Interesting comparison to invading germany after Hitler took the Rhineland as a justification to preemptive war.

Using that logic if Canada and Mexico were to attack America in a preemptive war because Bush invaded Iraq without cause and that they believed America was on a path to world domination - would that be justified?

A nitpick. The first word of the title is either mispelled or misused.

The content is high class and thought provoking. Thanks.

Society constructs certain rules, the widespread compliance with which allows for a reduction in various costs. The rule of honesty, for instance, might decrease contracting and contract enforcement costs; the rule against unprovoked violence allows people to invest less in personal protection and thus reduces the costs of transacting day-to-day business that involves walking on the streets.

The rule against attacking a nation unless attacked introduces a degree of certainty into international interactions that presumably allows everyone to reduce the cost of self defense. Once this implicit international consensus prohibiting preemptive war is broken, the costs of defense for all nations will likely rise. It is the discounted value of these future defense expenditures that Judge Posner appears to omit from his cost-benefit example. It seems that at least a plausible case can be made that this will not be a negligible term in the cost-benefit balance that might make the threshold at which preemptive action is justified (at least the first time) extraordinarily high.

Dear Justice Posner,
I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.
Sincerely,
Charles

Dear Judge (and hopefully one day Justice) Posner,



I'm a 2L as well (at Georgia) and have had a deep admiration for your judicial opinions, which it seems, have graced almost all of my casebooks so far.




I will comment only that I think that both 1) your Rhineland example is a perfect case of when preemptive war is optimal and 2) the costs far outweigh the benefits of our present venture in Iraq. I would have said so (and did) even from an ex ante perspective. It seems to me that, even where we benefit from attacking Iraq in insolation (a notion I might also dispute) the kick-to-the-hornet's-nest effect this will have on the Arab world will only bring enormous costs to the nation in years to come.




Respectfully,
Tanner

Your analysis is surprisingly one-sided--it seems not to include any of the costs of preventive war.

Consider, for example, the costs of perceived illegitimacy, which tends to follow preventive strikes. The more distant a threat, the more illegitimate the war will appear in the eyes of (a) potential allies and (b) the citizens of the country one invades. In other words, the more distant the threat, the higher the cost of the war.

And, of course, perceived illegitimacy doesn't stop with the war itself. Post-Iraq, the US is seen as less credible and less moral by millions of people, some of whom may be in a position to help us kill terrorists.

There are other costs; why not address them?

I respectfully disagree that the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland illustrates the benefits of your model. The British did not attack Germany in response to the reoccupation of the Rhineland because they underestimated the threat posed by Germany. Simply put, the British believed that Hitler would stop at the German border. The French were immobilized by their internal politics, and were loath to fight without British aid. In the real world then, the anticipated costs of attacking Germany were likely lower than the anticipated benefits of such an action. Clearly the French and British governments should have reacted more forcefully to Germany's treaty violations up to and including the reoccupation of the Rhineland. However, it does not seem likely that an economic analysis would have supported invasion of Germany at that point in time.

This preventative war thing is pretty difficult. Alternative histories from 1936 are possible - and the assumption that Hitler would have been overthrown is too quick by far. (We were sure Hussein would be overthrown after Gulf War I.)

But how is this for an alternative history.

Hitler manages to portray himself as a victim. Invasion falls back to hard lines (there is no overwhelming Allied build up then and Hitler had not expended himself in Stalingrad.)

As a result Hitler never looks East until the West is thoroughly beaten. Japan never joins the war - and America thus also sits on the sidelines for way too long.

Hitler then controls Western Europe including Britain but his heart is set on making the German minorities of the East German majorities. The war ends in a cataclysmic struggle between fascism and stalinism.

You are assuming in your post that free market liberalism had wide enough support in countries like France in 1936 to make all that possible. It did not.

Being a collaborator had romantic appeal for some French in 1940. Because free market liberalism has been such a success after WW2 we should not assume that it had a natural following of scale before WW2. We should also not assume then that free market liberalism would win a war in which it could be perceived to be the aggressor.

JH

The probabilty of an attack is only certain, when the attack has occured. If that is the case, then the benefits of a preventative war, is only evident after the fact.

The answer I get from this is that we don't know with any certaintity that premptive strikes have benefits. The benefit is only seen, after the fact. Those who want to divert back to "well, what would happen if we didn't go after Hitler," should play craps in Vegas for a few hours, and see how fast their money evaporates.

Preemptive war like gambling at the craps table is just a bad way of making money. Stick with selling stereos.

One potential difficulty I see with using a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether to engage in a preventive war is that any such analysis seems (at least as a practical matter) to ignore or otherwise be biased against information contained in the other side's revealed "commodification" preferences. By waiting at least for the other side's strike to become "imminent" we gain valuable information about their LACK of willingness to fight that would not otherwise available. Rapidly changing circumstances and the imperfect lines of communication between two parties that hate each other would seem to make such information even more valuable. Although analytically we may be able to account for that in the CBA, as a practical (perhaps even pragmatic) matter I'm not so sure we can do so accurately.

Of course, if the other side has already revealed its preferences, for example, by attacking another state, then we can estimate its commodification preferences far more reliably. Germany's invasion of the Rheinland, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, may be examples. But was our most recent invasion of Iraq?

What do you mean by "probability" in this context? Are you trying to say that if the Nazis were to occupy the Rhineland again and again, then as the number of Rhineland-occupations tended toward infinity, then the proportion of them which resulted in war in Europe would tend toward fifty per cent? Presumably not, because that's pretty plainly incoherent.

So I'm presuming that this is a Bayesian concept of "probability as degree of belief". Which rather points up the weakness in this doctrine of pre-emptive attack; unless the attack is imminent, then what you are talking about is the subjective assessment of a policy-maker, with no real evidence to back it up. Since what a policymaker believes is most clearly influenced by what he wants to believe, then what you have here is a doctrine of wars of aggression, with its indecency covered up by a fig-leaf of pre-emption.

What other large and costly government projects would you suggest that this doctrine could be applied to? For example, if President Bush were tomorrow to wake up and decide that the USA needed a National Health Service, massive cash reparations to the descendants of slaves and to take the commanding heights of the economy into public ownership, would you regard it as sufficient reason for doing so that he had subjectively assessed the probability-weighted payoffs from doing so as positive?

The problem with your arguement is that there is no set standard as to determining if a preventitive war will in fact be preventitive of anything and if it the benefits of the war will outweigh the costs. How do you decide which countries to attack and at what point? Which countries pose a threat?

As for Iraq, you must remember that the White House withheld information about North Korea's nuclear program until after a congressional vote deciding our plan of action has taken place. If we were to take your Rhineland example into account we should also admit that both North Korea and Iran pose a much greater threat to the world than Iraq ever did. That is clear. Yet no preventitive measures are being taken now. The worst the current administration has to offer is sanctions. In fact, because of the "preventitive war" in Iraq the Bush administration can not wage a preventitive war in Iran or North Korea. International relations aside, the mere logistics of such an event would stretch our armed forces to a breaking point and would have major negative effects on the economy.

A preventitive war must be planned in good faith and the planning must deal with immediate changes in overall intelligence. Once news of the North Korean nuclear program broke out the preventitive war for Iraq should have been put on hold. A decision should have been made as to who posed a bigger threat. Intelligence concerning WMDs in Iraq was known to be shaky even then where as North Korea outright admitted to possessing weapons of mass destruction.

What you have to understand is that things like "preventitive war" and "preemptive strike" are all terms used to excuse whatever the current policy is. One should never take any such statement at face value. Take the trade embargo with Cuba, for example. The official explanation is that the embargo is still in place to punish a repressive Communist regime. Yet China remains our biggest trading partner and it is the biggest Communist state in the world.

One should never try to rationalize any action without first analyzing whatever data is at hand.

Your simple numerical example, which compares the expected costs of waiting to be attacked, military build up, and preventive war, leaves out one important alternative: waiting to collect more information about the costs and probabilities. Waiting to collect information may turn into waiting to be attacked if your standards for sufficient information are too high, but it is a distinct alternative, and an attractive short-term strategy, in situations where:

1. The threat of imminent attack is low,
2. There is a decent chance of gathering enough information to change which of the other alternatives you consider to be least costly, and
3. The costs of the other alternatives are not likely to increase significantly while you are taking time to gather information.

Given that Iraq was largely incapacitated by various restrictions and that weapons inspectors were in the country learning about its capabilities, Iraq in March 2003 seems to be a strong candidate for meeting these three criteria. Thus, continued inspections, rather than preventive war, would have been the cost-justified course of action.

(technical note: there seem to be problems with posting after previewing)

As dsquared noted above, talking about probabilities in the context of preventive war is a bit misleading. If the decision to go to war was a mechanical, predictable, well-understood process, we could perhaps assign it an a priori probability and work the expected costs and benefits from there. In this case cost-benefit accounting is both reasonable and efficient.

Take the drunk driver. We understand the consequences of impairment relatively well, so we can assign an expected cost to driving under the influence. In many cases the cost justifies a legal incentive not to drink and drive.

But how about what Knight once called uncertainty, as opposed to quantifiable risk? When we talk about unique, one-time events, we cannot assign a definite probability to them. Activity related to them is entrepreneurial in the Austrian sense, and quite possibly beyond cost-benefit accounting. This is especially relevant when the outcomes depend on people's decisions, as opposed to a mechanical process of one kind or another.

Take the person sitting next to the driver. Suppose she's drunk. Should this be criminal on the grounds that a drunk person's advice might lead to a crash? I'd say no, because ultimately the driver is the one responsible for the safety of the passengers, and there is no clear causal relationship between what the passengers say and what the driver does. For the most part the law agrees -- we regulate the conduct of the proximal actor, because he's the one making the final decision, and we cannot reasonably treat him as an automaton which can be made to operate according a nice statistical description. (OTOH incitement offences provide a notable exception to the reasoning. But should they?)

I think this is generally speaking why there are no thought crimes, but instead punishment only follows definite actions, or at least definite signalling (e.g. declaring war, breaking into a house or building a bomb). We modify people's incentives so that rational judgement of costs and benefits will make crime unprofitable but do not try to touch the mechanisms leading to the final judgment. The same then goes for preventive war.

Of course war is hazier in that it's a collective phenomenon. It is difficult to assign guilt and to put the proper disincentives in place when considerably more than one person participates in a crime. War is also messy in that there's a grave imbalance of cost between building something and waging war on it, and also between causing indiscriminate destruction and punishing only those responsible. Terrorism is even tougher because individual disincentives do not work -- how do you punish a suicide bomber?

But does this mean the basic reasoning is incorrect? Not likely. All it does is raise the potential cost of war. If it's true that the a priori probability of war cannot be reliably estimated, the only reliable disincentive we can give is to commit to responding in kind. Which is probably why mutually assured destruction worked -- even if we didn't know the expected cost, we indirectly knew that going to war would not be profitable.

Given that no theory of preventive war is acceptable, and given that opponents of preventive war will not accept anything short of absolute certainty (dead people and smoking gun in hand of the accused), then the next logical question that I can think of is: how high should costs be allowed to reach before reacting? Of course, both assumptions could be relaxed, but let's run with this ....

Ex: Since it is accepted that Saddam was paying families of suicide killers in Israel, would Israel have been justified in nuking Saddam?

Ex2: Since Chris Hitchens has documented a plethora of interesting connections between Saddam and terrorists including al Qaida, how long should those conditions have been allowed to continue before the probability of there being any kind of link between Saddam and murder of American civilians could be admitted to be 1?

In other words, did we actually have to wait for more people to die after the 1st WTC bombing and subsequent flight of the perp to Iraq? How many? Some people would actually respond, in effect, infinity, since they reject military responses altogether. I think that if you categorically reject preemptive war, then it is incumbent on you to define the conditions that must be met before you react. This requires an admission that you are willing to let people die (to incur costs) before you do so. If you still think that no action is tolerable, doesn't that suggest that you are willing to bankrupt yourself to avoid the cost of war?

Paul Eremenko comments above that the abrogation of the rule against attacks unless one has been attacked or the threat is "imminent" will raise costs of self-defense for all, and is not taken into account in Judge Posner's model. This is perhaps true as far as it goes, but Mr. Eremenko does not seem to notice that on the same logic, the existence of rogue state or related non-state actors who would attack without warning similarly introduces uncertainty and raises costs. Although estimates of such costs, especially in discussions such as this, are always heuristic and imprecise, I suspect the financial and psychological costs of living with a terrorist threat at least equal and perhaps exceed (at least for the state making the cost-benefit analysis whether to engage in preventive war) any increased uncertainy and cost resulting from the preventive attack. After, a nation state actor is duty bound to take into account the costs and benefits to its society first of all and to give them primacy over the potential costs and benefits to others (except of course as they affect its own costs and benefits over time).

The other aspect of the cost benefit critiques here, as well as the more unsophisticated uses of cost benefit analysis, which I find problematic is a sense that there is a neat continuum upon which decisions can be made. (The flaw with much criticism of elementary economic theory as well) Of course, in the real world, cost-benefit functions, like demand functions, are almost certainly not convex, continuous and twice-differentialbe. There are surely discontinuities, and I take the possiblity of a major terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction as a clear example of a catastrophic event that would represent (at least) a point discontinuity. Such discontinuities make for (and perhaps account for historically) the great difficulty in assessing after the fact the intuitive cost benefit analyses performed by decision makers with not only imperfect, but disaterously wrong information.

Since nation states, however, are in the business of making decisions under uncertainty, it seems to me we simply have to get the "best" information we can reasonably obtain and make our analysis on the basis of it. Will the decision makers sometimes get it wrong? Surely. But in dealing catastrophic events, our tolerance for the risk of being wrong (i.e. being willing to act with less certainty) surely increases as the expected costs remain high even when the probability of their occurence decreases. Is this not elementary?

[It's been too long since I read Becker and Posner's major works and was current on the literature to know if anyone has modeled this stuff as convincingly as the guys in the '70s like Werner Hildenbrand who applied measure theory to demand and equilibrium theory -- can anyone point me to the relevant literature, preferably in English as I am no longer fluent in higher mathematics?]

You dance around the question I think everybody has in mind here: should we have invaded Iraq? You almost answer it: as our information becomes sparser, the justification for war, in expectation, becomes weaker. Without good information aggregation methods, your analysis says that we can't justify a war.

It only becomes more difficult with terrorism, which is a catostrophic event. By `catastrophic', I do not mean what Gary seems to mean (causing much damage), but what the statisticians mean: you can't predict it with any reliability. There is no easy bell curve. We've been studying earthquakes for a century or two now and still don't have but the inkling of a clue as to when major earthquakes will occur; we've been seriously studying terrorism for at most a decade or two, and we have absolutely no statistical methods that begin to allow us to aggregate information into a reliable prediction of whether a terrorist act would occur.

BK -

I disagree that my analysis suggests the Iraq war was unjustified because of our failures in creating effective ("good enough?") information aggregation methods. That would be true only if one assumed that we can accurately assess the risk that our information is bad. While I agree that issue represents a systemic issue, I do not believe we have the luxury of defering decisions in media res until we have a high degree of confidence (in the theoretical sense you are speaking) in the quality of our information aggregation. After all, inaction itself, even for the (generally admirable) purpose of improving information for decision makers, represents a decision. I do not share what I take to be your bias (again in the statistical sense) in favor of inaction.

Your point about the use of catastrophic should be well taken. Although only having the been the student of students of Professor Becker, I don't think it would be a stretch to believe he was using the word in both the ordinary language meaning and the statistical sense -- surely it is possible for an event to be both.

There is a tension in pieces such as these by Judge Posner and Professor Becker: they are writing indirectly about the real world, more or less in real time, using the analysis and language of economics that is inherently abstract. The interesting questions are not so much whether the abstraction is entirely correct (which no abstraction can be), but whether the abstraction is useful. At this point, I think the abstraction is useful for thinking about the problem, but I am not sure the analysis is yet sufficiently worked out to be applied convincingly to particular cases --- althougth that is an important aspect of testing their hypotheses.

I'm surprised, given the criticism generally of the analogy of the Anglo-French decision to militarily oppose Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland (which every historian knows scared the Bejesus of the the German military, who sent the two battalions of troops in without ammunition and orders to turn tail at the slightest resistance from the Entente powers), no one has mentioned the effect of the Iraq intervention on Lybia's Col. Khadaffi. Does anyone seriously believe that Khadaffi would have renounced weapons of mass destruction and cooperated with us were it not for a sincere desire on his part to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein?

Judge Poser begins this entire discussion by sliding this at us:

Indeed, the essence of self-defense is striking the first blow against your assailant.

What?

How about: "the essence of self-defense is defending, deflecting, or otherwise avoiding, etc. the assailant's first blow."

Its nice for you to set up a continuium from pre-emptive to preventitive to self-defense, but you can't take the english language seriously and suggest that striking out first offensively is the essence of self defense.

Methinks you have been watching and listening to sports casters who cast about pithy aphorisms like "the best defense is a good offense."

But even these folks realize that they emphatically are not literally talking about defense.

I am 100% certain that you cannot be 100% certain that someone will attack you.

What you describe the "essence of" is preventive force. But it is most certainly offensive.

Remember that World War I was a preventive war, and that illustrates both why the Britain and France were unwilling to intervene in the Rhineland, as well as the reason why there should be overwhelming and reliable evidence before resorting to war.

In the case of WWI, the costs were vastly underestimated, while the benefits were overestimated. (Sound familiar?) So, a war that was intended to be short, cheap and definitive became one of the greatest man-made disasters of world history, with previously unimaginable costs in both money and human life. Moreover, the final outcome of the war was so inconclusive that yet another war was fought 20 years later, on roughly the same territory with roughly the same sides.

The tragedy of WWI was foremost in the minds of planners leading up to WWII, and for good reason. More than anything else, they wanted to avoid another catastrophe like WWI. This didn't blind them to the Nazi danger, but it did cause them to adjust their estimates of the costs (too high) and benefits (too low) of war with Nazi Germany. Eventually, as more information became available, and as the intentions of the Nazis became more evident, France and Britain decided to go to war. Of course, WWII caused massive destruction, but is considered to have been worth it, because of the costs, estimated retrospectively, of losing to the Nazis.

