The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  It is certain that among the decision-makers, little effort was made to learn relevant information about ruling Iraq once the invasion succeeded. No national intelligence estimate was made on the conditions to be expected during and after the war, yet such estimates are routinely produced for a large range of less important (and certain) contingencies (such as invading Bolivia). The CIA began war-game exercises in May 2002, to plan for what might happen after the fall of Baghdad, and people from the Defense Department attended the first of these sessions, but when their superiors found out, they were ordered not to attend again. The key is that postwar planning was seen as an obstacle to war itself. Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer in the CIA for both the Near and Far East, points out that no one had any appetite for such assessments and gives two general reasons:Number one was just extreme hubris and self-confidence. If you truly believe in the power of free economics and free politics, and their attractiveness to all populations of the world, and their ability to sweep away all manner of ills, then you tend not to worry about these things so much. The other major reason is that, given the difficulty of mustering public support for something as extreme as an offensive war, any serious discussion inside the government about the messy consequences, the things that could go wrong, would complicate even further the selling of the war.

  These are the two great drivers of self-deception: overconfidence and active avoidance of any knowledge of the potential downside to one’s decisions. The contrast with World War II is instructive. Before the United States even entered that war, teams at the Army War College were studying what went right and wrong when Germany was occupied after the previous world war. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, an entire School of Military Government was created at the University of Virginia whose mission was to plan for the occupation of both Japan and Germany. But of course this was much closer to a just war and was designed and thought through without the need to sell the war under false pretenses likely to induce self-deception. Injustice always requires justification and special pleading, justice less so.

  CREATING KNOWLEDGE AND THEN WALLING IT OFF

  As in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, where top management did not want to know about safety problems, during the Iraq war, no one wanted to hear about the problems on day two in Baghdad. Such knowledge interferes with the sales job. In the case of NASA, the safety unit was degraded to a caricature of what such a unit should look like. In the case of planning for Iraq, a truly bizarre partitioning took place. A set of working groups was duly created, then walled off from the decision-makers and the rest of the government to render the working groups impotent. Each involved knowledgeable people from throughout the US government, the army, the CIA, State Department, USAID, and so on. The State Department’s Future of Iraq project began a month after 9/11 and was publicly announced in March 2002, eventually comprising seventeen working groups and producing fourteen volumes of detailed findings. The project was headed by a man who was skeptical of the wisdom of the war but certain that planning for its aftermath was essential.

  Given the chaos that ensued, it is worth noting that in the summary report, stress was placed on (1) the need to get the electrical grid up and running and with it the water system, (2) the need to plan carefully for the change in the Iraqi army by removing its leaders without losing the ordinary soldiers, and (3) the need to plan for civil disorder, including the emergence of common criminals bent on rape, murder, and looting. All of these turned out to be exactly on the mark but were overlooked entirely. In September 2002, USAID also began what would soon become the Iraq Working Group to study the problems of postwar occupation. Drawing heavily on expertise from numerous nongovernmental organizations, it too highlighted some of the obvious problems forces occupying Iraq would face.

  These working groups were walled off from the rest of the operation, in particular from those actually making the decisions; information flow was halted in both directions. Individuals close to power who happened to attend meetings of either study group were chastised, and higher-ups were ordered not to attend any of these meetings. Why bother with a detailed analysis that is deliberately overlooked? This seems extraordinary. Perhaps those in charge learned that the news was pessimistic and did not wish to hear the details, or perhaps they set up this whole charade in the first place to look as if they were taking seriously problems that they were not.

  Curiously enough, identical forces were at work in the UK. Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted on limiting key war decisions to a very small (like-minded) group within his cabinet because of the danger of information leaking to the press. Precisely the problem one would expect with a questionable or unethical decision: let’s avoid group introspection and do it on our own. In the effort to limit information leaving the small group, information is diminished within the group.

  In any case, in for the dime, in for the dollar. When Jay Garner, the first person put in charge of “administering” the new Iraq, asked that the head of the Future of Iraq study group be assigned to him as an aide, the request was denied at the highest level of the administration. This is an extraordinary self-inflicted wound. It is one thing to exclude him in advance, while you are still hyping the adventure to self and others, but quite another to spitefully deny yourself his knowledge when you desperately need it—first blinding, then beheading yourself. Self-deception seems like a drug: once you start, it’s hard to stop.

  Having sold the public on the war through two lies, the US government then wasted at least six months’ time and resources in Iraq looking for the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and torturing prisoners to try to get them to give up the nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The intelligence agencies and interrogators were told to do “whatever it takes” to get the information from their detainees, and when they still came back empty-handed, they were told to push harder. Of course, the one sure property of torture is that it creates in the victim a desire to say whatever the torturer wishes to hear. Many Iraqis described the situation as surreal. The first question posed was, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” and the answer was, “How should I know? I am in Iraq.” From this point the relationship went downhill. It seems absurd that such a farce could be entrained by an initial simple lie; months after the invasion, people were being tortured to generate evidence in support of the lie, even though the lie had done its job.

