Thread by @brenkjm

A fascinating and (for me, personally) very relatable discussion from @juliagalef and @mattyglesias about why they were mistaken to support the 2003 Iraq invasion as students.
rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-2…
(Transcript: rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/storage/transc…)

Here's the lessons I took:

1) Beware thinking you've heard the best arguments for a position. Both J & M were partly persuaded to a pro-war position by hanging out with hysterical anti-war students (e.g. some campaigning for North Korea to *have* nuclear weapons)

(To consider: What are the crazy students *right* about in today's politics that you ignore because you find them annoying?)

2) Beware being persuaded by the fact that smart, informed people support something. For J&M this was Democratic leadership, T Blair, and other liberals "reluctantly concluding" war was necessary

(Unfortunately this still describes how I come to 90% of my positions. It's just that today the right-thinking people I follow aren't politicians but Various Bloggers on the Internet)

3) On a less meta-level, @juliagalef's main update seems to be that she's less worried about nuclear proliferation. How bad has it been that N Korea now has nukes?

(Not completely clear as she's interviewing so spends less time giving her position)

4) The update from @mattyglesias that resonated most with me was about how unpredictable war is. E.g. it wasn't expected that the US would botch the occupation (at least my memory of the debates) but if I'd known more about war, I should have expected *something* like that.

This feels like the biggest thing I got wrong on Iraq and I'm embarrassed by it. Tho it is interesting how much the case for intervention rests on recent empirical experience. Bosnia, Rwanda, S Leone, Kosovo etc made intervention attractive in 00s. Iraq makes it unattractive now.

If things had turned out different I'd probably not have realised what I'd got wrong. E.g. what if the occupation had been better managed (not disbanding army etc) and Iraq had turned out much better? What if North Korea does drop a bomb and kill millions?

Also this from @michaelkeenan_0

https://twitter.com/michaelkeenan_0/status/1357552340765614080

@threadreaderapp unroll