Ultimately, the greatest danger of going to war is the difficulty of correctly estimating the costs. This is an issue that, I think, is papered over too quickly in commentary here. It is also the reason why prudence dictates that war be considered as a last resort -- not because of its unique or intrinsic evil, but because it is a Pandora's box. Once it is opened, it is almost impossible to predict what will emerge.

In particular, the Bush administration's arguments for going to war with Saddam Hussein were almost entirely mistakes or lies. Even if one believes it permissible to mislead the public into supporting war against Saddam, it is vital to estimate, correctly and with caution and intelligence, the costs of that war. By now, though, it's absolutely clear that the Bush administration bungled that, too.

These issues -- of estimating costs, of intelligence and of prudence -- also hold of preventing terrorism, as well as state-to-state violence. However, the tool of war, being between states, is mostly useless against terrorist groups. Although the history of terrorism is shorter than the history of war, we already have good and bad examples of executing campaigns against terrorist groups. The Bush administration, however, seems to be unaware of these examples; they're also deliberately obscuring the real distinction between terrorist groups and nationalist insurgencies. Even if this makes good PR, it is a mistake, insofar as they seem to believe their PR.

In any case, and as a final thought, I wonder about the propriety of erasing the line between defensive and preventive war. Perhaps we should maintain it -- if only to maintain the line between preventive war and offensive war. After all, any arguments made in favor of preventive war may be applied to support offensive war as well, and the differences between them may be, at least partially, in the eyes of the beholder. I wonder how many people outside the US believe the war in Iraq was offensive, rather than preventive.

Just out of curiousity, Judge Poser tosses out .5 as a nice "round" number of probability for the likelihood of future attack.

I'm curious to know what folks think that actual "probability" was in the case of Iraq and why.

I too would like to see more writing on how to account for the costs of preventive war. The costs include, as mentioned above, the loss of perceived legitimacy. There is also a giant opportunity cost associated with going in pre-emptively. Now the US is stuck in Iraq, and has much less leverage, both diplomatic and military, against Iran and North Korea as a result of the Iraq war.

There is also the problem that the attacked region and country will view the preventive attack as illegitimate, leading to the creation of more terrorists or other groups that could attack the US in the future.

Your analysis does not seem to address the myriad, multiplying costs of preventive war as it is currently being played out.

Doesn't war have lots of external costs? Costs which the concept of imminence is, in essence, trying to roughly include into the calculation?

Or is the latest dead brown baby in a fallujah better considered a transaction cost, to be ignored?

First, as I didn't do so in the comments of the first official post, congratulations on the new blog. As an avid consumer of blogs, I have to say I'm excited about this one.

I would add to Judge Posner's comments that the benefit of attaining certainty is not to be underestimated. The probability of direct or indirect (e.g. funding or supplying terrorists) attack is something to contemplate, to be sure, but I can't shake the notion that this variable is an aggregation of:

A) What is the probability that the capability to harm us is present, and

B) What is the probability that the willingness to harm us is present?

What do we do when faced with an entity that we know has the willingness to harm us, but there is uncertainty about the capability? Eliminating the uncertainty in this case is a very large benefit of putting boots on the ground to find out.

Certainly better intelligence can help us make informed estimates of these two probabilities. I fear that many people have exaggerated notions about what intelligence is capable of, however. When dealing with an entrenched despot with a decades old internal security apparatus and a lot of geographical area in which to hide surprises, there is only so much we will know.

I am left with the image of the police officer who challenges a suspect to put his hands in the air. The suspect refuses and keeps his hands in his pockets. At some point, the impasse can be reasonably resolved by aggression.

To compare the erroneous (but almost universally so) cost-benefit analyses (intuitively) made by the Powers in July and August 1914 with Iraq is, in my view mistaken.

However, I think it's not unfair to suggest that an aversion to a repeat of World War I was on the minds of the British and French governments in 1936, especially in an era when the oxford Union debated and passed (if I recal correctly) a resolution to the effect one would under no circumstances be willing to fight for King and country. And a fear of unwilling troops was not entirely unwarranted, especially in light of the French Army mutiny of 1917 and its later performance in 1940. It is useful to consider the different performances of the French and British in the Second World War in light of their histories: While WWI (especially if you consider the whole Home Rule fandango as a piece with it) represented a huge upheaval in British society, it was Englands first truly major war since the defeat of Napoleon, also an English victory. France had suffered a major defeat in 1814, and again in 1870, each of which convulsed French society from bottom to top. Although the British were war weary after WWI, they were not played out, they had the national reserves of will and determination upon which they drew in 1940, they had not lost a major war since the 18th century. The French, by contrast, had nothing left, especially if one considers revanche to have been the great unifying French idea after 1871 Having achieved it at pyrrhic cost in 1919, there was simply no idea (nearly) all Frenchmen could agree was worth fighting for.

There is a case to be made that WWI was a preventive war (the whole set of arguments about the various powers calculations of when it was to their individual advantage to fight a European war some thought inevitable), I have never found that line of reasoning quite persuasive.

More likely, I would argue the series miscalulations which led to the outbreak of WWI bespeak more of a combination of failures to understand how various Powers would react to threats and the rigidity of the Powers' mobilization plans. Especially daunting was the inabilty to mobilize partially, especially on the part of the less modern Powers Austria and Russia. But we could spend entire careers debating the Kriegsschuldfrage....

A cost-benefit argument for preventive war is quite convenient when you can pick and choose which costs you think are worth discussing. As some of the comments above have mentioned, you do this discussion a disservice by not discussing other potential costs of preventive war, such as appearance of illegitimacy to other nations, the inability to sufficiently defend the decision to one's people, the loss of civilian or other life on either side, etc.

Now, if your post was meant to be an introduction to utility theory, then you hindered your intent by clouding a theoretical discussion with a political angle. It works nicely for you because if anyone criticizes your post, you can claim that they're criticizing the underlying theory, not the conclusion. But your post greatly simplifies any sort of analysis needed to justify preventive war (which I'm not claiming to be unjustifiable) by implying that the most important costs can be enumerated and computed with sufficient reliability.

For a more thorough and rigorous discussion of these matters, check out William T. Vollmann's 7 volume treatise on when violence may or may not justified, Rising Up and Rising Down. You'll find a careful analysis on the kinds of costs one can incur by the application or witholding of violence. For example, your post, Judge Posner, implies by omission that costs can be tallied linearly. But things are not that simple when considering civilian life. Is it justified killing 100 of our enemy's civilians to save 10 of ours? What about 1000 for 100? Or 100,000 for 1000? Or 1,000,000 for 100,000? Or 1,000,000 for 100? You can't just plug these numbers into your basic utility theory equations.

The concept of preemptive war based on a cost/benefit model is rather suicidal. Since that same model will be used against those willing to engage in preemptive war.

The learned scholar Prof. Becker of the University of Chicago wrote the following about those involved in these suicidal attacks:

The only really effective approach is to stop them before they engage in their attacks. This is accomplished by tracking them down and imprisoning or killing them based on evidence that they intend to engage in suicidal attacks. Those planning such acts can also be punished on the basis of intent.

So how do you prevent these kind of escalations where one professor professes his intend to kill the other? And they are even supposed to be collegues and friends, running a blog together!

Wow, that was underwhelming. I could've read this on Instapundit. All of this analysis is based on a one-time game. But intervention itself creates conditions for future, subsequent "blowback."

Also, the analysis of 1936 Rhineland is really really really weak. We can play hypotheticals all day and make the argument that if the French hadn't demanded exorbinant reparations in 1918, the German right wouldn't have used that

Or go back even further and say that if the U.S. had not intervened in 1917, Europe would have had to fight to a negotiated peace, which would've kept the balance of power more-or-less where it should've been. The U.S. intervention, and then (sensible) extraction in the 1920s, meant that the allies won the war, but couldn't win the peace.

One other factor that plays into this discussion is that war is almost never undertaken except after a major attack -- an event that the republic can accept as justification or pretext to do the job.



Names like 911, Pearl Harbor, Lusitania and the Gulf of Tonkin have all served that purpose. In the 1990's the US was attacked several times where the awfulness of the attack didn't reach the level that would allow any president to move into Afghanistan. Only after 3,000 people were killed on our shores could it happen.



The preventative war in Iraq could only be done with public approval after 911, even though the connection remains tentative. Democracies can only wage war when the people agree. That eliminates any possibility that Britain could have confronted Germany earlier. Even the early years after the invasion of Poland were known as the "phony war", since there was little appetite to pursue it aggressively. And we will not attack Iran or N Korea now, no matter what type of provocation until an actual attack begins.



So my feel is that this is a moot question. A democracy can't become involved in a preemptive war, except in very specific circumstances. Those circumstances include a violent shock to the nation, and a situation where there's a bad guy in the same part of the world that needs to be dealt with. Not a picture that will likely happen again.

Judge Posner, how would you factor into your equation the cost to global stability or peace generally. Isn't your formula necessarily state-centric? How do you interpret your formula in light of the goals of the UN Charter "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war"?

As with MRL, I fell off the rails when I read "Indeed, the essence of self-defense is striking the first blow against your assailant."

I hope this is a phrase that would be remedied by editing - since what is described is in fact the essence of offense.

The essence of defense is to not be harmed - striking preemptively is one of many possible tactics, but is in no way the essence of the thing.

So, let's say I am Iran, or N. Korea, and I reasonably suspect, can put a numerical probability on, an invasion by the USA? By this rationale, I am justified in a pre-emptive invasion of N. America. Of course the theoretical economics argument is sound. It is the practical employment that makes no sense whatsoever.

Had you left out the references to Iraq, one might have been able to excuse this as a simple academic exercise.

Sometimes I wonder whether otherwise apparently bright individuals lose all sense of rationality when devotion to ex-post justification of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq takes over. Absolute failure to consider the situation from any other party's perspective than their own seems to be the hallmark of such thinkers.

Essentially this same rationale has been tried to justify our flaunting of the Geneva Conventions, with very likely adverse effect on the treatment of our own personnel.

I see that I am not the first or only person to see through the blatantly political agenda here.

This is a frankly embarrassing first post for two reputedly very smart people.

Concerning the ubiquitous 'blowback' principle of foreign policy, I would note that there is an assumption inherent in the argument that the choice to not act has no consequences, or 'blowback'. I can't see how that view is justified.

In general, I don't know that historical counterfactuals are useful tools in arguments about justification. They tend to be divorced from the perspectives of the affected parties. What level of reparations in combination with the loss of the WWI would be low enough that the German right wouldn't have seized on it for leverage? Who knows?

"The concept of preemptive war based on a cost/benefit model is rather suicidal. Since that same model will be used against those willing to engage in preemptive war."

Power escalations are rational in many cases for just this reason. International relations is fundamentally about the ability to inflict harm. It therefore behooves those with liberal values to be able to inflict massive harm on those without those same values. The justification may be made both ways, to be sure, but that point is moot. The reason Saddam didn't march on Washington was not that he felt in his heart it was wrong to engage in aggressive acts, it was because he was physically incapable of doing so.

To take preemptive action off the table is to surrender enormous strategic advantages, especially when dealing with a non localized threat. Every entity that can count itself as distinct from Al Qaeda gets a free shot at us in that scenario. Suppose bin Laden has a brother that runs a fundamentalist, anti West terrorist organization distinct from Al Qaeda. Do they have to blow up a couple of buildings before we are justified in attacking them? What if Al Qaeda breaks up and reforms into smaller groups with different names? If we kill or capture all members of AQ who were directly involved in attacking the US, are we done? Other members of AQ certainly didn't attack us.

"As with MRL, I fell off the rails when I read "Indeed, the essence of self-defense is striking the first blow against your assailant.""

A wise man once said, "What is true of the kung-fu fight is not true of the gun fight." If he didn't say it, he should have.

Real people don't dodge bullets, and the first bullet can kill you.

I think that states sometimes use some sort of rational calculus to go to war. But Judge Posner's very number-crunching look at the subject seems to gloss over a key point--estimation of political and military forces on a quantitative basis is extremely difficult if not impossible.

If such estimation is impossible, then any theoretical justification based on an exposition of such principles at work is, to say the least, intellectually suspect.

Furthermore, the question as posed simply evades the moral dimension, one of the critical elements of any war analysis. I guess I might be called "old-school" in these days of realpolitik, but I think that preventative war is immoral.

More importantly, the analysis' only historical example is one where preventative war was decided against, creating a huge bias towards finding preventative war as useful. But examples of preventative war that led to ruin or did not create the benefits claimed abound in history--Stalin's backdoor move on Poland in 1939, or his invasion of Finland a year later. The biggest of these examples, Germany's invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941, is not touched on at all. Barbarossa was based entirely on a belief that eventually, Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. would come to blows and that now, rather than later would be the time to fight that war. To argue that Barbarossa was worth it is simply ridiculous.

But I think the best illustration of the absurdity of the concept is its application to every country on Earth. Imagine a "Preventative War Index" by which the Pentagon would measure the likelihood of attack from other countries and then use this matrix for decision-making. I can think of many small countries who are unlikely to do much damage to the U.S., but whose invasion would cause little grief to the U.S. Despite the fact of low risk of attack, it would still be cost-beneficial to attack these countries. However, I think that few readers would support invasions of Bhutan or Madagascar.

Presumably, the Pax Americana of the future leads our attention to a McCarthyism which threatens everything we hold dear. On the other hand, the unstated purpose of this war brings about the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century. So far, the influence of Leo Strauss belies justifications given by the world's leading apologists for the essential Western imperial interests. It appears that the pro-Sharon neoconservative cabal brings forth this calamity brought to us by a horrific onslaught, known as Shock and Awe.

Paul Eremenko,

The rule against attacking a nation unless attacked

Except there is no such rule. Posner made that point quite clearly right there in paragraph 1. Disgree with it all you want, fine--but I don't think you can fairly claim that Just War or some other widely accepted theory of international conflict supports your position.

John Hempton,

the assumption that Hitler would have been overthrown [in 1936] is too quick by far

Well, we know for a fact that officers were planning a coup if Britain and France had decided to defend Checkoslovakia. German military strength was also far weaker in '36 (this is the main flaw in your alternative history.) Because of these factors, the assumption that Hitler could have been defeated over the Rhineland has always seemed very uncontroversial to me--though of course the general's plot was not known to the Allies at the time (it hadn't even occurred yet.)

MRL,

Now that you mention it, "the essence of self-defense" statement is perhaps too condensed to be useful. How about "Without the ability to strike the first blow against your assailant if necessary, you certainly don't have self-defense, at least not as understood in the Anglo-American common law tradition"? That's certainly the mental context I supplied the first time I read his statement.

Me,

Although yours are good questions, there are some troublesome elements lurking right below the surface, most notably the apparent link you make between stability and peace. That seems pretty darned state-centric to me: quibble about the legality of deposing Sadaam, while never once accounting for all the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and others harmed by the Baathist regime because that was all internal state affairs.

This topic is impacted by change in several areas.

Technology has escalated the destructiveness that even small groups of potential enemies can wield. This skews the complex preventative war calculations that many on this forum wish for - possibly to the breaking point. Another point of instability is the breakdown of the "nation-state mystique" that was so carefully bulit at the Congress of Vienna, namely the idea that the leadership of a nation is comprised of 'special people' who are not to equivalent to some nameless infantryman. Hence, the "no asassintaions' policy [Pay close atention: not Law, but Policy, which is a stroke of a pen].

Not only is preventative war seem to be growing more needful, its proper expression may well become the immediate destruction of a ruling elite as the standard opening move: Pawn to King4 = JDAM in the Beloved Dictator's bedroom.

Since this involves far fewer casualties and a potentially more odious target set, it is likely to be much easier to "sell" to the public.

This going to be an interesting century.

Judge Posner: I wonder if you feel the exact same logic should apply in criminal trials for assault. Should the individual's weighted calculation of the costs and benefits of the risk from not preventively assaulting an enemy be considered, rather than more traditional standards for self-defense? If not, why not?

Is this what the "Burning Bed" defense is about?

As long as we are considering historical counterfactuals, let's go back to WW I and the consequences of America's intervention and the removal of the Kaiser.
US intervention delayed the exit of the Soviet Union and tipped the scales toward the Allies.
Without it, Germany probably would have won the war and the map of Europe and the balance of power would looked slightly different. Germany wouldn't have been a threat, as the GDP of the Triple Entente was 5% or so larger than that of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire combined, and wouldn't have been on the hook for reparations.
Since the Kaiser was a check on the rise of a dictator, Hitler wouldn't have come to power and so WW II probably wouldn't have happened.
Churchill accepted the logic of this.
As for Japan, if FDR had pursued a libertarian foreign policy and kept the navy within three miles of the West coast, its military wouldn't have felt compelled to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Hawaii was not a US state then, just evidence of America's nascent imperialism.

I would love to see your calculations for how much a baby's leg or thousands of dead and displaced civilians in Fallujah is worth in your cost-benefit analysis. How about a 19 year-old dead marine or his grieving mother? Or three years in Guantanamo Bay for a poor Pakistani who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and turned over to the Americans for a couple thousand dollars in bounty?

Or what is the cost I have suffered for being separated from my wife for the last six months? Not much compared to the examples above, but significant when you multiply it a couple million times.

War is a bloody, horrible, messy business. Preventative war will never survive a cost-benefit analysis because by its very definition preventative war can be avoided, and since you can't put a cost on human suffering (maybe you can, but I always found your decisions to lack any spark of human feeling), preventative war is never justified because there is always an alternative.

A few "costs" that have yet to come up in the context of the Iraq discussion posts:

1) How do you account for the costs in human capital as a consequence of Saddam's extermination of his own countrymen? He had nearly a generation to squander the productive talents of the Iraqi people; his psychopathic sons were to be the ideal product of the next iteration of the regime. Doesn't there come a point where if you do not act preemptively, you may get to a point where the entity you are reacting against will never be able to recover?

2) The cost of securing total victory vs. long-term management of the problem. For all the comments re supposed facts that we did not acurately quantify prior to invading Iraq, I see far greater danger in not recognizing, or finishing conflicts to total victory, and believe that when in doubt, err on the side of securing victory. Would N. Korea have nucelar weapons today had Truman decided to "win" that war instead of accept a divided Korea? Would we have been better off deposing Saddam back in the early 1990s? What if Israel were allowed to keep and govern the territories that it won as a result of various wars initiated against it, rather than give them back to the very ones who call for the nation's destruction? What if Reagan had unleashed the full force of the Marines in response to the attack in Lebanon?

