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02/02/2005: "Bad Bet"

We already know that the Bush Administration is made up of high rollers, none so high a roller as their Chief, so how should they be feeling right now about the big bet they made by invading Iraq? I’m guessing that the Right Wing is thinking that it was a pretty good bet. Certainly the Administration is bursting with pride at this weekend’s turn of events. And from Bush’s very narrow perspective, one could argue (if devoid of conscience and morality) that he has hit the jackpot. Exhibit A is his reelection. One might argue that his bet on Iraq put his reelection in jeopardy, but my take is that having a war on was the factor that nudged his nose first over the wire. My Exhibit A would be his Dad, whose lack of the vision thing caused him to goof up by finishing his war too early. Had he not, maybe the White House would have sheltered Poppy, Dubya, and Jeb in succession! In any case, the lack of a single example of an incumbent being voted out during wartime is a powerful statistic. Note that the enormous cost of the war is not likely figuring into Bush’s judgment over whether his bet has paid off. It’s not his own money, after all, and it also isn’t money that’s coming out of the pockets of the people who voted for him, since posterity is picking up the cost of this off-the-books-when-the-budget-is-already-in-deficit war. But aside from the people in the Bush Administration whose paychecks depended on him being reelected, how good a bet was Iraq for the rest of us? Let’s be generous and say we get lucky with nation building. That would mean that we end up with an Islamic democracy in Iraq as opposed to perpetual civil war or an Iranian-style Islamic dictatorship. That’s being very generous, of course, since I happen to believe that the most likely outcome will be the same kind of multi-sectarian civil war that occurred in Yugoslavia with the collapse of the communist dictatorship there. (Remember Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo?) But let’s give the Bushies the benefit of the doubt and say that they start getting much better results with what the Army calls Civil Affairs than they have been to date. Let’s say they end up with the government of their dreams. It would show the Bush bet to be a winner, right? Well, uh, no actually. What matters is not whether a reasonably democratic government ends up in place, but whether it stays in place. There’s actually a good amount of data out there on the likelihood of emerging democracies to stay democracies. It’s worth looking at, because if an emerging Iraqi democracy gets replaced by dictatorship, we’re back to square one (or worse) with nothing to show for it but a tapped out Army and extra interest payments on hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars. Tomorrow let’s look at the track record (a term that originated, appropriately, in horse racing) of the political outcomes on which Bush’s big Iraqi bet was placed.