  CAN WARS BE WON THROUGH BOMBING?

  War is a rapidly changing phenomenon, driven in part by continual technological development, which is surprisingly susceptible to change in the wrong direction. For example, the invention of armored knights on armored horses led to hundreds of years of investment in Europe in a manifestly foolish strategy: the knights were easily overcome by soldiers on foot.

  World War I was (roughly speaking) the last major war in which troops were sacrificed to protect civilians, and the majority of those dying directly in the war were soldiers (more than eighteen million versus five million civilians, not counting the influenza pandemic). World War II reversed this pattern, which has remained reversed ever since. Careful estimates from World War II suggest that at least fifteen million troops and more than forty-five million civilians died.

  The key to this change was massive aerial bombing of civilian populations. Although the Allies began by emphasizing tactical bombing—of military targets and key industrial areas—by the end of the war, they had perfected large-scale bombing of cities with or without any military value. Among the cities were Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden in Germany, and almost all the major cities of Japan, including Tokyo, in which more than 100,000 people were incinerated in a single night’s conflagration, the deliberate firebombing of a largely wooden city in order to create a massive inferno with temperatures reaching 1,800 degrees and winds more than fifty miles an hour. In all, more than sixty Japanese cities were destroyed by intensive bombing, leaving almost nothing of the cities on the list that bore the names Hiroshima and Nagas
aki.

  An enduring fallacy of surprising strength is that wars can be won through airpower, bombing from the relative safety of the skies, decoupling the killer and the killed. Among other virtues, it is claimed that bombing can turn a population against their leaders, whose activities are said to have induced the bombing. Proven wrong in World War II (with the single exception of the nuclear attacks on Japan) and repeatedly since then, nobody seems able to drive a stake through the heart of this fallacy. As recently as 2006, both Israel and the United States imagined that a devastating bombing campaign against all of Lebanon would turn the country against Hezbollah as the presumptive cause of the bombing. In fact, the campaign had been conceived about a year earlier and extensively wargamed by Israel and the United States in the six months leading up to the onslaught. As usual, the bombing had the opposite effect: the country rallied behind Hezbollah, which enjoyed its highest levels of general support ever during the bombing itself.

  For the United States, the Lebanon war was apparently meant as a prelude to a larger bombing attack on Iran based on the same absurd logic—in this case, that the Iranian people would rise up against their leaders for having somehow provoked the United States into mass attacks on their people. The notion that the Iranian people might regard the United States instead as a mass murderer seems scarcely to have reached the consciousness of these decision-makers. And the mistake continues. In Afghanistan, US murder of civilians from the sky may be driving the population into the arms of their murderer’s enemies. Or as one headline (May 17, 2009) put it: DEATH FROM ABOVE, OUTRAGE DOWN BELOW. In 2009, the United States acknowledged that killing fourteen alleged al-Qaeda members cost seven hundred civilians their lives in Afghanistan for a 98 percent cost on the innocent.

  One of the most spectacular failures of mass aerial bombing occurred in the US war on Vietnam, with truly horrific consequences, quite apart from the hundreds of thousands of civilians directly slaughtered. In Cambodia alone, an entirely innocent bystander in the US assault on Vietnam, the United States dropped more than 2.75 million tons of bombs between 1966 and 1973, during 250,000 missions on more than 100,000 sites. That is to say, more tonnage was dropped there than by all the Allies on Germany and Japan in all of World War II, including the two atomic bombs. Put differently, an average of almost 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped every day on Cambodia for about 2,900 straight days, during 100 separate attacks each day. This was on a small rural country that had not attacked or threatened a soul.

  More than 10 percent of these sites were completely indiscriminate, in the sense of never having been targeted or described. The stated purpose of this horror? To deny the Vietnamese troops safe haven in the Cambodian forests. Survivors describe scenes out of hell, massive bombs looking like lightning bolts and producing terrifying explosions that ripped trees and people apart, leaving deep craters and victims walking around dazed and haunted by the recent horror from above—some struck speechless for days, only to be revisited by fresh attacks. The full scale of the assault emerged to general knowledge only when President Clinton (in a gesture of reconciliation) released in 2000 data on bombs dropped, in order to help the Vietnamese and Cambodians find unexploded ones still waiting to claim lives and limbs.

  And what was the effect on Cambodia’s social and political life? A small radical fringe group in the countryside—the Khmer Rouge—grew in five short years of US carpet-bombing from a poorly organized force of 5,000 to a raging and well-organized army of 250,000. When it seized control of the capital, the group turned on its own population, fulfilling, in effect, the genocidal words of Henry Kissinger when he transmitted President Richard Nixon’s orders to carpet-bomb Cambodia: “Hit anything that is moving with anything that is flying.” Subsequently, more than a million Cambodians were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in less than two years.