3) The cost of requiring a "rational" strategy of the U.S. when dealing with inherently "irrational" actors on the other side. Take preventative or offensive war off the table, or place a legalese framework on the decisionmaking process, you give far more leverage to your enemy.

4) Long-term strategic costs. Regarding the current threat from Islamofacism, one of the issues that needs to be addressed is attacking both its financial and ideological underpinnings. That is primarily coming from Saudi Arabia, with secondary effects (in terms of terrorist training methods and threat of nuclear capacity) from Iran and Syria. What are the comparative costs of overturning the Saudi regime directly vs. Iraq? Is it possible to have a successful regime change in Saudi Arabia when you have Saddam Hussein sitting on the border? Ditto with any revolution-from-within in Iran or Syria, were one ever to occur? Now that the US is formally entrenched in Iraq, with a presence in Afghanistan, doesn't that change the cost-benefit analysis (to render non-war options more likely) for surrounding nations vis. providing added inducements for self-reform that would never have existed had preemptive activities been off the table?

5) The "legitimacy in the eyes of others" cost is overplayed, and I think a false cost. All of the "others" are essentially free riders. Their opinions shouldn't count for much, if anything.

For what it is worth, I personally think that the problem with pure cost-benefit analyses, absent a guiding moral/philosophical component, is that cost-benefit analyses will ultimately work to the benefit of the person most likely to abuse them. Arguably France is the nation that has been most wedded to pure economic cost-benefit analyses in its Middle-East strategy; Saddam Hussein was able to manipulate that analysis all too well (see, UN Oil-for-food scandal, for starters). Is France's geopolitical strategy really the intellectual ideal we want our nation to strive for?

"Had France and Great Britain responded to this treaty violation by invading Germany, in all likelihood Hitler would have been overthrown and World War II averted."

Nonsense.

The only thing that would have happened "in all likelihood" is that there would have been unintended, unpredicted, and unpredictable consequences.

It is just as likely, for example, that Hitler would have repulsed the invasion and increased the development efforts to produce the German atomic bomb .

The point is not that preventitive war is never justified. Sometimes it surely is, but war is always a last resort solution, representing not the continuation of diplomacy by other means, but instead a monumental failure. And because the chaos that accompanies that monumental failure is equally monumental, the outcome of a war -any war- can never be accurately predicted despite Posner's apparent self-assurance that it can. Except in one regard:

That innocent people will die horrible deaths approaches a confidence level of one.

In any event, by any criteria, except Bush's, nothing in the run-up to the Iraq war justified a preventive war by the US (and its allies).

Arguably France is the nation that has been most wedded to pure economic cost-benefit analyses in its Middle-East strategy

Sheesh, do you really believe the crap you write? Yes, France over the last ten years did have the closest economic ties to Iraq. But if you want the country that looks at the pure economic cost-benefit analysis in its Middle-East Strategy, we are it baby? We overthrew the first almost democratic country in the Middle East and installed a dictator because we thought it would be too friendly to the USSR (Iran). When the Shah got overthrown we supported Iraq in Saddam's war against Iran out of spite eventhough Iraq was closer to the Soviet Union than us and we knew how awful Saddam was. You admit that Saudi Arabia is a problem yet we are their biggest backers and we didn't say a word when they delayed their elections and announced women would not be able to vote (look for them to quietly cancel them completely with no complaint from us).

Do you really think that a "revolution from within" will result in more friendly governments in Iran or Syria? Be serious. Chances are we will try in foment one and it will be tainted by our influence and result in a fundamentalist backlash. The hardliners in Iran have gained power, not lost it, since 9/11 because they have got the country to rally around the flag against us and increased oil revenues have allowed them to buy off the fence sitters. We support corrupt dictatorships in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, and Jordan. This administration has shown no real interest in pressuring them to change nor has it pressured Israel and the Palestinians to come to some kind of accomodation.

Uncertainty does not justify a bias in favor of inaction. Inaction is a decision with consequences, just as it action. Since human behavior is inherently uncertain, all social choices, even those classified as “inaction”, must be made in the face of uncertainty. This necessitates the assignment of probabilities that are themselves only uncertain estimates. There is no alternative. Therefore, Richard Posner’s methodology is inescapable. Of course, this method can be used to justify any action or inaction.

The typical argument in favor of the US invasion of Iraq includes the following:
Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator who had already slaughtered more than 1 million people and would probably kill more if left in power. He had probably already assisted terrorists acting against US interests and would probably do so in the future. Containment was not effective and would probably deteriorate over time. The defeat of Saddam Hussein would probably discourage other nation states from supporting terrorism in the future. The US could probably establish democracy in Iraq as it did in Germany, Japan, and South Korea and democracy in Iraq would probably encourage liberalization among Arab nations and thereby reduce support for terrorism.

Not all of these uncertain expectations need to be true to justify the US invasion of Iraq, but it is clear that the decision to invade can not be justified with certainty.

What about the decision not to invade? This would typically include the following:
The US is not responsible for Saddam Hussein’s genocide and should therefore give it only minor weighting in any decision, but the US would be fully responsible for all deaths that occur due to its invasion. Saddam Hussein might kill far fewer people in the future than he did in the past, in part due to containment. Containment of Saddam Hussein will probably work adequately far into the future. Invasion of Iraq will probably motivate more Islamists to become terrorists than would inaction. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein will probably not deter other nation states from supporting terrorism. The US is unlikely to ever succeed in establishing democracy in Iraq. Saddam Hussein probably never had significant ties with terrorists acting against the US and probably never will in the future if the US does not invade Iraq. The US can probably prevent future terrorists acts against the US or at least keep them to a cost less than that of war in Iraq.

Clearly, the decision not to invade Iraq is based only on probabilities, not certainties. Hence, there can be no certainty. We are forced to argue probabilities.

I don't think Judge Posner omitted "the discounted value of these future defense expenditures" from his cost-benefit example. In the case of the United States, there is no such benefit. The only nation states that threaten the United States are already on the outside of international law (North Korea, Iran). There is no increase in the threat of attack from say Canada, as the first commenter so foolishly suggests.

In fact, the primary stabilizing force throughout history has not been any rule agaisnt pre-emptive attacks (which have been common forever) but rather the fear of destruction by a superior force. East and West Germany existed in relative peace not because of any international law, but because the United States and USSR assured the destruction of either, should it turn agressive.

In this context, I would argue that the United States, as the sole super-power, discouraged agression by rouge nations when it attacked Iraq (both times) and Afghanistan. A pre-emptive military policy serves the same goal as agressive police enforcement of minor violations, it cleans up the whole neighborhood. Our pull-out of Vietnam on the other hand, had the opposite effect and encouraged minor conflicts around the globe, as did the failure of the USSR to subdue Afghanistan.

"East and West Germany existed in relative peace not because of any international law, but because the United States and USSR assured the destruction of either, should it turn agressive."

That is a gross oversimplification of an exceedingly complicated situation, one in which MAD surely was an element, but which also included the utlility of institutions of international law and the deployment, after October '62, of state of the art communications technologies by world leaders.

If US "discouraged agresion [sic] by rogue nations," how come the world has Darfur? And what on earth is a rogue nation anyway?

Anonymous- your links don't work so I've no idea where you're referring me.

I've always been uncomfortable with claims that calculations of utility can be neat and part of a truly orderly continuum -- as I thought my post made clear. As economists or social choice theorists we use relatively simple models such as the 'utility calculation continuum' because we're convinced they're useful (i.e. generally good enough, not because we're convinced they're exhaustively accurate) and because they lend themselves to relatively straightforward explication. When we want to be significantly more precise in defining our functions, for example, the mathematical price of admission to the discussion shifts from the calculus one expects most undergraduates to understand (at least generally) to the sorts of advanced mathematics understood by few (a prominent mathematical economist once suggested to me in a conversation that there were less than 100 people in the world who were really capable of understanding and contributing to the literature, and half of them were mathematicians who couldn't care less).

Nonetheless, I am not persuaded by your distinction between risk and ambiguity, nor am I convinced that modelling decisionmaking under uncertainty (risk) is inappropriate to model decisionmaking under ambiguity. You may have blogged on it, but I guess I'd need to see a more fully fleshed out argument, perhaps even the mathematics you have it mind (though, as I said before, I'm very rusty with serious mathematics).

Tristero writes:

'If US "discouraged agresion [sic] by rogue nations," how come the world has Darfur?'

Let's not play dumb now. Clearly he meant aggression against the United States. Is Darfur a part of the US? "Duh".

Uncertainty does not justify a bias in favor of inaction.

Rick,

Your analysis fails to account for the fact that greater uncertainty exists concerning the prediction of the threat as opposed to calculating the negative consequences to a state engaging in preventative war. Negative consequences to a state engaging in preventative war would be far easier to calculate because their effects would be much closer in time to the decision to go to war. A threat calculus must take into account a potential threat years into the future, making prediction much more difficult.

Since it is assumed that the calculation is being made to determine if a preventative war is to be launched now, the calculation of the negative consequences is far easier than the threat.

Thus the risk of inaction will always be easier to calculate and to mention the costs of inaction in the same breath as action does not to full justice to the problem.

The factor of uncertainty of threat demonstrates that the calculus will more often than not fall on the side of "angels fearing to tread" rather than "fools rushing in."

Our pull-out of Vietnam on the other hand, had the opposite effect and encouraged minor conflicts around the globe, as did the failure of the USSR to subdue Afghanistan.

Steven,

Your analysis seems to suggest that you would think it better that the Soviet Union had subdued Afghanistan. I find this troubling. Furthermore, you provide no evidentiary justification for either position quoted above.

Cato makes a good point regarding the cost of uncertainties created by allowing terrorists to run amuck. Many analysts have said there is a $10+ dollar a barrel "terrorism premium" on the price of oil right now. This illustrates just one of the real costs of waiting to clean out the hornet's nest. (Watch this premium drop as it becomes apparent that OBL & co. are severely weakened as a global menace, probably a month or so after the successful elections are held in Iraq.)

I won't even go into oil-for-food, which makes a complete mockery of Blar's argument that Saddam was in any way "contained."

Off topic, but necesary given no E-mail contact to administrator, is the fact that the spam bot mechanism does not work with the preview feature correctly. One has to copy one's work, and then paste again into the first page, sometimes with disasterous results. Please fix. Thanks.

The premise of weighing pre-emptive war in terms of the probability of attack and the balance of cost and harms is an interesting one. While the idea might seem most pertinent to American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m curious how the model would apply to third party conflicts such as those that occur in Africa. Does the probability that a foreign country will attack another foreign nation still carry the same weight as the probability that one would attack us? For example, was it necessary for Britain and France to wait until the invasion of Poland to declare war on Germany or could the likelihood of the attack been sufficient? What if they had invaded due to the occupation of Austria or the Sudetenland, where the eventual probability of a German attack against them appeared significantly lower or possibly non-existent? In the calculations of pre-emptive war, the question exists of what relationship there is between the probability of being attacked and the probability of conflict between foreign nations, as well as the consequences of that relationship or lack thereof. For example, can the high probability of third party conflict justify pre-emptive attack even when the probability of eventual conflict with either foreign nation is otherwise low?

To try and answer this question, we might turn to cost-benefit analysis as the Honorable Posner suggests, but now it is more complicated. The nation considering pre-emptive invasion to prevent the third party conflict has to look at a greater variety of costs and benefits due to the multiple relationships involved. Let’s assume that the Nation of A is considering a pre-emptive strike against Nations B or C (or possibly both) to avoid war between the two. Nation A would likely need to consider the C/B-analysis between itself and B as well as with itself and C. In addition, there is the C/B-analyses between B and C to consider, if not more.

One interesting result of this approach is to ask if nation A gains nor loses in its C/B-analyses, can it still justify pre-emptive invasion due to the C/B-analyses between B and C? Between individuals, the answer is yes. Even though both Bill and Tom, who are in an intense disagreement over ownership of a piece of land, intend to set fire to the property, society can intervene with criminal sanctions on both parties before either can carry out the act. This is still true even when there is no risk of escalation between them or any involvement of third parties and their property (Assume that they are both happy if neither person can use the property, which happens to be a small island near an urban location). At this point, the only significant principle perhaps for justifying these criminal sanctions is society’s “interest” in preserving wealth. While there have been many actual and potential disputes between nations over contested territory similar to the situation of Bill & Tom, historically the preservation of wealth and lives doesn’t seem enough to merit a pre-emptive invasion when a conflict between two foreign nations is likely. Therefore, it would seem that more than the preservation of wealth and lives is necessary before nations, when little cost or gain will result, will pre-emptively involve themselves in possible conflicts between foreign nations.

Rob W:

Your analysis fails to account for the fact that greater uncertainty exists concerning the prediction of the threat as opposed to calculating the negative consequences to a state engaging in preventative war.

This greater uncertainty as to threats would suggest a bias in favor of inaction only if two conditions exist: the nature of the threat must be uncertain and the imminence of the threat must be uncertain. However, if the magnitude of the threat is sufficiently great (e.g. an attack with nuclear weapons),and the reasonably foreseeable costs not at least equal or greater in magnitude than the threat of action, then regardless of the fact that the calculus is inherently risky and ambiguous, there is no necessary bias towards inaction.

Mutual assured destruction was an example where the threat of acting by an attack on a potentially threatening adversary (and unleashing MAD) was knowable and of a magnitude at least as great as the threat of inaction.

Consider that a nation state's first duty is to provide for the defense of its citizens, it must place a higher value on their lives and freedom than those of any other nation, by definition. I take it as given that there is a difference in kind between the sort of threats taken into account traditionally in determining whether preemptive action is justified (hostage takings, kidnappings, destruction of some commerical interests -- all traditional causa belli) and the possibility of an attack by weapons of mass destruction. If this is correct, I would describe such an attack as catastrophic not only in the ordinary language sense, but mathematically as well, meaning the ordinary assumptions about the orderliness of the functions no longer obtain. Or to put it another way, if the potential threat is so great that it cannot be tolerated under almost any circumstances, a decision-making rule that is biased in favor of inaction will not be acceptable to decision-makers charged with the welfare of society.

This is all rather silly. I doubt that the most brilliant economists in history could have sat down in July 1914, and crunched their cost-benefit analyses on the impending war would have even come close to predicting the outcome. Who would have predicted that four years and 12 million lives later Europe would be in ruins, four of the seven empires that participated in the war had collapsed, two of the remaining three were so damaged that they too would eventually fall apart. That the rest of the century would be taken up fighting the twin evils, fascism and communism, that the war created.

And yet you seriously want us to believe that there is some magical economic formula that can tell us if a preventative war will be "worth" the cost. What hubris and arrogance.

Freder: ummm, you're not an economist I take it....

As far as I can tell, no one has suggested there is some modern version of the felicific calculus advocated by the English Utilitarians at the beginning of the 19th century. I doubt most economists would suggest it's likely that we'll be able to construct one. The notion as I understand it is not that someone has actually and effectively constructed a real world model into which inputs can be dumped and outputs cranked (pace Wassily Leontieff and his epigoni), but that the description (model) is a useful way of describing what goes on in the real world, useful in terms of understanding how decisions are made and considering what can be learned from this.

Your Honor,

I am not a 2L and don't idolize you, but an unemployed freshly minted lawyer who recognizes grave social threat in your law and economics school, yet, grudgingly, admires your compositional style and the efficacy of some of your methods in some of your opinions.

1. You said "striking the first blow is the essence of self-defense" as though you have never considered the criminal law, nor situations in which the self-defense is proffered as a justification of violence. This has been addressed above.

In those cases, as you must know, striking first would tend to degrade the self-defense argument, portraying the putative victim as the initial aggressor, and thus the putative aggressor as the initial victim.

This is absurd.

2. Still more absurd, and shocking to contemplation, is your description of "the U.S. decision not to invade Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks"!

Sir, when was this decision made? And by whom?

Clearly this decision must have been made "before the 9/11 attacks" and, as you have phrased it, it must have been made both in foreknowledge of those attacks, and considering them sufficient justification for the planned invasion.

Are you really saying that, oh great adjudicator?

Are United States policymakers, even now, (in)acting on the decision not to invade all the sovereignties with which we are not currently engaged in actual outright hostilities?

Before the 9/11 attacks, members of the Afghan ruling junta had 1) significantly curtailed poppy cultivation (and hence the flow of opium and heroin), and 2) been involved in negotiations with certain American concerns, mediated by certain American officials, regarding the transportation of oil. And "we" had a plan on the books to topple the regime and install our own power vacuum.

I would disagree, point by point, with the rest of your discussion, but I am too shocked and dismayed at the vertiginous spin and radical framing in your first few paragraphs to stomach it.

Where is the 9th Circuit blog?

The unstated purpose of this war is determined by capitalist interests which lead to an oil war masquerading as an endless crusade against "terrorism." Bush’s argument for war belies justifications given by the world's leading apologists for a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable scale.

This suggests that the American state, with its unelected president, venal Supreme Court, silent Congress, gutted Bill of Rights and compliant media can be seen in the light of the apparent fabrications which lead to the final subjugation of the Middle East, beginning with the $90bn invasion of Iraq. It appears that the appropriation of Arab resources brings about the resurgence of White Supremacist ideologies. On the other hand, the Pax Americana of the future is solid evidence of the seizure of the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Clearly, Donald Rumsfeld's worldview is determined by capitalist interests which lead to the predatory imperialist aims outlined by the crypto-fascist Project for a New American Century.

Presumably, the unstated purpose of this war represents the repudiation of international law in order to bring about the result of a pre-fascist atmosphere in America.

It is quite remarkable that the appropriation of Arab resources represents the crushing of internal dissent in order to propagate the flagrant lies promulgated by the political donor class. Nevertheless, Americanism as an ideology provides a pretext for the essential Western imperial interests.

It appears that the deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root brings about this calamity brought to us by a horrific onslaught, known as Shock and Awe. Perhaps for the first time since the late 1940s, the influence of Leo Strauss represents the repudiation of international law in order to bring about the end of any possibility of social justice in a reactionary state. It is quite remarkable that the apparent demise of "anti-Americanism" as a respectable means of stifling recognition of American imperialism is determined by capitalist interests which lead to an act of international violence that exceeds even those of the "liberal" Bill Clinton.

