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Irrational escalation of commitment

April 22, 2007 on 9:44 pm | In Uncategorized |

American foreign policy seems to have succumbed to a tendency of the human race that has often been remarked, namely the inclination, when a certain course of action fails, to keep doing the same thing with redoubled effort.

Examples of this tendency are legion. In warfare it was evident in the behaviour of Union generals in the American Civil War. They would send a wave of infantry in a frontal charge against concealed Rebs, watch them get mown down, and send up another lot in orderly parade ground fashion. When there were no more troops left to despatch they’d go ask president Abe for some more. They did this for four years until the South had run out of food and ammo, whereupon they declared victory.

Generals on both sides in WW1 adopted roughly the same approach. First, launch a sustained artillery bombardment. Next, send thousands of infantry over the top to get machine-gunned while they try to scramble through barbed wire. After a day or two, dig new trenches half a kilometre in front of the old ones. Vow that next time you’ll increase the bombardment by 50% and send at least twice as many infantry get slaughtered.

When John Monash won a few battles in 1918 by attacking without a preliminary artillery bombardment, supported by these new-fangled tanks, it put a lot of noses right out of joint. That wasn’t how to fight a war, dammit.

Irrational escalation of commitment, as it’s called, is a reflexive pattern of behaviour that boils down to this: when something demonstrably doesn’t work, do more of it. For some reason, human beings are very prone to it. Like the parent who belts a kid for crying. The kid cries even more, so the belting gets cranked up a notch. Nobody’s happy. The parent isn’t getting the desired result. But they keep doing it anyway.

You see irrational escalation of commitment in business all the time. Some car companies are good at it. In order to boost flagging sales they make their cars cheaper, either by adding lots of free features, or with cash back offers, or just by cutting the sticker price. Result? Customers who paid full price are pissed off, resale values drop so the car becomes less competitive in the market, and the overall brand reputation is devalued. Hardly any of these price campaigns have improved a car company’s competitive position in the medium to long run. Yet what do they do the next time sales flag? Yep, good guess … cut the price again, only more this time.

So what’s this got to do with the yanks’ foreign policy? Well a few recent straws in the wind demonstrate how they continue to escalate their irrational commitment to a failed policy of regime change. This is the policy: ‘When you see a regime that you don’t like, use dirty tricks to cause the regime’s downfall’. The US has been doing it since forever, with a pretty much perfect record of disastrous results. For example, 100 years of interfering in the internal affairs of South American countries has left the USA with near neighbours who are the only hard left socialist nations surviving on the planet. And of course the success of attempts to dictate regimes in the Middle East is legendary. But does this track record deter the decision-makers in Washington? Not a bit of it. They just keep right on irrationally escalating.

Case in point: Ethiopia. North Korea is part of the Axis of Evil, right? Except, apparently, when it wants to break UN sanctions and sell arms to Ethiopia, in which case the USA is happy to turn a blind eye. Because Ethiopia is fighting the damned Islamo-fascists so let’s not get technical about a few dodgy arms sales. The result is to cause further damage to whatever moral credibility the USA has left in the world and reinforce the belief that its guiding ethical principle is called ‘Expediency’. But no matter! It’s what they’ve always done so do it again, only more so this time!

Case in point: Pakistan. The USA’s record in making terrorist groups its proxies in regime change campaigns is a story of unremitting stupidity and blinkered short-term thinking. Support for Al Qaeda against the Russians in Afghanistan is only the most spectacular example; you can also think back to the way the CIA helped Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam before the lovers’ tiff. Well actually if you wanted to be scholarly you could go back to the days when American Indians were armed and trained to fight the British in the 18^th century. Who would of thought they’d turn round and fight the good white guys later?

Heedless of history the yanks are now supporting terrorist operations from Pakistan into Iran. Yeah well that Iranian regime’s gotta go, eh. No the terrorists won’t turn round and cause problems in a few years’ time, no way. This time the CIA knows what it’s doing, trust me.

Case in point: Iran. Sticks and stones may break my bones … but it doesn’t work that way in practice. Words are powerful things. The Bushistas have created the Monster in the Closet with their rhetoric about Iran, just like they did with China and Russia and Cuba and *giggles* Panama and Grenada. Once you convince enough people that the Monster is real and about to come out and eat you up, you have to do something about it. Especially if you have up to three naval carrier battle groups sailing up and down just busting to show the goddam army how to fight a war. So you keep accusing a country of supporting terrorism and sending weapons to kill your soldiers and having spies in Iraq and next thing you know you’re in a corner … if you don’t do something to kill this Monster you’ve created out of thin air you look like a girlie man. So it’s shock and awe time!

Why do people keep falling for irrational escalation of commitment syndrome? Well they’re like the punters who’ve just put the week’s wages into a poker machine … they’ve invested a lot of time and resources and they’re buggered if they’ll admit it was a silly thing to do. Economists would babble about sunk costs. Psychologists might use the technical term ‘pig-headed’. What it boils down to is that people have a mental model of how the world ought to work … a kind of invisible user’s manual that tells them what to do in any given situation … and lots of folk don’t seem able to admit that their version doesn’t work very well. They’re convinced that if they just give it one more try but this time make sure we don’t do what we did to screw up last time … they’ll be rewarded with a stunning success.

So expect to see the USA keep trying to bring down the regime in Iran, even if it leads to all-out war. After all, they’ve spent a lot of years practising regime change in the Middle East … you can’t expect them to just abandon all that expertise and try something new can you?