  War these days has all sorts of unintended and unvisualized consequences, such as the entire destruction of Cambodian society, its evisceration from the inside. The horrors being inflicted are usually deliberately hidden from view of the society inflicting them. No one is describing the horrors and, in any case, a mentality of “we are at war” rules at home, discouraging interest in such “side effects.” Efforts are made to hide the truth from the larger world and from later historical memory, the better to maintain a false positive collective view of one’s past. The United States did not slaughter Asian people wantonly in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead it fought international communism with some collateral damage.

  BOMBING TO ERADICATE HISTORY AND TO REINFORCE IT

  Bombing can be used to alter history and to impose it. The importance of eradicating history is nicely illustrated by two bombing runs during Israel’s assault on Lebanon in 2006. In the first, the Khiam prison near the Israeli border was obliterated. The prison had no military value, no rockets were being fired from its midst, and there weren’t even any civilians inside to terrorize. The attack was not an accident; it was a systematic bombing raid designed to obliterate the prison, as indeed it did.

  The prison was a museum, the actual prison in which southern Lebanese men and women not cooperating with the Israeli occupation were housed in the 1990s. I visited it myself six months before the war. Except for two guides, it was empty. Signs on the wall said that women were allowed to bathe for fifteen minutes once every two weeks but men only once a month. And there was a torture chamber, somewhat resembling the old electrocution chambers in the United States. Noam Chomsky was photographed sitting in such a chair. And that is precisely the point. The living memory of the prison invited Israeli destruction, the better to destroy the past and build future, false narratives.

  The second bombing run destroyed another museum, built on the site of the Qana massacre of 1996. This massacre took place during one of Israel’s periodic assaults on its northern neighbor Lebanon. As shown conclusively later, successively calibrated shells fired by the Israelis finally landed on a UN refuge, their intended target, overhead drones providing the key information. Within the refuge were huddled women and children trying to survive the general bombing while their men remained at large. Of those sheltered by the UN, 106 were incinerated, mostly women and children. Many of the victims were then buried there and a museum erected with photos and exhibits of that dreadful day: ghastly burned corpses, shredded bodies, blood everywhere—the pitiful remnants of human beings cowering under the wings of the UN for false protection. (They would have been better off widely dispersed in the open. Many more sitting ducks would have survived.) Yet why does Israel now bother with the museum, with rebombing dead people? Precisely to kill the victims for good, so their memories do not come back to haunt or to indict. Rewriting history through rebombing.

  An extraordinary—if very ugly—bombing also happened in 2006, with very different intended effects on group memory. The Israelis perpetrated a second Qana atrocity—with similar loss of young life. From their drones in the sky, the Israelis had been carefully tracking the residents of Qana, who were forced to join together in ever-tighter clusters as homes were successively destroyed. Children played outside in the daytime, easily visible to the drone. Then one night Israel attacked the final house where twenty-seven were huddled, claiming a fresh set of seventeen dead children. This was deliberately grinding salt into an old wound. So here we have Israel acting oppositely regarding the history of 1996: to the outside world it wants to destroy direct physical evidence of the atrocity, but to the local Arabs it wants the dreadful memory of 1996 to be reinforced, as if to say, “We will murder you as piteously as we choose, when and where we choose. We will then do everything to deny and eradicate in the minds of outsiders what we have just done to you.”

  CARNAGE IN GAZA

  In what seemed to me, a mere bystander, to be a stupefying act of violence, Israel attacked the people of Gaza at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, December 27, 2008, when the streets were bustling with people and a graduation ceremony for police cadets was under way. Within the space of twen
ty minutes, almost two hundred people lost their lives, including many young men who were about to become police officers. In one sense, it was beautifully planned, two days after Christmas, the last day of Hanukkah, a few days before the new year. Who would have guessed that Israel would choose this time to launch a savage attack long in the planning? Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper called this “a stroke of genius” since “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed.” “Genius” seems a curious word to describe what is only a well-timed act of malevolence. Another commentator echoed earlier US self-praise in Iraq: “We left them in shock and awe.” Or as another put it, “Israel can and must mete out a severe punishment to Hamas, one that sears its consciousness (yes, sears its consciousness) and causes it to hesitate before it fires again.”

  American editorialists and commentators rushed to Israel’s defense. As gathered from a single day’s commentary (January 4, 2009), the following talking heads on US television justify Israel’s brutal assault: three governors, one senator, and one newspaper columnist. “The missile firing into Israel, I think, brought the proper response from the Israelis.” “All Americans know what we would be doing if missiles were landing . . . from Vancouver, Canada, into Seattle.” “It is inconceivable to me that if missiles were coming out of Cuba into south Florida that we wouldn’t respond.” “Israel has no choice but to take military action.” “Israelis are doing the only thing they can possibly do to defend their population.”