From the beginning of time, whenever an individual or the leadership of a group has perceived the benefits of using violence as outweighing the costs, they have utilized violence. This will continue till the end of time, almost by definition. Organizations such as the UN are supposed to raise the costs of violence but that basic premise still holds. Therefore, I consider the distinctions between offensive, defensive, pre-emptive, and preventitive war a distraction to the real argument.

If all we're trying to prevent is a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands of U.S. citizens murdered and a few big buildings knocked down every few years, then the cost of invading Iraq may not have been worth the benefits.

But what about the value of civilization itself? It's not inconceivable that a few well placed nukes could so shake the faith people have in civilizations and its institutions that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. For example, currency only has value because: a) people think it does and b) people think that the issuing government will be around essentially forever. The latter could possibly be called into question with an attack not all that much bigger than 9/11. Many of civilization's institutions are like that so the whole thing could unravel fairly quickly.

If civilization collapses, then what? The planet would probably struggle to support even one billion people living without the structure and efficiencies of civilization. That means at least five billion dead, of all races and ethnicities. If you estimate the probability at one in ten-thousand, that's still an expected value of 500,000 dead. Even at one in a million, that's still 5,000 dead. That's how I look at the utility analysis.

Cato,

I'd argue that if the threat is imminent, it would fall under Judge Posner's "preemptive" war, not his preventative war.

I'd also like to see the effects of internal constituencies are taken into account in this model, for example, the non-entry of Britain and France as intervenors in the U.S. Civil War.

I think I am with Quiggan here - this has to be a hoax. My history is not good - but its enough to know that this history is totally revisionist.

Alternatively BP is being too cute by half. I feel stupid even trying to comment above.

JH

CR-

This thing keeps thinking I'm a spambot; sorry about the mangled prior post. The ambiguity blog is here

http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000101.htm

and the article from the Saban Center is here:

http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/indyk/20040309.htm

Meanwhile, this isn't about doing Bayesian updating with PDFs instead of just assuming the probability of attack is a half. It's about whether it makes sense to apply any sort of expected utility framework when, as fifty people have pointed out to this point, we have no f.ing clue how to calculate the ex ante probability of an attack of a given scale. Is a diffuse prior correct? Nobody knows. Maybe we should come up with a prior distribution over prior distributions? Doing so assumes that we have a set of potentially correct models which we can somehow aggregate to arrive at the truth. Is that true about our current knowledge of terrorism? No.

Also, we know from a million lab experiments that humans do not process information or make decisions that way. So Posner and Becker's calculations don't correspond to any consistent real-life information, and aren't even a model of how humans make actual decisions.

I think the question of whether pre-emptive war can ever be justified is answered by resorting to a simple example. Hypothetically, if North Korea was physically placed were Cuba is, there would no argument that preventative war was justified to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons.
However, Judge Posners argument makes an assumption that would be disputed by many of those who would never agree to pre-emptive war. Those disputants would argue that any cost-benefit analysis should not be limited to the costs and benefits accrued to the U.S. but rather, should also include costs to nation being attacked. I disagree with the position I have just stated but in order for Judge Posner's analysis to address those who disagree with him, he would have to explain why we should only consider the costs and benefits to the aggressor nation.

The notion as I understand it is not that someone has actually and effectively constructed a real world model into which inputs can be dumped and outputs cranked (pace Wassily Leontieff and his epigoni), but that the description (model) is a useful way of describing what goes on in the real world, useful in terms of understanding how decisions are made and considering what can be learned from this.

Well, if you read Judge, Justice, Prof, Lord (or whatever the fawning 2Ls are calling him nowadays) Posner's body of work--or at least the parts of it I was forced to read in law school-- and this little gem today, he obviously thinks he has the magical economic formula that tells us when a preventative war is cost-effective, how the British and French could have prevented World War II (Of course, why wait for the invasion of the Rhineland, they should have just poisoned Hitler's dinner at Landau).

He has an economic solution to every possible legal problem. I'm sure that if you asked him if he considered the electric chair to be cruel and unusual punishment, he would want to know if the chemicals for lethal injection cost more than the electricity to run the chair.

Cato R., Feder's point is that this technique is useless in the real world of issue politics and corporatist corruption. In fact the whole post reads like a naive make-anything-up-at-all exercise to support the Iraq war. Because isn't this at bottom a fairly banal mechanistic justification for vigilantism in general?. But it's worse than that, isn't it. In this case, brutal punishment is, in indisputable fact, collectively visited upon some large number of innocents, as well as some fraction less than one of the the presumptively guilty parties.

It's curious that the next logical step for an integrity based analysis of the situation isn't in fact taken: compare the actual outcome with what the model would predict given the inputs available at the time. We've got all the information necessary to evaluate the usefulness of this scheme.

But what if the danger of attack is remote rather than imminent?

Given that the Baathists running Iraq were routinely firing missiles at our pilots in the no-fly zone in the leadup to the war, I don't see the point in having a debate over whether the threat from Hussein was 'imminent' or not. As far as our pilots were concerned, attacks were already occurring by the time we went to war. In fact, the Iraq War Resolution states exactly that -- that is that Hussein had fired "thousands" of missiles at our pilots in the leadup to the war.

So shouldn't the question be -- after 9/11 -- were we going to go to war against other people who were attacking us or were we only going to go to war against Al Qaeda?

I would suggest that anyone who believes that we should have given Hussein a pass because his missile attacks on our pilots were not serious attacks to justify a war is someone who has learned nothing from 9/11. In fact anyone who makes that argument, in order to be logically consistent, would have to also argue that we didn't have good grounds for responding to the South's attacks on Fort Sumpter (which resulted in zero Union casualties) or that we didn't have good grounds for going to war against Hitler because Germany hadn't killed any Americans at the time Hitler declared war on us.

'War is the continuation of policy by other means'. War (for historians) does not occur in an historical vacuum. OK, so the fig-leaf changes through time - as it must; and so 'preventive' or 'pre-emptive' may now be the excuse offered.But to understand any actual, historical, war: 'cui bono?'What is the policy now being *continued* through the means of war?

Richard,

I'm so pleased that you've started a blog, but I'm so disappointed that you've made some semantic mistakes that make your argument superfluous.

As expressed elsewhere. Self-defense does not mean attacking first - you can have a pre-emptive act of self-defense (see many abuse cases) but more often, in the international arena, it means you've been attacked and are attacking back.

Furthermore, you use preventative and pre-emptive interchangeably. They are not synonyms - don't treat them as such. Pre-empt means you haven't been attacked but expect it so attack first. Preventative means you're trying to forestall an attack by trying to go to war (usually not with the power you're in conflict with). For a clear discussion of this, I recommend reading Stephen Walt or John Mearshimer. Iraq was a Preventative war. The stuff in Afghanistan was self-defense, and the actions in the Philippines are pre-emptive.

That said, the question should be - deterrence or Preventive war? No one questions the idea of pre-emption (I would argue it's a component of deterrence). I feel the idea of preventative war is poppycock. Starting a war to prevent a war? When in history has that ever worked? And did it work in the case of Iraq? I, like my undergraduate teachers, believe it did not.

I look forward to reading more from you on this - and look forward to you addressing the issue of deterrence.

yours, devgirl

Here is an issue: when deciding the utility of war, how much should the utility to noncombatants of the enemy be taken into account. In one view, a nation-state is like a corporation, with its citizens as shareholders. Maximizing their utility at the expense of other countries is optimal. On the other hand, taking a broader view, noncombatant enemy are human beings with rights. Under traditional just war doctrine we take into account their utility; we don't terror bomb every nation we go to war with for instance.

How does this affect the calculus? And should it?

"As far as our pilots were concerned, attacks were already occurring by the time we went to war. "

I suppose that one fractionally small component of the total cost to fix this defect ought to be pointed out: the complete safety of our pilots was bought, only in part, with 1000+ killed and many more wounded US soldiers. At the time, my understanding was that firing a missile was rather suicidal on the part of the battery operators, so in effect the pilots were getting almost professional quality in-the-field training subsidized by those willing to die for Saddam. If we factor in the $100B startup + $75B per year in crude monetary outlays required to support the adventure (civilian lives are valueless, and we'll neglect the rather important if hard to quantify notion of being able to respond to obvious arising threats like, oh what's obvious... Iran or NK?) the place is set for a bit of Posnerian introspection on the topic of which situation is more economically salubrious. Have at it.

How about a preventative war against ongoing environmental distruction? Then we might have to attack ourselves preventatively because we (the U.S.) are the #1 producer of greenhouse gases. You worry a lot about Iran & No. Korea but what about the current, terrible destruction of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil? You talk about dealing with an issue before it is too late; it's sad y'all can't see the forest for the trees...until both have long since disappeared.

My compliments for the thoughtful words. Your blog will be regular reading from now on.

Trumpit, that environmental extremism is worthy of a typical college student. Have you noticed (1) disensus on global warming (2) greater efficiency by wealthier countries and (3) the possible economic advantages of global warming.

To disappointed:

So what you are saying is that we shouldn't have treated Hussein's direct attacks on our pilots as an act of war because the costs might be too high. Isn't that exactly the mindset that led to 3,000 people dying on 9/11?

Finally, if you are not prepared to have the United States go to war when some lunatic in control of an entire country is firing missiles at our pilots, when are you prepared to have the United States go to war?

One of my bigger regrets from my time at the Harris School on the U. Chicago campus was that I did not have the chance to take a class from Richard Posner, this blog underscores why.

I for one completely trust our new Republican Neocon Overlords. Can we please cancel the law of unintended consequences though?

Can anyone name for me a war that was NOT preemptive? Give me one case where both sides agreed to go to war.

Mr. Korves,

You're stacking the deck and don't understand what pre-emptive means. Wars are not necessarily symetrical on both sides. It is possible that there can be an offensive war all-around -- both nations attacked eachother at once, or agreed to go to war. Perhaps there are some examples of this in the Middle Ages when Kings agreed to meet on battlefields. Obviously, a defensive war all-around is impossible. The only other possibility is a war in which one side is the aggressor (offensive) and the other side is the victim (defensive).

Pre-emptive war means you declare war against a country because you think they were going to aggress against you. In reality, there is little difference between that and offensive war; Hitler said Germany needed "breathing space" and had to wipe out their enemies.

Defensive wars are certainly not pre-emptive. The Revolutionary War was defensive, from the US side, and offensive from the British side (likewise, the Civil War was defensive from the Southern side).

Judge Posner there has to be some semblence of logic used in formulating such a scenario. How do you know Hitler wouldn't have kicked the French and British in 1936? Seems to me he could have, so I find this to be an implausible example.

Likewise, what were the chances of the US being attacked by Iraq with us flying over him all the time? 0 is what I'd give it. The question is how to civilize such decrepit societes so as to not have to invade them and assume the expenses.

There's the real challenge. What do you offer in this regard sir?

"Nor is B entitled to in any way aggress against C (or anyone else) in the course of defending himself against A, or retaliating against A. If B accidentally shoots C while attempting to retaliate against A, B is liable to C for such (because C would have been entitled to defend himself)."

So each hostage taker gets whatever he wants - always. The police do not have the right to endanger a hostage to eliminate a broader threat? Who needs a nuclear weapon? All you need to take over the world is a single hostage and a dead man switch. Any agent seeking to act against you would be morally prohibited from assessing those filthy consequences. How grand.

"Starting a war to prevent a war? When in history has that ever worked? And did it work in the case of Iraq?"

Not starting a war to prevent a war, starting a war to prevent or mitigate damage that can be delivered to you. The issue is not whether a war is the result, the issue is who takes the casualties.

Mr. Heinrich,

You remind me why I favor the Austrian school over these Chicago boys, or whatever they call themselves nowadays. I for one don't believe in justifying the deaths of innocent civilians by using simplistic equations.

Cheers.

Economical Analysis is a very useful tool... when things can be economically analysed.

But are you really pretending that you can set-up a costs / benefits analysis of war ? If you do, you should at least present a model of some kind so we can understand the way you will conduct this analysis, and then criticize and enhance it.

But, I don't see any valuable model in your demonstration. Of course, that's just a blog and its not a scientific paper. But you should have stressed the point that there is not yet any model efficient enough to allow us to conduct costs / benefits analysis of war.

As comments on this post will easily show, even your analysis of past conflicts does not prove rigorous enough to convince your readers.

War is just too complex to be summarized in a model today. Even the DoD is unable to do so, and they do have much more datas than any of us.

Not insisting on the limits of your analysis, your post can easily be read as some scientist propaganda.

"A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation."

This statement is not entirely tautological - Judge Posner has decides whose costs and benefits are to count in the decision, and I think it is here where the most fruitful objections to the statement may be made. But we must also ask the question - is such a "rational" decision desirable? Even assuming the affirmative, we must recognize at least three large problems with implementation of such a "rational" decision:

1. Cataloguing the relevant costs and benefits. Many posters have already identified costs and benefits not mentioned in the main post; the costs of errors in judgment should be added to the list as well. We're dealing with decision-making under massive uncertainty - the probability of making a mistake in judgment (avoiding war when it would be "justified" as well as taking pre-emptive or preventive action when unjustified on C/B grounds) is likely very large, and the costs of making mistakes are also not likely to be negligible.

2. Measurement. As others have suggested, measuring - or even putting rough bounds on - many of these costs and benefits in any meaningful sense is an unrealistic endeavor. At the end of the day, the president, or Congress, or whoever happens to be the decision-maker, is left to shrug shoulders and make something up. What are the chances that their judgment will have reliable grounding in fact? Would some prescriptive rules of thumb protect us from the dangers of uninformed decision-making? There are costs and benefits to allowing the decision-maker the freedom to choose - have we done that cost-benefit analysis?

3. Agency problems. Whatever the costs and benefits "to the nation" might be (if it's even sensible to talk in such colletive terms), they're almost certainly not perfectly aligned with the costs and benefits to the decision-makers. Do we have a system in place to ensure that the decisions to go to war are based on the costs and benefits "to the nation" as properly conceived? (Can such ideas be properly conceived?)

Are there others? Are these problems surmountable? Would surmounting them be cheaper or more cost-effective than, say, a statute requiring certain measurable or observable events or criteria to be satisfied before military action can be taken?

let me unfairly summarize: merely conjectural probabilities are sufficient to kill any number of innocent people as long as the mathematics says that's logical, as per Judge Posner. And anyone who might ever be a suicide bomber should be shot ipso facto without ado, according to Mr. Becker, based again on the inexorable math. Surely this summary is so unfair as to be completely inaccurate, one hopes.

Prometheus, you suggest a simple way to look at a complex situation. You act as though before invading Iraq, or before any preventative (I believe I am using this term correctly) war, that there are no innocent civilian deaths, or other damages worth considering, and that such deaths and damages only occur after the preventative action is taken. Even in Iraq this is not completely true by any means. As we are all now aware, Saddam’s regime committed atrocious acts to innocents both in and outside of Iraq.

How should we-- as a state, or as citizens of a state if you prefer-- make decisions where we know our state’s actions will both mitigate and cause innocent civilian deaths? Don’t use Iraq as the model though— answer this question in regard to dropping atomic bombs to prevent the death caused in the counter-invasion of an initial aggressor.

While the United States’ actions may have been immoral in regard to Japan, one can certainly imagine a scenario wherein the use of atomic weapons would not only provide the most utility, it would also be the most humane option. (Granted humane and utility are loaded terms—but no time to define them now!)

I think it is in situations like these, where the acting power knows it will have to kill both guilty and innocent to end current killing of innocents, and/or to prevent the risk of future killing of innocents, a cost-benefit analysis like the one Judge Posner offers becomes not only useful, but utterly indispensable.

What other models for decision-making can you suggest? While I agree that it seems cold to put a price on a child’s leg, for instance. But when the cruel realities of the world leave of us no choice but to pick either to save one child’s leg or another child’s hands, how do we contemplate such a decision?

One issue that I have not seen discussed is the issue of jurisdiction/sovereignty. When a democracy prosecutes a criminal- like the analogy that Cory Hojka makes- the democracy has a fundamental, ethical basis for its jurisdiction over the citizen. But in the analogy that Hojka makes, wherein Country USA will take action to prevent the damage that Country E and Country F will cause if they fight each other, what philosophical or ethical right does Country USA have to intervene? Surely Country USA is right to defend itself against imminent attacks, but to risk the death of innocents to prevent damage to other countries and other countries’ citizens begs the question—by what right?

I think when preventative action is taken by a democracy in a manner that appears to lack the prudence of the ethics and principles that support democracy, the cost of illegitimacy and bad precedent are very hard to measure in economic terms. In this sense, Bush’s war in Iraq bears immeasurable cost due to one of two failings: 1- the invasion was fundamentally illegitimate; otherwise, 2- the Bush Administration’s failure to explain the invasion’s legitimacy left a large part of our own citizenry and a majority of the world quite skeptical about the legitimacy of the US’s action.

A government that is taking preventive action bears the burden of persuasion as to the action’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizenry (US succeeded, at least initially) and in the eyes of the world (US failed.)

Sadly, I find the entire war better justified by Richard Posner and Arthur Chrenkoff than anyone in the Bush Administration. Could we have imagined or tolerated such poor communication and public relations from FRD and Churchhill? Hmm.

"A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation." Please define ALL variables both short-term and long-term (effectiveness of future diplomacy, success/failure in intelligence, success/failure in judgment, effectiveness of alternative actions, unintended consequences of waging preventative war, etc.). When you can do so we'll talk rational (and I would think that the further you get from defensive – or even 'justifiable (imminent threat) preemptive' - war the more tenuous the assumptions/variables become). Any attempt to pseudo-rationalize the irrational only gives aid to those who will abuse the effort.

Well... it seems to me that the global cost-benefit analysis and national cost-benefit analysis for going to war diverge. For example, perhaps the optimal threshhold P-value that benefits will exceed costs for going to war for an individual nation is something like 0.2, and the optimal threshhold P-value for every nation to go to war, to optimize militarism globally, is something like 0.05. To be efficient on a world-wide scale about warmaking, then, should international institutions play a role?

