had functional "weapons of mass destruction" (I mean chemical and biological here, and the former really shouldn't be considered WMD, but such is the terminology) because I expected that it would produce regional geopolitical chaos afterward. At the time, I underestimated the amount of sectarian conflict and (so far at least) overestimated the degree of Kurdish-Arab ethnic violence. But I was not and am not an expert on the area. Other people really did get this right at the time.

There's another issue that also doesn't come up much: there's a certain fraction of the population which wasn't in favor of the Iraq war, and they like saying "I told you so" but in fact they didn't. Most of their argument was meaningless slogans.

I suggest evaluating a point of view by its best proponents, not its worst or even its average proponents.

Andrew Rilstone got a lot right, ten years ago:

But a general war against terrorism – or, in some views, against evil in general – seems too open ended. It could go on forever. Millions could die. And it’s a blank check to give power to our rulers. Of course we aren’t going to be too critical of them during a crisis; but don’t let it go to their heads, otherwise the crisis could mysteriously drag on for ever and ever, with more and more of our liberties being eroded along the way.

That's a good point. The reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing and other domestic terrorism (such as the Unabomber) supports your analysis.