Saturday 6 February 2010

Karl Popper and the Iraq War

"It is difficult enough to be critical of our own mistakes, but it must be nearly impossible for us to persist in a critical attitude towards those of our actions which involve the lives of many men. To put it differently, it is very hard to learn from very big mistakes."

When I read this quote, from Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, I immediately thought of Tony Blair's recent appearance before the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war, where he said he had no regrets for leading Britain into the war in Iraq. Of course Bush's lack of regret - on any issue, let alone ordering the invasion of Iraq - is infamous. Even John Kerry, having caved to political pressure to support the war in 2003, couldn't bring himself in 2004 to say he had made a mistake in voting to authorize military action.

Interestingly, the quote comes from a discussion of social engineering in which Popper mentions, as an example, "the question of how to export democracy to the Middle East." Popper was not opposed to social engineering per se. He believed in "piecemeal social engineering," which he contrasted with Utopianism: the violent remaking of entire societies in one big push. Utopianism, Popper argued, is based on an unscientific attitude. Utopians eschew self-criticism, believing their ideology gives them all the answers. And when their plans go disastrously wrong, they don't learn from their mistakes - they lash out at their critics.

The case of regime change in Iraq, and its protagonists' continued refusal to learn from their catastrophic mistake, is a painful testament to Popper's observation. At the inquiry, Blair went so far as to say that his policy on Iraq should now be applied to Iran. But if the politicians who precipitated the Iraq war are unrepentant, it is heartening that the lessons of that fiasco have not been lost on their citizens. (I believe the British public was ahead of the curve in rejecting the war, but Americans eventually came around too. More than half believed the war was a mistake by June 2004.) Bush and Blair may refuse to criticize themselves, but they hardly escaped criticism from others. And the criticism has had political consequences, such as the Republican loss of Congress and the White House between 2006 and 2008. That silver lining underscores another of Popper's themes: that the primary virtue of liberal societies is their openness to critical debate, and thus to self-correction.

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