Getting back to the Rhineland, the Brits at the time didn't go in because
(1) they didn't want to risk - and I emphasize the word risk - another war except on real interests;
(2) they thought Hitler was going to strike east,thought it was a splendid idea, and didn't want France to have the option of striking across the Rhineland to reinforce Eastern states and interfere with it;
(3) British public opinion was strongly against it;
(4) If Hitler had simply pulled back in the face of military mobilisation, the Allies would have been faced with an indefinite stay in a hostile land or with the option of withdrawing and having Germany do the same thing again;
(5) They thought that Hitler might fall; and they thought, with whatever truth I don't know, that there was a good chance that the left would get in, and that this would open up Europe to Stalin.
What-ifs are like quantum chromodynamics; you have to calculate the probability of all possible paths.

What happens when the putative target's governing entity lies and then commences action based on the lies?

"In the discussion to follow, we limit our treatment of the use of force to cases involving self-defense or defense of others (humanitarian intervention). In particular, we assume that some external actor poses a threat of pure aggression (that is, aggression not motivated by defense of self or others) against the actor that we model, or against third persons that the actor we model may wish to defend. If the aggression occurs, we further assume that it is socially undesirable and will impose net social costs. The threat of aggression is exogenous in that our model does not explain why it arises, although we do entertain the question of whether the aggressor can be deterred through various means."

While I am always impressed with how Judge Posner can reduce all discussions into a convincing economic argument for his position, I feel something needs to be pointed out here. I do agree with what I feel Posner's point is, that going to war now, even though unpopular, will probably end of being cheaper in the long run. My addition to the argument would be when talking about such grave issues, present or future lives taken are going to be inexcusable, how are these quantifiable?
apparentauthority.blogs.com

Your logic is compelling, but your use of the WWII example has a flaw: The benefit of preemptively fighting Germany is only a long-term gain If You Win.

So each hostage taker gets whatever he wants - always. The police do not have the right to endanger a hostage to eliminate a broader threat? Who needs a nuclear weapon? All you need to take over the world is a single hostage and a dead man switch. Any agent seeking to act against you would be morally prohibited from assessing those filthy consequences. How grand.

You've erected a red herring.

Firstly, the hostage taker and the hostage are on someone's property. That person has the right to decide how to deal with such situations, as it is his property (except in the case of "public property", a contradiction in terms if there ever was one).

The police are, of course, entitled to shoot the hostage-taker (but not the hostage). If they accidentally shoot the hostage, they are to be held liable for restitution, if for some reason the hostage-taker cannot be held liable, or does not have the necessary assets to compensate. The key question is, Does the hostage have the right to defend himself against what would be a mis-aimed shot? The answer is clearly yes. Every non-aggressor has the right to self-defense, whether it be against reckless endangerment of himself, or purposeful violent action.

However, the actions of the hostage-taker are his actions and no-one else is responsible for them; he may lay down mandates, and say that if they're not followed, he'll kill the victim. However, that doesn't make those who didn't follow those mandates legally responsible for the victim's death. It's still the hostage-taker's responsibility.

"One issue that I have not seen discussed is the issue of jurisdiction/sovereignty."

Despots don't have sovereignity at all. They are individuals who claim national resources as personal wealth. They have no more claim on regional authority than any arbitrary strong man that can kick them out of the country, including Country USA.

"The police are, of course, entitled to shoot the hostage-taker (but not the hostage). If they accidentally shoot the hostage, they are to be held liable for restitution,"

What does restitution mean to the deceased? Just to be clear, law enforcement can morally weigh costs and benefits to decide if the threat to the hostage exceeds a greater threat, right? There is a scale of probabilities that the hostage will be hit by the police bullet. Point is, once we know we are dealing with a hostage taker, we have a moral justification to employ aggression. The balancing of costs and benefits is what matters at that point.

I'm struck by the reasoning of those commenters who suggest that costs and benefits either can't be analyzed for something like war, or that doing so is an inappropriate exercise, who subsequently go on to argue that the costs of going to war are too high. Blanket statements about the infinite nature of 'blowback', the assertion that doing nothing is a cost free option, and so on, abound.

Pentagon:
Did you know there the Original Plane shown that hit the pentagon had NO Windows, and rather glided down.
Aswell, the hole made was alot smaller then the plane itself that was said to hit it.

And after the plane hit, where did it go? Where was the debree?

Two Towers: There was a flash before the two planes hit the towers, as well there was a object on the plane before it hit.

There was as well, smoke below the two towers on the first floor. How could there be smoke if the towers were hit so high up?

Misc Comments: Any Video tap taken of the "Terroits attacks" was taken by the FBI.

AND if a plane does go off course (must note these planes were 30 minutes to 45 minutes off course) they are contacted, and talked to if everything is ok and what is happening. AS WELL, after contact is made, jets are sent to talk to them and in the end, are to be shoot down over water so it doesnt FLY into anything.

MY COMMENT IS: Do you really think Terroists actualy set this up?
Why isnt these events not explained?

To be blunt, the USA hit themselves so that they may start acting as a police for the world. Didnt the US catch Bin Ladan? What is happening on this? Maybe i missed the news report on it.

chiming in at comment 109, I feel as though my views are going to be overlooked. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to say, if the Blogosphere has not been missing much if this is what the much-hyped Posner/Becker blog amounts to.

I mean, Posner may know something about being an appeals court judge, but he knows next to nothing about foreign policy, and almost as little about the Rhineland. Go read a book, yo.

"What does restitution mean to the deceased? Just to be clear, law enforcement can morally weigh costs and benefits to decide if the threat to the hostage exceeds a greater threat, right? There is a scale of probabilities that the hostage will be hit by the police bullet. Point is, once we know we are dealing with a hostage taker, we have a moral justification to employ aggression. The balancing of costs and benefits is what matters at that point."

Simply because a person's shot doesn't mean they die. In he event he does die, restitution goes to his family; in the event of no family, then whom-ever homesteads that right (e.g., close friend, partner, etc). And did you ever consider non-lethal (but disabling) guns? like tranquilizer guns? What about gas? There are many other options.

The probability of missing the criminal depends on the skill of the shooter. If the shooter isn't confident he can hit the criminal, he shouldn't fire. The question is, if the hostage knew that he was going to miss (and hit the hostage), would the hostage be justified in defending himself against the police officer? The answer is, of course, yes.

There's also the issue of who's property they're on. The property owner sets the rules for his profits, including, presumeably, how such incidents are to be handled.

The police officer is, of course, entitled to defend whoever or whatever the criminal is threatening. That doesn't, however, exempt him from liability for any of his actions, including theft, tresspass, or accidentallly shooting an innocent person.

It is very simple. If A is aiming to shoot B, B is entitled to shoot A in self-defense. If, however, B misses A and hits C, then B is liable to C. This is evident from the fact that C would be entitled to defend himself against B.

"Despots don't have sovereignity at all. They are individuals who claim national resources as personal wealth."

That's true, but no State has any sovereignty. All States are just arbitrary collections of power, little different from mafia organizations, except in scope and scale. See No Treason by Spooner, and For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard.

It seems to me the Iraq war as a "preemptive" war was correct under both cost-benefit and geo-political strategic analysis. The cost is likely worth the long-term benefit: changing the psychology of Araby, disrupting relationships between terrorist entities and states that harbor or help them, and causing terrorists and their sponsor states to pay a price for terror and force higher costs to stay in terror business.

The greatest threat is WMD in the hands of terrorist entities and rogue states. The benefit of eliminating or lessening that threat is worth a great deal. Significant factor that justifies many war expenses.

Strategically, the war showed the terrorists and certain rogue states the U.S. is dangerous to provoke and is willing to fight and inflict severe damage. This deterrence is noteworthy and ought to be factored.

The need for democracy and freedom in Arabdom is great. The long term peace dividend of helping grow human capital in the Middle East is in the world’s interest. Evidence suggests this is most likely to happen by building the institutional software for democracy, free markets, rule of law and open society. This is a long-term investment and will take many generations. Iraq was a good place to start seeding democracy and freedom for Arabdom.

The cost could be worth benefit if our efforts succeed in protecting us from WMD and transforming the region. It may take 40 – 100 years before we can assess the cost-benefit of our long-term investment. In short, we elect our political leaders to make these tough judgment calls with imperfect information.

One point that seems not to have been mentioned in this vast blogging is the possible usefulness of relying on collective decision making with respect to preventive wars. (I'm accepting here, for purposes of argument, much of what Judge Posner has put forward.) There is evidence that combining individual forecasts can give a better forecast (see summary in Chap. 2 of Alan Blinder's short book on central banking, The Quiet Revolution). By analogy, given the great uncertainty in assessing the expected future costs of not taking preventive action (especially the [subjective] probabilities), one could argue that preventive action should be conditional on joint (or qualified majority) agreement by a sufficiently large group of countries. This would bring different heuristics to the table and help make the idiosyncracies and biases of each country's assesssment wash out. In short, collective decision making in the face of great uncertainty could help improve forecasts and hence improve C--B decisions. Each country deciding these things on its own is a recipe for highly biased decisions. (The case of preemptive war would be different; there, the uncertainty is much less.)

Judge Posner, I've always wanted to ask you this.

How on EARTH can you quantify life and death? How can you rigorously assign numbers -- coherent, sensible, verifiable numbers, by which the decisionmakers can subsequently be held accountable -- to the costs of something as inherently (a) random and (b) costly in human life as WAR?

What analytical framework can possibly measure the comparative worth of persons with unknown potential?

This is why "law and economics," in my opinion, will never have even the faintest chance of having any kind of scientific credibility. How in blue blazes would this imaginary rational decisionmaker arrive at the numbers representing the cost to the attacker, attackee, etc.?

(For that matter, how do you quantify historical forces? How is the benefit to the world from France and Germany's invasion of the Rhineland predicted [especially in light of the view that German re-militarization was historically invevitable, albeit woeful], let alone calculated?)

Excellent articles and discussion about theoretical subjects. Where I depart from the general tenor is to reject the characterization of the Iraqi invasion as a preventive war. It was not a war; rather a campaign in a global war, that is, World War IV. (Cold War == World War III) By the same token, the invasion of Afghanistan was just another such campaign in the same WWIV. Further, the real war, WWIV was entirely defensive and reactive.

Does anybody consider Operation Torch, the US/UK invasion of North Africa early on in WWII as a war? Let alone a preempive war! Even though Operation Torch attacked nations that were neutral and lightly armed, posing close to zero threat to the Allies, there was no economic, legal or moral problem with Operation Torch. Strategically, the situation was that a stalemate had arisen in Egypt. Hitler's objective was to gain control of Middle East oil to fuel the Wehrmacht. The British had blocked Hitler but the stalemate was tying up resources and preventing rollback of the Nazis. Torch broke the stalemate by opening a second front to Rommel's rear and eventually destroying the Afrika Corps in a gigantic pincer movement. Strategically, Operation Torch was absolutely essential before European second (Italy) and third (France) fronts could even be considered.

The strategic situation in WWIV wrt Saddam and Iraq was almost identical. The invasion of Kuwait was Saddam's second attempt at gaining control of Middle East oil having failed to grab Iran's. The next objective looked like Saudi Arabia. The Gulf War frustrated Saddam and ended in a stalemate tying up coalition resources to maintain sanctions and the stalemate. The probability of sanctions being lifted within two or three years was at or near one. The probability that Saddam would take advantage of this to build up WMD was about one. The probability that Saddam would cooperate with terrorists was one. The probability that Iran would also try to gain WMD was/is one and the probability that Iran cooperates with terrorist is one. Our ability to attack Iran without moving through Iraq was/is zero. In short, there is almost zero uncertainty involved in strategic thinking about Operation Iraqi Freedom. Strategically, Afghanistan and Iraq are essential preliminaries to all further campaigns (Iran, Syria, SA, 'stans, Pak) many of which are non-military.

Within this wider, and IMHO, more correct framework, the rationale and justifications for any given campaign such as Afghanistan, Iraq, et al. devolve primarily to strategic considerations. The economic, legal and moral issues have been settled since 9/11/2001.

Dean,

The problem is that there's been scarce little evidence that Iraq was at the beginning in any way connected to the war on terror. Supposedly Saddam had some of those WMD things which he was going to give to terrorists, but that turned out not to be true.

In esssence it is now a part of the war on terror because our actions have created a large number of terrorists there and because the multi-national terrorists saw it as a perfect one-stop place to attack Americans.

Thank you so much for creating this blog! It's wonderful to find some intelligent conversation on this topic. I look forward to reading your input on future current events.

Throughout this discussion "war" is referenced as if it is a particularily distinct entity -- a concept upon which notions of justice hang. It is not.

"War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means."-- Clausewitz

If Iran destroys a Marine barracks through a terrorist proxy, that is an act of war but we have not treated it as such. If North Korea sends a missile over Japan, that is also an act of war. Certainly, the missile strike in Sudan by the US was an act of war. Nevertheless, what is considered "war" is always a product of the calculus of the interested parties and determined conclusively only post facto. What use is a concept of timeless justice when based on a noncausal criterion? It is a sham.

I propose that the Iranian deception of the IAEA is an act of war requiring a massive air strike and partial invasion. I calculate that millions will die if this measure is not realized. I also understand that the consensus of "right thinking people" will decry this as unjust if undertaken. Nonetheless, should I be right and millions do die at the hands of an Iranian WMD placed in the hands of terrorists should they not be preempted, these same people will say that the inaction that allowed this to occur was unjust. The two concepts cannot both be right in a world based on rules of justice such as this concept of "war".

So, "war" is simply a term of propaganda waged by those on a political stage. It is all politics. Thus, this discussion is moot.

"[W]e must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

-Robert Houghwout Jackson

What a fantastic piece of logic! I'm all for this dry, numbers-oriented win-loss analysis... so long as you count every civilian death as a trillion dollars of "cost" in your calculations.

Don't dress up your geopolitical ambitions with a little math to justify them.

Judge Posner and Professor Becker’s post will positively advance the national discussion about preventive/defensive war which, given the recent electoral vitriol, is a wonderful thing. A discussion of the consequences of “getting it wrong” should also begin. Although most of the world believed that Saddam had WMD, and 9/11 changed the calculus for preventive war, it seems nearly certain that there were no significant stockpiles. Furthermore, Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he had not expected the type of ongoing resistance we are facing. In other words, we were not prepared for the aftermath of the preventive war. As a citizen, it is uncomfortable that there are no personal or organizational consequences for these failures. (It is cold comfort that the people responsible for these failures were re-elected/re-appointed.)

Two analogies, which have long been dead horses, are Ruby Ridge and Waco. The FBI sniper who killed Randy Weaver’s wife was eventually absolved of wrongdoing. Perhaps that was correct, but someone in the FBI was responsible for putting in place rules of engagement which were flawed. How was that person or group held accountable?

Perhaps even more apropos is Waco. We know that it was the Attorney General who gave the go-ahead. What did she think were reasonable rules of engagement? How was she not held accountable in any way for the horrific outcome? Was the political arena our only recourse?

Although the analogies have long been out of our view, our actions in Iraq are not. The Abu Ghraib problems provide a vivid example. One can certainly make an argument that Abu Ghraib was an outcome of the planning failure before the war. How is that individuals at the Pentagon and at Central Command will not be sanctioned?

As above, 9/11 changed America’s calculus in regard to preventive war and the points of view posited by Judge Posner and Professor Becker may initiate a national discussion about the calculus that most citizens can understand and participate in. But what happens when we get it so badly wrong? It seems to me that, only by thinking about this, can we force our leaders to be more discriminating before they initiate preventive military actions. Mustn’t we worry about this with respect to Iran or North Korea?

Just curious: Is there any evidence that anyone in the Bush administration actually sat down and weighed the prospective costs of invading Iraq vs. the possible benefits? Any evidence that a rational cost-benefit analysis was conducted by anyone?

Right, I thought not.

Analytically empty. All you've done is deflate the argument---which argument is made by practically no one, and no one worth listening to---that preemptive war is _never_ justified. (Catholic theologians and the like are exempted from my previous slur.) But you haven't shown anything about the rightness of a particular preemptive war, or said anything about the conditions under which such a war would be justified. And the burden of proof, as it were, is on those who would go to war; "Why not?" is an insufficient answer.

Count me among those who still think this page is a hoax.

What about pre-emptive ethics? Say...justice, presumption of innocence, and the whole XIX century individual rights picture?

Analyzing human problems through Economics in a cultural, ethical, philosophical and institutional vacuum is no way to go.

For the most creative approach to this topic in recent years, see 79 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 1365 (2004)

What about combining the comments to the bek-po blog into one thread since some people seemed to be in one thread thinking they are in another or don't realize that there are two comment threads? Those commenting usually indicate who's being addressed if not both. And it looks like there might be hundreds of comments weekly. Posted to both threads.

The calculaton is a sham. I doubt that even Judge Posner would take this calculation seriously when probability of attack is low and cost of attack is just high enough to make the expected cost of inaction greater than the cost of prevention.

There's a panel van with a driver and a passenger. Based on certain intelligence information and the model and color of the van, there is a probability p=0.00001 that the two are terrorists and that the van contains a nuclear device. The cost of the explosion would be 1,000,000 lives lost. So the expected loss is ten lives. The cost of prevention is 20 firearm rounds. Twenty bullets to save ten lives. Calculation says.... SHOOT. Even though the probability that you've just killed two innocent men is 0.9999. OK, the cost of harming innocents is just too high in this case. Ultimately, there's an overriding subjective veto power: the calculation either confirms what's already been decided or is discarded.

There's a regular thread of responses that object to the economic analysis of the moral questions here. I sympathize with those responses, that was my initial objection as well. But upon reflection, Ligon is right to suggest that we're barking up the wrong tree.

"I'm struck by the reasoning of those commenters who suggest that costs and benefits either can't be analyzed for something like war, or that doing so is an inappropriate exercise." (Whether he was struck by the reasoning preemptively, we may never know.)

Posner isn't using cost-justification to demonstrate ethical justification here. He's suggesting that the two timings of attacks (pre-emptive and, er... post-emptive) are morally analogous, so long as the certainty of conflict is constant (fixed at one, say). Suppose the preemptive/postemptive distinction is morally vacuous (once we fix all the other variables); as nations have a duty to effectively protect their people, the cost analysis becomes sharply relevant.

That's IF the distinction is morally vacuous, clearly an issue that has entrenched adherents on both sides. For me, it seems a bit of a leap to go from "The morality of your attack doesn't depend upon its timing, so long as the probability of their attack is 1" to "The morality of your attack never depends upon its timing." But even if we set that aside, the cost-justification of preemption itself still seems suspicious to me.

