Logic isn’t flip-flopping

IT’S BEEN TRUE for a while that the American public has a better idea of what Republicans stand for than what Democrats stand for. Conservatives say this is because they have won the war of ideas. I say it’s because Republicans have reduced their ideas to a few simplistic bromides that they repeat endlessly and never subject to evidence or reexamination.

Case in point: the debate over Iraq.

I supported the war, and while in retrospect I think it was a mistake, I believe it would be another mistake to withdraw our troops and abandon the country to chaos. Plenty of leading Democratic politicians feel the same way. Other Democrats think the war was a mistake and want to withdraw. It’s an agonizing debate, and neither side can be completely certain that it’s right.

Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to have little problem with certitude. They think the war was right, remains right, and any view to the contrary is nothing more than spinelessness and incoherence.

Think I’m exaggerating? Take my fellow Times columnist, Max Boot. He’s one of the most respected conservative foreign policy analysts, so it’s not like I’m picking on some lightweight. In this space Wednesday, Boot called Democrats who think the invasion was a mistake “flip-floppers.” They fall into two categories: “[Bill] Clinton characteristically wants to have it both ways. He says the invasion was a ‘big mistake’ but that we shouldn’t pull out now because ‘there’s a lot of evidence it can still work.’ (You mean, Mr. President, that we should continue sacrificing soldiers for a mistake?) The others are more consistent. Because they now think the war is wrong, they favor a withdrawal, the only question being whether we should pull out sooner (Murtha) or slightly later (Kerry).”

Where to begin? Let’s start with this flip-flopping business. It’s a flip-flop to change your mind when the basis for the decision hasn’t changed. But in the case of Iraq, the basis for the decision has changed. Before the war, most Iraq hawks based their support for war on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Now that we know this was untrue, admitting we made a mistake is the only consistent position. The flip-floppers are the ones who supported the war to halt Hussein’s WMD and then changed their rationale mid-course.

Then there’s this notion that it’s somehow inconsistent to support the war effort after you’ve conceded the invasion was a mistake. Here conservatives are falling for what economists call the “sunk costs fallacy.”

What this means is that, once you’ve paid the price for something, you can’t let the cost bind your decision. Suppose for your vacation you reserved a few nights at a hotel. But you arrive to find it’s raining nonstop, and decide you’d have more fun staying at home. It would be foolish to stay merely because you had already paid for the room. The money is gone, and you should decide based on what’s best going forward.

Bush employs this fallacy all the time. “We’ve had, you know, some of the finest Americans die in Iraq,” he said last week. “And one thing we’re not going to do is let them die in vain.” The real question is whether we can make the situation in Iraq better going forward, and at what cost. The price we’ve paid is tragic but not germane to the argument.

The flip side of the sunk cost fallacy is that you shouldn’t change course just because you initially made a mistake. Take that vacation example. Suppose that instead of driving you flew, and changing your tickets to return early would cost a lot of money. In that case it might make sense to stay, despite the rain. The trip was a bad idea, but leaving early would be worse. (I assume that if you tried this reasoning in a GOP family, you’d be told, “First you wanted to go on vacation, now you’re saying it was a mistake, and yet you want to stay anyway. Flip-flopper!”) If failing to grasp simple logical concepts is called “winning the war of ideas,” then I guess I’d rather be on the losing side.