One negative consequence of engaging in preemptive philosophies is that it undermines the ability for military force to act as a deterrent. If nations are attacked harshly only after they begin wars (or engage in certain other dastardly behavior), other nations will be less likely to wage wars (or behave in like dastardly manners). If nations are attacked irrespective of clearly specified conditions, and attacked based upon suspicions or perceived probabilities that might not correlate with their actions at all, deterrence will be obfuscated, causing more wars generally.

If Posner's analysis is correct, but we add in another variable that modifies the likelihood of war in general (due to the deterrence effect), a commitment to preemptive activity might increase the probability of war very slightly across many nations (by weakening the deterrent effect), thus cancelling out (in the long run) any utility gained by that specific preemption.

To balance out these hypotheticals, a nation wishing to engage in justified preemptive warfare (if there indeed is such a thing) might want to weigh some of these costs and probabilities with care. Because of this, kc's "Just Curious:" post attains a relevence to accompany its smarminess (a distinction I strive for).


(PS - Cullen McGough also raises an excellent point that's garnered too little attention, and will again garner too little here: these cost-benefit analyses are assuming victory is certain.)

The nice thing about sham calculations is that people who don't know math will believe them. I wrote about one of the "equations" of project management of equally dubious origin here:

http://www.tanglebones.com/archives/2004/10/07/project

But keep up the good work in making guesswork seem like math, Judge Poser^h^hner!

I respectfully suggest a problem with some arguments in this blog: utilizing the correct analytical framework to examine “pre-emptive” or “preventive” war. Here, legal and economic considerations are subordinate to geo-political strategies and self-defense.

No disrespect to law and economic discipline: it is helpful tool for policy makers creating and executing geo-political strategies.

The problem is most smart folks in this blog confuse and mix professional discipline standards - ie: law, economics, social work…. You need a geo-political strategic framework to analyze concept of pre-emptive war. Legal, economic and other issues factor but are subordinate to big ticket geo-political strategies: WMD and Islamic extremism.

We executed a strategic pre-emptive war in Iraq for purely geo-political reasons: show strength, create deterrence, raise costs to terror business, disrupt terror - state relationships, secure U.S. from terror and WMD.

Evidence suggests it is working. Res ipsa loquitur.

Posners cost-benefit approach to assessing the justification for going to war leaves quite open the possibility that pure subjective belief will suffice to go to war since whether even a powerful state with seriously differing views will in fact use its eventually magnified power to attack one's own is nearly impossible to establish objectively. Will China come after us when it grows powerful enough or will it be focusing on self-defense and carry on as a more robust trading partner that will be a win-win situation? Also, defensivists do not need to conceed that they must wait for an attack to commence--just as there is probable cause and clear and present danger in domestic use of force, this same idea can be deployed for international affairs as well.

C/b analysis doesn't quite translate from economics to legal analysis, particularly on a question of whether armed force is an appropriate response. Isn't this just proportionality all dressed up?

Let's not waste time with a cost-benefit analysis for this purpose. Using it before taking action probably means ignoring the garbage in-garbage out rule -- the desired result will be obtained, because where the threat is not imminent, estimates must be substituted for facts, and the estimates will be influenced by bias. More likely, it would be used as a post-hoc justification for failed action, and then, as in its hypothetical pre-action use, it will invariably be manipulated to reach whichever conclusion fits the political leanings of the person(s) doing the analysis. It will never be needed to justify successful action, even if the reason given before taking the action proves to be mistaken or overestimated. It will not be applied in Iraq unless the ultimate result is an Iraq without an elected government, or an Iraq suffering through a widening civil war with loss of life far exceeding anything we've seen so far. If the Iraq war is successful, meaning that Saddam's regime has been replaced by an elected government accountable to its people, then no c/b test could ever be applied to show that the undertaking was unjustified, even though Saddam apparently had no actual wmd with which to attack us or which could have been distributed to terrorists.

With this in mind, pre-action c/b analysis seems useful to remind a nation contemplating preventive war that its objectives must not be limited to merely defending itself. It must accomplish a good -- that is, bestow a benefit -- that extends beyond its own protection or economic advantage. Lofty objectives such as establishing democracy where none had existed weigh heavily on the benefit side of the scale in the post-action analysis, but only if the action is successful. Any decision to make preventive war is a gamble, and the c/b analysis can serve as a reminder that the stakes must be big just for the gambler to break even.

Judge Posner has once again utilized economics as a crutch for stating the obvious, giving his presentation the illusion of scientific rigor by plugging in numbers and then reducing all the considerations one takes into account in engaging in a preventative war to factors such as the probability of a future attack, the expected cost of a future attack and the expected cost and benefit of present-day preventative measures. Of course, every idiot knows that in thinking about the merits of a preventative war, one must weigh what, in lay terms, would be called the 'pros' and 'cons.' These factors include absolutely everything from the economic costs of a preventative action, to the political costs of engaging or not engaging in one (which may result in future economic costs if, say, engaging in a war means alienating one's alies and having to go it alone for the foreseeable future), to the gravity and magnitude of the danger today and in the future. The interesting question, unfortunately, is not the one Judge Posner addresses in abstraction, viz., one of methodology, but of how to assign proper weight to each factor in each individual case. Thus, for example, assuming good faith on the government's part, President Bush and his advisors had a very different estimate of dangers stemming from Saddam Hussein than did much of the rest of the world. Bush likely underestimated the costs of going to war and, perhaps, also underestimated the costs of the loss of international cache that the U.S. incurred as a result of his actions. The latter factor may have made Al Qaida's job of recruitment easier than it had been prior to the invasion. One may agree or disagree with any particular analysis of this sort, but the point is that different people have different predictions of what the results of a given preventative action will be, value different sorts of outcomes differently and consequently arrive at very different conclusions about the appropriate courses of action. In other words, this is a question with regard to which the abstract methodological discussion engaged in by Judge Posner is unnecessary and unproductive; as is often the case with economic approaches to geo-political problems, the guise of mathematical rigor disguises an all-too-obvious failure to address the truly complex and nuanced questions raised by the issue at hand. Certain kinds of limited thinkers get excited by this appearance of rigor, thinking that it introduces cool, calm rationality to a problem which has been mired in bluster and vituperations. In reality, however, it only begs all the interesting questions, leaving the difficult analysis for others to perform.

It's interesting that Judge Posner, the Lecturer in Law, uses a cost-benefit business model to justify a preventative war on the basis that the potential for the probability of an attack can increase while Prof. Becker, the Economist, uses a crime analogy to justify killing terrorists on the basis "of less than 100% certain evidence." The evidence may not be up to scratch, no crime has yet been commited, no trial, no jury but they MIGHT be a threat so they get a death penalty. I wouldn't like to be Johnny Terrorist's lookalike that day, or anyone in a half mile radius for that matter.

Is it worth remembering again that the 9/11 attacks were lead by an Egyptian and carried out with box cutters?

At http://orcmid.com/blog/2004/12/justifying-pre-emptive-war.asp:  I have serious concerns with the lopsided social utilitarianism that is expressed here.  What about the externalities?  Posner seems to suggest that the trade-off equation about pre-emption involves the cost-benefit to us, to our nation, without consideration for the externalities that are bourn by the inhabitants of the territory that we conduct our war on.  This also seems to completely undermine the present-value versus future-cost equation, having the present cost in lives lost be some else's while the only the speculative future cost is ours.

On Prevention. (Against Utilitarianism, a Reply to Judge Posner)

"To constitute a crime against human laws, there must be first a vicious will, and secondly, an unlawful act consequent upon such vicious will."
Sir William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England

The concept of preventing terrorism through presumption sounds appealing but amounts to an attempt to restrict liberty to purchase safety. It destroys the presumption of innocence. It makes the behavior of terrorists the measure of the rights and scope of liberty the law will permit to the innocent. This is because laws based on the concept of preemption tell the innocent that their liberties depend on the conduct of terrorists. Laws based on the concept of preemption permit the innocent to have only such rights as terrorist will allow. The selectivity and arbitrariness inherent in laws based upon the concept of preemption is unsupportable. Once the principle of punishing only activities that are actually wrong (malum in se) is abandoned we have nothing to guide us and any violation of natural rights becomes justifiable.
Laws assign a punishment for wrong behavior (malum in se) after the fact or ex post. No law has the power to prevent acts of terrorism. Laws attempting to prevent terrorism through preemption are based on the false presumption that laws control conduct, i.e. that human beings are not free.

Adapted from Jeff Snyder. Nation of Cowards, Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control. Accurate Press, St. Louis, Missouri.

"We executed a strategic pre-emptive war in Iraq for purely geo-political reasons: show strength, create deterrence, raise costs to terror business, disrupt terror - state relationships, secure U.S. from terror and WMD."

Michael, while I agree with in for the most part (hurrah! another person who believes this is a geo-stratetic issue, not a freaking utility maximizations problem) I think, again, you've compounded Posner's mistake.

Calling the Iraq war pre-emptive implictly declares that Iraq was a clear and present danger to the security of the US. It was not. What was a danger was the potential loss of US pre-eminence in the middle east vis-a-vis the continued existence of states like Iraq, the failure of the middle east peace accords, and the continued support of Middle Eastern states for terrorism.

While Iraq, per say did not offer a signficant threat to us, it was nonetheless a convenient straw man used by us to "show strength, create deterrence, raise costs to terror business, disrupt terror - state relationships, secure U.S. from terror"

I will beg to differ on the WMD bit.

So this was a perfect example of the preventative war concept. As I eluded to in my post, the concept is ridiculous. We have not prevented a war. We have not pre-empted the enemy. We are already in a global war against states and and stateless enemies. What we may have done is deter middle eastern states from agressing us, or challenging our regional hegemony (which frankly, none of them was going to do anyway). We certainly did not prevent future attacks against the United States by stateless actors.

And while I deplore the sloppiness of the execution and the fact that we've managed to create a whole new stack of stateless enemies, I'm none the less pleased (as an American) that we've secured our hegemony. Redundantly, but at least we accomplished that much. I would have done it another way, but then I suspect my overall strategic goal and the Bush Administrations strategic goals differ.

yours,
devgirl

Devgirl: You state: "Calling the Iraq war pre-emptive implictly declares that Iraq was a clear and present danger to the security of the US. It was not."

I think you take an overly narrow approach. In a world of WMD and terror, the reasonable and prudent standard is not "clear and present danger" but a "grave and gathering danger".

Again, we elect our political leaders to make these tough judgment calls with imperfect information.

What I want to know is: Where do people apply for jobs to write the Action Plans for such "positive" investment opportunities? Does the M-I Complex have a job-postings board?

"grave and gathering danger."

What, precisely, standard is that? Alliteration is not a standard. Do the words "grave and gathering" tell us anything? What does it mean for danger to "gather?" Is that when danger's underpants are wrinkled? Please admit that your standard is no standard, unless of course you have a three pronged approach to demonstrate when a danger has "gathered" and when it has not.

See http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html

The U.S. National Security Council broadened the definition of "imminent threat" in 2002:

For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning.

The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.

The war failed a reasonable BCA done with reasonable assumptions before the war. Therefore, it was bad policy. It is not reasonable to use sanctions as the counter-factual if sanctions themselves fail a BCA. My BCA of the war assumed that Iraq had WMDs and that they had links to terrorism (both silly assumptions, but made for the sake of war-niks) and the war still failed the BCA.

There is a value on life. There is an efficient amount of crime. There is an efficient amount of terrorism. No evidence has been supplied that indicate the previous level of terrorism (or random state killings & torture) was wrong.

But hell... there are terrorists under your bed. Quick -- shoot somebody.

Walker --

Your article defines neither "grave" nor "gathering." It also does not provide us with a standard for exactly when, and when not, we should use force. It seems to say force should be used whenver the threat is "really bad." Do you favor a "really bad" standard? If so, what qualifies as evidence of "really bad?" Do you think that, in hindsight, we met that standard in the current adventure?

I suggest you take an overly narrow legalistic approach. Your assumption that we need a constricted legalistic “standard for exactly when, and when not, we should use force” is unnecessary and unreasonable. It is also impractical and against our national interest in a world of WMD and terror.

Analyzing the case for anticipatory self-defense is a political function not a legal judgment call. A cost-benefit analysis may be useful. Judge Posner and Mr. Becker demonstrate the usefulness of employing a cost-benefit analysis within the context of a geo-political strategic framework. Yet at the end of the day it is a judgment call to act preemptively and we elect our political leaders to make these tough judgment calls with imperfect information.

We do not elect judges to apply a legalistic “standard for exactly when, and when not, we should use force” in foreign affairs – that is an executive branch power with congressional check and balance.

40 virgins in heaven and the glory of the martyr do not fit economic models.

"But the appropriateness of thus discounting future costs is less clear when the issue is averting future costs that are largely nonpecuniary and have national or global impact."

For this reason, I think we must exercise prudence when using your proposed equation. It may serve as a solid basis for analysis, but it fails to answer the deeper (and perhaps less quantifiable) questions. For one, is an American life worth more than that of an Iraqi? I could go on but I think the direction of my argument is clear. I would like to see Judge Posner take a stab at questions like these.

(Or perhaps his son already has in the link below? I am not sure since I am merely avoiding studying for exams in even being on this site and don't have time to devote to an entire article.)

"Posners cost-benefit approach to assessing the justification for going to war leaves quite open the possibility that pure subjective belief will suffice to go to war since whether even a powerful state with seriously differing views will in fact use its eventually magnified power to attack one's own is nearly impossible to establish objectively."

The cases in which purely objective criteria would allow one to avoid harm are vanishingly small. The defensivist case is respectable for its consistency, but its efficacy in dealing with a terrorist strike of any sort leaves much to be desired.

With strictly objective standards in place, what happens if New York is the victim of a nuclear terrorist, and our level of confidence in our best assignment of blame is no higher than was our confidence of Saddam's WMD programs?

"40 virgins in heaven and the glory of the martyr do not fit economic models."

Jon Elster gave a paper at Columbia analyzing the 'rationality' of suicide bombers, and managed to give various explanations without resorting to this one.

Hello Mr. Posner, (Can I call you Dick?) I suspect you are interested enough to read these comments so I just wanted to give a little greeting from a IL at Indiana who is rather tired of reading your opinions in his casebook. We recently covered Indiana Harbor Belt R.R. v. American Cyanamid, and I wanted to ask you if any folks have moved from the polluted ghettos of the south side up into your subdivision like you so compassionately suggested. Perhaps you threw a party for them when they arrived, Bring Your Own Cake.

By the way, your Blog has set a record for adherance to Godwin's Law by mentioning Hitler on the first day! (Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.") Congrats on that, you've really got the hang of this whole internet thing.

It is also kind of ironic given your choice of example that Hitler seems to have thought he was acting pre-emptively himself by invading France.
Its really a pretty good justification for war... perhaps old Prescott Bush got some tips when he was supplying industrial materials to the Germans before the war.

Your opinion, and much of the subsequent discussion displays a horrid amount of jingoistic Americo-centrism. If you were willing to include the death and destruction and horror that is Iraq today on the Burden side of the Hand equation, then your "pre-emptive strike" precaution wouldn't seem so justified. Or then again, maybe it would, since dead Arabs don't seem to count as much as dead Americans in L&E-land. If we are going to apply Coase, what is the transaction cost of negotiating with a Daisy-Cutter bomb?

Well, back to studying for finals for me, and don't worry, I am from California and have no intention of practicing in your circuit.

Mr. Walker --

Do you argue that all standards are "legalistic," unworthy of the time of our elected officials? Invading Iraq was a "judgment call." Does that mean it should not have been based on reasons? That those reasons shouldn't have to be well argued? I will go out on a limb and say that yes, a sitting president ought to be able to ariculate the general circumstances under which he will invade another country. At the very least, he ought to be able to give good reasons for doing so each time he does it. If that is legalistic, well you've found me out: I'm a lawyer.

The thing is, an international standard had evolved for self-defensive actions. It was "imminent threat." In 2002, you rightly pointed out, the security counsel articulated a different standard -- "grave and gathering." The problem is that, whatever its poetic merits, "grave and gathering" isn't a standard at all. The two words, put together, tell us nothing at all about the kind of threats that warrant invasion. "Grave and gathering threat" is meaningless.

You congratulate our esteemed Posner for applying a cost-benefit analysis. Though not unexpected of him, let's applaud. Do you think that, say, George Bush applies cost-benefit analyses, even brief ones such as fit in blogs, when making "judgment calls?" Or do you think he keeps words like "grave and gathering danger" around to justify whatever direction his "judgment" takes him?

I don't think it overly legalistic (or unreasonable, or unnecessary, or impractical) to desire that politicians use words that mean things. Language with meaning is not the sole property of judges. In fact, some of them are quite foreign to it.

Of course, words that don't mean anything, substituted for actual judgment (which usually involves standards), can come in handy -- they can take you almost anywhere you want to go.

TW (tpw@alum.dartmouth.org) :

Jon Elster

Motivations and Beliefs in Suicide Missions

"The best-known scheme for explaining action in terms of desires and beliefs is that of rational-choice theory. According to the standard version of that theory, agents choose the best means to realize stable desires, acting on beliefs that are well-grounded in information that is the outcome of an optimal search process. ... I shall argue, nevertheless, that in some cases suicide attacks fall short of being fully rational due to the instability of the underlying motivations. I shall also argue that some attackers are subject to irrational belief formation and that, moreover, these irrational beliefs contribute to the explanation of their actions.

Their lack of "rationality" (referenced by the heavenly virgins and hero worship) is well established by virtue of the irrational belief systems from which they derive their decisions.

My adaptation might be inflammatory but the reasoning is sound.

"what happens if New York is the victim of a nuclear terrorist, and our level of confidence in our best assignment of blame is no higher than was our confidence of Saddam's WMD programs?"

What happens is we don't invade anybody. To state otherwise is to advocate violence that is likely unprovoked. Do you advocate lynching (sorry to use the loaded term) a suspect if the crowd is angry enough, and evidence too thin for a conviction? Why do it on an international level? The fact that you have been punched is not reason to punch the first person you see, regardless of whether he hit you or not.

Your hypothetical reveals something of interest. Our justification for invading other countries is supposed to be a preventive one. We think the violence is justified if it prevents a terrorist attack or something.

But after the terrorist attack occurs, what is the justification for violence where we aren't sure who did it? It can't be a preventive justification, because a response against whomever we can pin it on fast is not likely to prevent future attacks.

The only justification would be revenge for revenge's sake. It's a perfectly human response, and we are kidding ourselves if we don't think that kind of gut reaction fueled our entry into Iraq.

The kid with the bloody nose wants to hit somebody back, if only to prevent jeering from his classmates. Isn't that really what people are getting at when they begin a sentence with "In a post 911 world ..." But come on, it is misguided policy.

Parker - if you were Iran (or N Korea), unless you were 100% sure of a US invasion then your analysis would not justify a pre-emptive strike on the US b/c that would result in a total loss for you.

TW - You should also include in your analysis the cost to Iraq living under the Saddam regime and the cost to the region resulting from the uncertainty created by the presence of the Saddam regime.
As for what the Iraqis think - those posting on BBC's Iraq log seem generally to prefer the presence of American soldiers to the former Saddam regime despite the continued violence.

"What happens is we don't invade anybody. To state otherwise is to advocate violence that is likely unprovoked."

Interesting. You can't invade to confirm, even though you are toppling a dictator? Does the cost matter to you? Boom, there goes another city.

Two points:

1) I note you are assuming that we are 0% confident in the identity of our attacker in my hypthetical, hence the straw man of striking against the first person we see. What about an 80% confidence level?

2) No one is suggesting that we invade France, but a dictatorship is fundamentally different. To follow your schoolyard analogy, the kid with the bloody nose looks up and sees several people, one of whom he has seen commit act after act of bullying. Tyrants are already guilty, and punching them in the nose is justified by their mere existence. I am suggesting precisely that once we have identified a tyrant as even a cursory part of the problem, we are morally justified in attacking. What should restrain us is purely an analysis of costs and benefits, as our bloggers have suggested.

"[I]f given a choice between $100 today and $100 in ten years, any rational person will take $100 now, if only because the money can be invested and through interest compounding grow to a much larger amount in ten years."

This depends on where you live, of course. Here in Japan a hundred bucks today is pretty much worth a hundred bucks next year. In some countries afflicted with deflation, it may be worth less.

Suppose there is a probability of .5...

It's too bad Posner demonstrates such profound ignorance of theory regarding decision making under uncertainty. The key here is the difference between risk and uncertainty. You can assign probabilities to risk. Not so for uncertainties. And all the wicked problems are uncertainties. See Daniel Ellsberg on Risk, Uncertainty and the Savage Axioms.

Suppose there is a probability of 1 that a commentator who discusses uncertainty in terms of estimable probabilities is not minimally conversant with the literature in the field.

Rob W,

I think you confuse yourself.

You correctly quote me as having said:
“Uncertainty does not justify a bias in favor of inaction.”

Then you believe you contradict me by saying:
“greater uncertainty exists concerning the prediction of the threat as opposed to calculating the negative consequences to a state engaging in preventative war.”
and
“Thus the risk of inaction will always be easier to calculate and to mention the costs of inaction in the same breath as action does not to full justice to the problem.
The factor of uncertainty of threat demonstrates that the calculus will more often than not fall on the side of "angels fearing to tread" rather than "fools rushing in."

You are wrong on two counts.

First, you fail to understand the risks of inaction and the fact that its consequences are not at all easy to calculate. We know the problems of overthrowing Saddam Hussein because we did it. We do not know the consequences of not overthrowing him. There is enormous uncertainty regarding these consequences. As just one example of a risk you may have overlooked, not having overthrown Saddam Hussein might have resulted in all the terrorists that entered Iraq from Iran entering Afghanistan from Iran instead. This might have greatly diminished our success there.

Second, even if inaction were less uncertain, there is no reason to conclude that the less uncertain path should always be chosen. You can be certain that if you shoot yourself in the head (properly), you will die. If you choose, instead, to live and to try to accomplish something, you are faced with great uncertainty extending many years out. Has that caused you to choose suicide? Apparently not, and for good reason. A certain bad is not better than an uncertain good. Moreover, a certain mediocrity may not be better than an uncertain great success. The comparison depends on the degree of uncertainty and the value of the possible success.

Thus, you are incorrect to assert that inaction has less risk than action, but even if you were correct in that claim, it would not show that inaction is the better course.

your example was "as sure as we were about WMD." I don't think we were 80% sure. That is, the people who made the decision could not have been 80% sure that Iraq possessed real WMD, given the intelligence.

I will be generous and give our WMD probability 50%. At 50% we should not invade. Although simplistic, I think the punched school lad test is helpful. If you are only 50% sure, you cannot punch back. If you are 80% sure, maybe you can. But it requires real justification -- you ought to have to demonstrate that 80% likelihood to the country.

Incidentally, striking the first person you see wouldn't be acting on 0% probability. The fact that the person is close in proximity to you makes him somewhat likely to have hit you. Maybe even as likely as it was that Iraq had working WMD.

I don't think the dictatorship argument works. Do you mean to say that tyrants are more likely to commit acts of terrorism than other possible suspects? That doesn't seem to be the case. Terrorists are mostly stateless. There was little indication that Saddam Hussein contributed to the trade center attacks at the time of our invasion.

So on that track record, why would you assume that "tyrants" -- undemocratic, nasty type rulers is I guess what you mean by the word -- are likelier than other suspects to have committed large scale terrorist attacks? There isn't any evidence to support that contention.

You equate "tyrant" with "bully," and imply they are equally likely to punch one in the nose. But with "bully," we are talking about a person who has actually punched noses (or performed nuggies). The connection of the normal tyrant-type behavior with a terrorist act is more attenuated.

You say "tyrants are already guilty." But what are they guilty of? If they are not guilty of the acts we are seeking to punish/prevent, then how is their more general guilt at all relevant?

For information relevant to the cost-benefit
analysis of pre-emptive strike, please visit
this site and look at the picture for at least
one full minute.

http://www.nomorevictims.org/

Then please observe the statistics concerning
the 15,000 civilian deaths so far in Iraq.

War is NEVER cost-justified. It will only
stop when we stop it.

Jason Ligon writes:

"Tyrants are already guilty, and punching them in the nose is justified by their mere existence. I am suggesting precisely that once we have identified a tyrant as even a cursory part of the problem, we are morally justified in attacking."

If that is indeed true, then why did our administration make such an effort to morally justify their actions by means of confusing a good proportion of the public mind into thinking that there was a substantial connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein?

Whatever happened to the good old days when liberals tried to make conservatives look bad by referring to them as 'isolationists?' If we had followed the lead of good conservatives like Barry Goldwater, we wouldn't even be having this debate.

And why are Americans so adverse to the idea of eliminating our nation's dependence on foreign oil? When I tell people that I am working as an engineer in the alternative energy industry, many look at me as if I'm peddling human skin lampshades or something...

Jason Ligon also wrote: "you can't invade to confirm? interesting."

Is that to say that you would justify an invasion just to find out if the invasion was justified? If so, you would have adjusted well to Salem circa 1600 or so.

Once we throw away the idea that "war" is necessarily a definable state with a start, end, and causal agents with ascertainable responsibility of quantifiable degrees, we are left with the same moral problems that confront us in "peace". It is all a matter of politics alone rather than a problem that can be solved by legalistic means.

For example, it is a common blunder in this discussion to view action with more culpability than considered inaction in a moral dilemma. In fact, there is a strong bias here that a justifiable default position is always inaction. This is only true in a static and stable system. Proliferation of WMD is a dynamic influence with a profound dynamic effect on the system, so this presumption is false. Many analogies fail for precisely this reason; specifically among these are the analogies with common law which assumes a static system (otherwise the laws would be conditional or time-limited).

While I appreciate the discussion of the lawyers here, the mindset is inappropriate in this analysis for the same reasons that customary international law fails as outlined my previous post. You must first ask yourselves, “Am I applying the appropriate tools to the problem at hand?” The answer is that the naked utilitarian approach is most appropriate – not a rule-based methodology. Rules do not constrain those pushing the innovation on our system as we have seen in Iraq, Iran, and the DPRK. The inapplicability of rules should be clear to all by now. On the other hand, the problem with the utilitarian calculus is, of course, in the formulation as some have pointed out already. This is where we should focus the discussion.

Ill stay on topic so that maybe, i get some sort of responce.

So, we know that bush went to war on Terror becuase, simply a group of terroists commited an act on the US. So simply put, why did this act happen in the first place? The US got involved in a situation, basicly going in Iraq some years ago, and leaving the next day.

I heard on the News that the US is setting up a new gov't, so that Iraq will be able to lead Democraticly. What if the US leaves, and the country goes in choas in a few years by not being used to a system as they will set up. Likly another terroist attack.

SO where does this endless war ends? It doesnt. Simply put, war is the result of everything that is human. Fighting for power is what leaders do, and with leaders, they always lead.. whether they are elected by a people or not. I find it funny that people try to argue the fact that war WONT happen again, or "we wont be hit again, so let us try to end this peacefuly" It wont sadly.

War will always be the end result of everything. Paral Harbor was bombed to bits, what did the US do? NUKED them to hell and got involved. So you expect the US not to get involved in a war manner from having a plane slammed into there buildings?

Yes, i am looking at the largest skim of things, and again going off topic. To get back onto it, ill simply say that power will always be seeked. Whether its costly to go to war or not, depends on the amount of power gained. And having the US "Police" Iraq, getting rid of terroists, is alot of power in my opinion.

Rob:

"You say "tyrants are already guilty." But what are they guilty of? If they are not guilty of the acts we are seeking to punish/prevent, then how is their more general guilt at all relevant?"

They are guilty of being tyrants, if nothing else. They crush entire populations under the heel of their boot. That is the definition of a dictator - the single person who attains and/or maintains sole power over a populace by way of sticking guns in their faces. Sounds like a bully to me. Some tyrants are additionally guilty of violating the terms of their surrender, which is a pretty big deal. Some are guilty of gassing people. He doesn't have to be guilty of attacking us directly for us to have justification for eliminating him.

I want to be clear that there are two concepts at play here. There is the question of when aggression is justified and there is the question of when aggression is cost effective. I am arguing that any dictator anywhere in the world can be justifiably killed or imprisoned by any democratic government at any time. Once justification has been met, the question turns to whether utility is maximized by doing so.

Response to Pete:

Pete:
"The calculaton is a sham. I doubt that even Judge Posner would take this calculation seriously when probability of attack is low and cost of attack is just high enough to make the expected cost of inaction greater than the cost of prevention.

There's a panel van with a driver and a passenger. Based on certain intelligence information and the model and color of the van, there is a probability p=0.00001 that the two are terrorists and that the van contains a nuclear device. The cost of the explosion would be 1,000,000 lives lost. So the expected loss is ten lives. The cost of prevention is 20 firearm rounds. Twenty bullets to save ten lives. Calculation says.... SHOOT. Even though the probability that you've just killed two innocent men is 0.9999. OK, the cost of harming innocents is just too high in this case."

No way. The numbers don't lie. If the people in the van cannot be stopped then shoot, shoot, shoot. The problem in your hypothetical is that you pose 1 in 100,000 as a remote possibility when, in reality, a 1 in 100,000 chance that the van has a nuke ready to be detonated is an acute threat.

For instance, the facts illustrating the highest possibility of killing innocent civilians: 100,000 vans of a certain color and model in the DC area. 99,999 are soccer moms with vans full of kids who all happen to be driving at the same time. The 'certain intelligence information' you speak of would have to be 1) we KNOW terrorists have smuggled in a nuclear weapon, 2) we KNOW they loaded it into a van of a certain color and model, 3) we KNOW the van is in DC and 4) (because your hypothetical requires us to shoot or gamble) we KNOW they are going to detonate immediately. With that kind of intelligence, the city would be shut down and the military would be deployed to destroy vans until the threat was neutralized, no question.

As the number of vans decreases, the 'certain intelligence information' moves away from absolute knowledge in other areas, but at the same time the likelihood you are killing innocent civilians decreases.

Pete:
"Ultimately, there's an overriding subjective veto power: the calculation either confirms what's already been decided or is discarded."

In reality, the entire process is subjective based on a set of objective facts; no hard number probabilities exist. I agree that it is pointless to try to objectify and quantify the un-objectifiable (?) and un-quantifiable (?), and thus any attempt to do so is a 'sham'. I disagree, however, that given a set of hard numbers a subjective decision will be made to ignore them if the result is too extreme.

"If that is indeed true, then why did our administration make such an effort to morally justify their actions by means of confusing a good proportion of the public mind into thinking that there was a substantial connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein?"

I am not condoning the approach Bush and company took to convince either the public or the UN. I am suggesting that the correct focus of the discussion should be costs and benefits, and that blanket 'objective' criteria are insufficient in this arena.

Read Posner carefully and one discovers that meaning is erased for the categories that represent a definitional cause for war, i.e., preemptive dissolves into preventative and both morph quickly into a decision to commit war on a "cost-basis" associated with a narrowly perceived threat to an even more narrowly defined potential victim. Under this analytic, war and its aim is available to anyone (nation or otherwise corporatist 'funding entity') willing to take a cost gamble. And, gamble it is because all costs cannot be foreseen nor are they measured to include their moral, historical, social, economic or political elements. With Posner we find ourselves in a cleared space bereft of either the civil matters that constitute a humanist perspective or the ethical concerns on the horror of destruction of human life and material. We are simply left with the cost benefit of buying a war like purchasing stock certificates. Note: Posner cites the historical example of 1936 Rhineland to substantiate a case for the past that he hasn't made for the present. In short, ideological arm-twisting absent any current, genuine evidence. Ammoral at least, the argument rings with a hollow, deceiving tone.

Jason Ligon wrote, in response to the "essence of self defense" critique:

A wise man once said, "What is true of the kung-fu fight is not true of the gun fight." If he didn't say it, he should have.

Real people don't dodge bullets, and the first bullet can kill you.

While the "kung fu" quote is cute and rather pithy -- it conjures up a nice image -- its too bad its totally irrelevant (i.e., not an image of two warring states, let alone a Super Power and its non-state terrorist enemy.)

The US and "The Base" -- not W's Right Wing Republicans, but Al Quaeda -- are no more humans in a Kung Fu fight than they are humans in a gun fight.

While real people may not be able to dodge bullets, the US is not a "real person" and is capable of taking many, many, many, many bullets -- as, sadly, exemplified on 9/11.

My point was a simple one -- striking first is not the "essence" of self defense. Indeed, many above have pointed out the folly of using "self" defense an an analogy at all, since states are not "selves" no matter how much we try to personify them through metaphors.

Michael,

Thanks for responding back. I think you are taking WMD issues as too black and white.

"I think you take an overly narrow approach. In a world of WMD and terror, the reasonable and prudent standard is not "clear and present danger" but a "grave and gathering danger".

Again, we elect our political leaders to make these tough judgment calls with imperfect information.

I agree, actors with WMD programs are not the most transparent actors in the International system. However, a "grave and gathering danger" is, as stated elsewhere a pretty slippery slope for military action. There are grave and gathering dangers in N. Korea, Pakistan, India, Iran, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and Japan. Oddly, we have not taken out their governments. Or the governments of Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, the PRC, Great Britain, or France.

Repeated US military and UN diplomatic action killed the Iraq WMD program. Even if his scientists had not feed Hussein a line, the presence of WMD or WMD stockpiles in Iraq offered a negligible threat to US security. He was not a grave and gathering threat. We had no evidence that his regime was preparing to go to war with other states, and he was not aggressing his neighbors (and no, press conferences where he waved a sword around do not count as aggressing).

Yet, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea did just that. In addition, they are not a grave and growing threat because?

Our leaders work with imperfect information, and make the best decisions possible. Any state with WMDs needs to be handled with kid gloves and deterred. If they were about to launch an attack upon us, and lacked second-strike capability, I would be the first to advocate bombing them into the Stone Age.

Iraq was not that, did not have that. That is why I think WMDs as a reason for war made good political cover, but bad political science. As a Geo-strategic (to use your term) decision, had Iraq been a hotbed of ICBMs pointed at US, we would have been better off destroying all their counterforce materials. We did not and we did not even guard the stockpiles of "WMD" material that the Iraqis had. This suggests to me that our invasion had little or nothing to do with WMDs.

yours,
devgirl

1) In Iraq, it seems that the sanctions were effective in containing and reducing the risks of attack and did so at much lower costs that war. Since there are alterative methods of affecting the probability of a future attack (such as sanctions) and these methods have lower costs. Assuming that is true for the moment, it seems that the idea of a preventative war, where the future attack is not imminent, is hardly justified as the long timeline allows for peaceful, less costly solutions to either be reached by all parties.

2) Given the diversity that exists in how people rank or assign value to the non-economic costs and how people rank costs suffered by other rather than by themselves, how would you suggest that a society determine a cost amount in a nation that a pluralistic, economically and politically diverse?

Jay,

Your comment regarding the effectiveness and costliness of sanctions omits, significantly, any comment on their sustainability. The sanctions were unsustainable, and without sanctions the alternatives were war or readmission of Saddam's Iraq into the world community. The latter choice would have fully restored Iraq's ability to use its oil wealth for weapons acquisitions.

The war will likely (and rightfully) be judged a success if post-occupation Iraq is a democracy, which seems more likely than not at this time. It is already costly in absolute terms, but it will likely not be costsly relative to the benefit obtained, to the US as well as to Iraq.

in victus

your poison is irrational.

many act for transcendental purposes, buddhist, moslem, jew, christian, secular humanist alike.

in general and nonpolitically suicide is not about despair but control.

any rational discussion of the motivations of suicide bombers would not assume that all of "them" adhere to the same view of paradise.
any rational discussion of the suicide bombers, themselves, would look at the recruitment and deployment network, and demographic facts, in addition to making unwarranted assumptions about being motivated by virgins in heaven.

if i understand the epistles of paul correctly, we'll all be virgins in heaven. if we get there.

killing them because we believe -- but haven't taken the trouble to honestly inquire -- that they are motivated by irrational belief and transcendental lust, is not one of the ways that st. paul said we earn merit. most of the rest of the koran pretty much comports with those virtues espoused by paul.

just out of curiosity, what is the value, in your great wisdom, of one of those heavenly virgins. are they inexpensive and pliable like the girls traded here on earth? do you value them one at a time, or in a package of 40?

would you also please advise as to the relative value of virgins (either individually, or by the crate) in heaven as opposed to here, below?

this determination alone would be a great contribution to the rational discussion.

"the sanctions were unsustainable"

On what basis do you make this assertion? The evidence we have indicates that the sanctions were working quite well.

Your next assertion, regarding Iraqi democracy, is amazing. A full cost benefit analysis of all factors, performed in several sentences, conveniently pointing in favor of our invasion. You must be able to perform some rather complex calculations in your head.

This may be outside the scope of the discussion here, but the cost of creating enemies and the cost of not creating enemies seems to me that it would be an important calculus in determining the likelihood and severity of a future attack.

In the same general way that the cost of preventive health care can reduce the cost of remedial health care and overall health care, why are we not assessing the opportunity cost of not creating allies? I am not suggesting that there is any way to eliminate the threat of having enemies who wish to attack, but the goal of fewer attacks (and fewer enemies) can also be pursued by making more alliances and more mutually beneficial interactions.

I know that the external costs can spiral well beyond the reasonable scope of the question, but I think that ignoring the "preventive care" of our foreign policy and relying on military solutions raises the likelyhood of attack and removes valuable tools in creating a safer environment.

"grave and gathering danger."

What, precisely, standard is that? Alliteration is not a standard. Do the words "grave and gathering" tell us anything? What does it mean for danger to "gather?" Is that when danger's underpants are wrinkled? - Rob

Perhaps it's when danger and danger's friends loiter in the food court at the mall, wearing low-slung trousers and making shoppers nervous.

The obvious result of this type of analysis (when used with this type of mind-set) is that all war, if called preventative, is justified.

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_12_05_fafblog_archive.html#110238611093456642

I think this analysis sidesteps the important issues of preventative war completely. The difficulty of preventative war is not justifying its legitmacy in the abstract, even the Bush administration can successfully make that argument. Instead, it is the application of preventative war that we should be worried about. Posner and Beckner here have supplied quaint formulas with general terms, but have avoided the issue of fleshing out those general terms with anything that has real meaning. For example, how do you calculate the probability of an Iraqi attack and its potential magnitude?

Forget the preventive part and lets just talk about "a cost benefit analysis" for going to war. I believe that Bush made the decision to go to war because Iraq was weak and poorly able to defend itself, Iraq was already demonized in the US and Iraq has huge oil reserves. He believed that the cost of attacking Iraq was low and the benefits high. So he decided in favor of a war of conquest.

Another comment: Maybe there should be a variable in the equation that represents the probability that the intelligence used to determine the likelihood of attack and the magnitude of the attack is actually correct.

"I believe that Bush made the decision to go to war because Iraq was weak and poorly able to defend itself, Iraq was already demonized in the US and Iraq has huge oil reserves."

the first intelligent thing I have read on this blog, including the actual entries.

"The evidence we have indicates that the sanctions were working quite well." - Rob

Liar or fool?

Sanctions working well? I guess if 500,000 children dead from preventable diseases like typhus and cholera means working well then sure.
Of course that kind of death rate isn't stable in a country with little to no imigration so that poster was correct too, the sanctions were NOT
sustainable. Too bad, because anyone should know
that killing children by repeatedly bombing the water treatment plants and denying imports of chlorine is a GREAT way to deter tyrannical despots like Saddam from killing people for fun... oh wait...

Of course the very fact that the sanctions DID take this kind of human toll is a fringe position in this country. Says a lot about our fair and balanced mass media eh?

Oh, and in case it isn't obvious, that first paragraph was written in a mood of outraged sarcasm.

I love Miles but I don't think his life was necessarily worth more than a lumberjack's, seems like the sort of thing one has to look at ex ante.
Society is often quite wrong about who is going to make a contribution, (Witness Einstein's C average in school,) so the best bet is to strive for substantive equality and see what happens.

"Of course the very fact that the sanctions DID take this kind of human toll is a fringe position in this country. Says a lot about our fair and balanced mass media eh?"

It might, assuming there's any truth to your figures. If not, then it may very well say a lot about you.

"Society is often quite wrong about who is going to make a contribution, (Witness Einstein's C average in school,) so the best bet is to strive for substantive equality and see what happens."

Courts are often quite wrong about who is guilty; that certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't make an effort to ascertain who is guilty and who is not. By the same token, it seems equally advisable to take note that certain type of people are more likely to be productive members of society than others.

I see that much of the discussion is dedicated to the politics of the Iraq decision. Fine if your point is domestic politics, but it doesn't move the ball down the field on the essential issue at hand: "How ought we to respond to the to the threat of proliferation?"

I am trying to distill the preventative war/preemptive war issue to its nub. It is really about WMD and a potential WMD attack on the US. We already seem to accept that if you observe a huge conventional army massing on your border as in WWI that you might do something about it. I don't believe anyone here is arguing that point.

So we are talking about WMD and the potential for a surprise attack on the US using WMD. Lets visualize what is at stake so we don't stray off into absurdities and petty arguments. Visualize in your mind a surprise WMD attack on the US. Now, use that "hindsight" to ask yourself, "What is clear to me now?"

You may adopt a hawk of pacifist position based on this hindsight. In either case you can now argue from an informed position and not a position of wishful thinking. In either case, your arguments will be better.

You will see that there is a philosophical issue and also a rational calculation. Don't confuse the two (as I have seen with some of the partial proability arguments). Argue one at a time based on a premise of the other.

Robert wrote in response to Rob:

"The evidence we have indicates that the sanctions were working quite well." - Rob

Liar or fool?

Are you asking Rob, or Colin Powell, who said this to Congress in May of 2001:

Senator Bennett: Mr. Secretary, the U.N. sanctions on Iraq expire the beginning of June. We've had bombs dropped, we've had threats made, we've had all kinds of activity vis-a-vis Iraq in the previous administration. Now we're coming to the end. What's our level of concern about the progress of Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs?

Secretary Powell: The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn't have the capacity it had 10 or 12 years ago. It has been contained.

Ah, well, he's just the Secretary of State. What does he know. LIAR!

Corey;

You said:

Sanctions working well? I guess if 500,000 children dead from preventable diseases like typhus and cholera means working well then sure.

Of course that kind of death rate isn't stable in a country with little to no imigration so that poster was correct too, the sanctions were NOT sustainable. Too bad, because anyone should know

I think, though, that your critique is actually on "the left" here. The sanctions were both sustainable and effective as they were.

Your quip (and it is mine too) was that the sanctions were overbroad and that (like Powell) thought that we should have moved to "smart" sanctions.

But as Powell said, the sanctions were "working" in the sense of keeping Hussein relatively impotent -- and thus, the "probability" that he'd attack or leack WsMD to terrorists to use to attack us, remained very low.

Our leaders work with imperfect information, and make the best decisions possible. Any state with WMDs needs to be handled with kid gloves and deterred. If they were about to launch an attack upon us, and lacked second-strike capability, I would be the first to advocate bombing them into the Stone Age.

Ah, but there's the nub, how do you know if (and when) they are "about" to launch an attack? How long before the (admittedly uncertain) "expected date" of an attack is it permissible to attack? What if we guess wrong and the attack comes while we're waiting? I suppose my own bias would be on the side of caution with the security of the United States, and I would want our leaders to err on the side of intervening too soon rather than too late.

Following Cato's remark:

Now, one has to consider the last restraint: MAD.

Remember, the premise of MAD was that both players were rational actors. Another was that they had something dear to lose by retaliation should the countries in which the decision makers operate through be annihilated. The final dilemma is that the initial victim should see something to be gained by retaliation once attacked and so the retaliation should be predictable up to the capability remaining of the victim.

As long as one wants to use Iraq as an example, it is worthwhile contemplating the effect of deterrence (not once but twice) on Saddam where there was an army massed at the border.

QED

(more MAD considerations at the link on my name)

I am depressed by the results I see from two reasonably sharp intellects and it has prompted this quick ramble:

Posner's whole discussion is a childish example and misleading - would that cost/benefit calculations be so simple or that moral costs and future risks be so easily estimated. You trivialize the matter, offend the reader, and insult yourself when you discuss it thus. You seem to like looking at the practical effects of decisions, your model only pretends to do this. You insinuate cost benefit for the Iraq War justified it without being held accountable -otherwise what's the point of the highschoolish example. I'll go listen to your 2002 debate with Fletcher this weekend and see if you make any sense there. Your comments here are essentially pointless.

Becker closes with a strawman " Democratic governments have to recognize that they no longer have the luxury of waiting to respond until they are attacked." What do you mean no longer - they never really had that luxury. It's always been a question of threshold and yes that has to evolve - trivial point for you. Another strawman: imminence of a threat is not and never has been the necessary criteria - it's important because it is a sufficient criteria. It was the administration's evoking of implied imminence - chemical weapons drones, bio-weapons labs, mushroom clouds etc. that brought it to the fore. They made shit up because they couldn't make frame a threat that would justify the war. So the critics of this preemptive war were right and you have the balls to criticize them! You say, next time we might be right? Shame on such intellectual dishonesty.

Becker only mentions punishment as a deterrence when it is reasonable expectation that in either form (preemptive or reactionary), punishment is typically be more expensive than persuasion, inducement or social pressure. Punishment is usually also inherently an admission of failure by the punisher.

Others have commented on the moral and religious aspects which are both a criteria and a cost. Innocents die, war corrupts your own, and your moral standing in the world can be diminished, ... (Making the world fear your incompetent foreign policy is small compensation.)

You suspect, justifiably , the motives and intentions of someone like Sadam Hussein (bin Laden's intentions are not very suspect - just his strategy and capabilities), yet you don't suspect Bush's. It was clear in the fall of 02 that there was no nuclear threat, and no bio or chemical threat. And until that point, I had been willing to support action because I had been told and no Senator had challenged, that there was a building nuclear threat. By November, the nuclear threat was shown to be bogus. It was clear in January, by the administrations reaction to UN inspections that war was the choice, not a last option. Until then, I could still support the threat of military action to enforce terms of surrender but it became clear to anyone who cared to see, that Bush's intentions were not just to enforce the terms of surrender. After that point, only those with egos too invested in their earlier decisions could continue to support the administrations drive to war.

And it turned out that all those shrill "leftists" who claimed that Bush was a war monger were correct. (and he has shown his incompetence to boot). Those the country trusted led us astray. You should be attacking them for their manufacturing and selling of a horrible and costly war (probably pushed for their own political advantage).

Becker - In arguing in '03 that the war was not about oil, you correctly surmised that the war would be costly. Yet you failed to see that the administration thought the war would be short and recovery would be quick and that US companies would get to play in a growing Iraqi oil industry. They would no longer have to argue for restricted Iraqi sales. Lower oil prices would be expected. Economic growth follows ... Yes, oil was a piece of the grand strategy that was to pay off economically and politically. And oops, your $150billion maximum cost - wrong. And that war premium priced into oil at $35/per barrel, we haven't seen that in awhile. Your claim the war was about Sadam's threat "to his neighbors, his people, and to nations around the world" can now be convincingly argued as wrong. And similarly for your wife's comments that "many Iraqis are secular" (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/iraqi_03-09.html) or maybe they're all dead now.

I am unfamiliar with Mr. Becker and have been both positively and but mostly negatively impressed with Mr. Posner in the past. For a judge, he thinks too often with blinders. I for one, won't be reading the blog regularly but welcome to the discourse.

It is not often that I can confidently tell a both a nobel prize winner and a federal judge that they are full of sh*t but consider it done.

P.S.
An example of where your type of non-selfcritical thinking leads, on 12/10/04 (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2004_12_05_dish_archive.html#110265097218978370), Andrew Sullivan stated that Bush deserved "credit" for taking the political risk associated with the invasion of Iraq. The proper word is "responsibility" (especially since it was more a political ploy than anything else). It would translate to "credit" if it they had correctly sorted through uncertain intelligence. It would be "credit" if their violations of domestic law and international norms were justified. It would be "credit" if they had executed the effort in a manner that upheld the honor and principles of this nation and the rule of law (consider Guantanimo, Abu Ghraib, collective punishment, extraordinary rendition, ...). This says nothing about the responsibility for the miserable execution of the effort. People don't deserve "credit" for being brave enough doing horrible heinous things or be bullheaded about their incompetence. (I'll resist the obvious temptation to provide an allusion that would invoke Godwin's law - after all, were only talking about $200,000,000,000+ and100,000+ dead so far and the intent isn't genocide). People like you should be examining why you failed to see through the lies rather than saying - "well next time they might be right". Rather than make excuses, figure out how decisions should be made and sold before we needlessly spend 300 BILLION DOLLARS and KILL 100,000+ people. You create strawmen to attack the people who were correct when you were wrong. You're arguments are lame, you should be apologizing. Think about it.

Oh - I see I'm not alone in my opinions: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=5269

>"Of course the very fact that the sanctions DID >take this kind of human toll is a fringe >position in this country. Says a lot about our >fair and balanced mass media eh?"

"It might, assuming there's any truth to your figures. If not, then it may very well say a lot about you."

Seems like the sort of thing you could look up with ease given the nature of this whole internet thing. I don't expect people to assume that I am credible but if you do doubt, the polite thing to do is google for the numbers yourself before implying that I am lying about them. They really aren't that hard to find, unless you are only
willing to trust Mr. Ailes' talking points.

Have a nice day!

Posner answers a letter in the 12/20/04 New Republic pretty much admitting to being a philosophical idealist. "If he [the letter writer, a chemist] and I examined the same body of chemical data, we would see very different things because of very different theoretical presuppositions." This is staright out of Kuhn, even Rorty. The world is, as it were, invented by our theories, instead of our theories being developed based on what we perceive of the world. Which then reduces to solipsism. (I critique this side of Posner in my book Objectivity, Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life [Ashgate, 2004].) If, however, his point is that the chemists is better able to understand what he sees, then why not just say, "The chemist will know what is going on while I will not."

"Seems like the sort of thing you could look up with ease given the nature of this whole internet thing. I don't expect people to assume that I am credible but if you do doubt, the polite thing to do is google for the numbers yourself before implying that I am lying about them."

I simply outlined the two possibilities. For all I know, what you're saying is accurate, but as it was your statement, you have the burden of proof, not I. Provide a citation, and I will gladly look them up.

What was the ultimate objective of the sanctions? I'd say initially the intent was to 1) contain Saddam and 2) to encourage Saddam to change. The sanctions accomplished the first objective, and had debatable results on the second. But a huge unintended consequence cropped up -- the significant suffering of the Iraqi people as whatever precautions were in place to help the people were instead looted and reinforced Saddam's rule. This is what made the sanctions unsustainable and ultimately unsuccessful. It became more and more apparent that as long as Saddam was in power the Iraqi people would suffer, and Saddam's regime would remain a huge wildcard in the Middle East. In the end, sanctions appeared to be prolonging this untenable situation.

You can make a lot of judgements about the righteousness of going to war in Iraq. But there shouldn't be that much debate about the feasibility of the sanctions -- they were not having the intended effect. While they did reduce Saddam as a threat to other nations, their unintended consequences were a big problem, from the unjust suffering of the Iraqi people, to helping Saddam maintain his dictatorship, to all the debatable stuff about WMD suspicions and terrorism.

A lot of people look at the war in Iraq as a tragedy. Personally I think it is perhaps a bigger tragedy that the decision to go to war was framed so poorly around the questions of WMD and terrorism. There were a lot of other factors like the unsustainability and unjustness of the sanctions which deserved to be considered much more.

Why are so few people serious about the proper role of the military in a free society? As per the suggestion of George Washington, why isn't it pretty clear that only defensive force is justified? Sure, one need not wait until missiles are in the air but "clear and present danger" does not seem to apply to Iraq's military posture toward the USA back when we invaded them.

Preemptive war is great if you have perfect, infallible numbers--as McNamara would surely be quick to point out the methods of computation regarding our prosecution of Vietnam were correct only the numbers were wrong.

Using cost-benefit-analysis to evaluate when preventive war is justified (or efficient?) is surely an interesting intellectual exercise. Let us assume, for the sake of an argument, that an Islamic country feels threatened by United States. Should it attack it? Posner would probably argue that it should not, because as things are, USA is the strongest military power on earth and consequently, the costs of counter-attack could be enormous for that country. Yet the country could negotiate with Osama Bin Laden and pay Al-Qaeda to initiate the attack, so that US military and administration would not know there was some state behind the attack (considering the mistakes US intelligence has done in the past few years, not a far-fetched assumption). How should one wage a war against United States? I guess that from an economic point of view, nuclear weapons would be least costly and most effective. Thereby a nuclear attack against Washington D.C., Pentagon, New York and so forth, could actually be a good alternative, if a country feels threatened by "American imperialism". Or let's assume that the whole world, United States excluded, would feel threatened by American military power. Should they combine their powers and attack it? The answer depends, I assume, whether the possibility of victory would be high enough (more than 50 %?). But let me emphasize that however intellectually satisfying cost-benefit-analysis is when analyzing international affairs, other things should probably also be taken into consideration (like moral philosophical arguments, or, especially in Christmas, the teachings of Jesus).

Using cost-benefit-analysis to evaluate when preventive war is justified (or efficient?) is surely an interesting intellectual exercise. Let us assume, for the sake of an argument, that an Islamic country feels threatened by United States. Should it attack it? Posner would probably argue that it should not, because as things are, USA is the strongest military power on earth and consequently, the costs of counter-attack could be enormous for that country. Yet the country could negotiate with Osama Bin Laden and pay Al-Qaeda to initiate the attack, so that US military and administration would not know there was some state behind the attack (considering the mistakes US intelligence has done in the past few years, not a far-fetched assumption). How should one wage a war against United States? I guess that from an economic point of view, nuclear weapons would be least costly and most effective. Thereby a nuclear attack against Washington D.C., Pentagon, New York and so forth, could actually be a good alternative, if a country feels threatened by "American imperialism". Or let's assume that the whole world, United States excluded, would feel threatened by American military power. Should they combine their powers and attack it? The answer depends, I assume, whether the possibility of victory would be high enough (more than 50 %?). But let me emphasize that however intellectually satisfying cost-benefit-analysis is when analyzing international affairs, other things should probably also be taken into consideration (like moral philosophical arguments, or, especially in Christmas, the teachings of Jesus).

thanks all
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