The Age of the Unthinkable (24 page)

The first flaw we can learn from was the notion that the war in Iraq would have a clean, fast end — a way of thinking and
seeing that ensured no plans stretched out to nearly the time that would be required. This in-and-out sensibility was captured
in what is perhaps the single most famous line of the Bush presidency, from his speech of September 14, 2001, at the National
Cathedral, in which he said, “This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour,
of our choosing.” This poetic idea contained a very fundamental misapprehension, not only about 9/11 but about the world in
general: there’s no final whistle in international politics. As we’ve seen, sandpile energy never stops, because complexity
is always expanding. There is rarely an end to conflicts or crises now. They simply change shape, but rarely toward a
simpler
landscape of the sort Bush and his aides hoped for. Remember Simon Levin’s observation that complexities tend to accumulate?
That insight clearly didn’t inform the thinking of men like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who told Congress
in February 2003 that “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than
it would take to conduct the war itself.” And the White House’s best guess of the number of troops that would still be on
the ground in Iraq in the fall of 2003 was 30,000 to 40,000. (When General Eric Shinseki suggested that something on the order
of several hundred thousand troops would be needed, he paid for the insight with his job.)

To assume that an invasion could be run with a clear time limit was to ignore the nature of a complex world order (to say
nothing of the history of Iraq itself). You didn’t need to look at Holling’s dead lake ecosystems to learn this. Frankly,
it was a lesson that should have been clear from American experiences in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo — and even Afghanistan
in the 1980s, where walking away from the mob of Islamic warriors that the United States had once funded there allowed them
to grow, evolve, and change into the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Insurgent groups or military crises or financial panics aren’t
like those singing electric bears at Disneyland that snap off as soon as you walk out of the room. Complex global problems
keep growling, looking for ways to survive, and — if you’re not careful — may eventually come hunting for you. This is crucial
to keep in mind as we combat shape-changing dangers as different from each other as bank failures and Iran. Disrupting life
in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan only makes obsessive maintenance more important. At a fast glance, the flawed American
in-and-out view looks a lot like maximum sustainable yield: it assumed easy-to-map interactions, a bet that the “ecosystem”
of Iraq would settle into something stable that could be left to run itself, and a sense that the most important variables
could be predicted and managed like fish food. Dangerous externalities, from guerrillas’ grudges to enthusiastic disruption
from Iran, were footnoted.

This last idea, that Iraq would snap back to stability after the war, was exactly the sort of error that adaptive strategic
thinking might have caught before it was too late. The United States assumed, for instance, that most of Iraq’s major institutions,
from its ministries, like health and education, to telephones and electricity, would continue to work well after the initial
shock of the war had passed. No one planned for the possibility that they would collapse. In reality, however, the speed and
violence of the occupation left such a vacuum that the Iraqi government system folded in on itself, essential infrastructure
was looted and gutted, and the United States found itself facing a rapidly decaying country where security was impossible
and life for ordinary Iraqis became more dangerous with each passing day. One of the accidental ironies of the Iraq war was
that much of the valuable infrastructure American fighters had obsessed about protecting by using high-tech precision weapons
during combat was then trashed by the Iraqis themselves in the weeks after the war as U.S. soldiers helplessly watched. Combat
had gone very well, but the postwar the United States had planned for was built on that Nisbett error of focusing exclusively
on an easy-to-spot object (Saddam) and ignoring a host of serious dangers lurking in the surrounding context.

As a 2008 RAND report concluded, “Despite a predilection for questioning virtually all operational military assumptions from
several directions, and despite the existence of alternative analyses within the government, those charged with planning for
Iraq assumed that one particular scenario would play out and did not plan for other possible contingencies.” Indeed, American
leaders were so fixed on their invasion plan that they didn’t let the truth stand in their way. Confidently misleading the
public about what intelligence they had was yet another sign — recognized only too late — that those running the war had not
only ignored the context but weren’t even paying attention to the whole of the central image.

In fact, one of the more dangerous ideas about postwar Iraq reads like something out of a C. S. Holling case study: thinking
that a single variable — political reform — would determine the future of the country. The idea was that after U.S. forces
booted out and de-Baathified the Iraqi army, security would come from a strong constitution and an open democracy. In postwar
reports and in the biographies of men such as Tommy Franks and George Tenet, you find a confident sense that safety for Iraqis
would emerge naturally once the country had new rules. So the United States spent billions constructing a “green zone” under
the illusion that creating a safe haven for an acting parliament would somehow bring the country into an easy order. But this
was ridiculous, as soldiers on the ground began insisting almost immediately. Sure, a constitution and a parliament mattered,
but without basic security they would be worse than pointless. There would be no certainty about
anything
in Iraq, least of all a political order, without security. As Holling and a group of other scholars had observed about wildlife
settings, “In contrast to an efficiency-driven, command-and-control approach, management that accepts uncertainty and seeks
to build resilience can sustain social-ecological systems, especially during periods of transformation following disturbance.”
This, in a nutshell, should have been Iraq. It took the White House more than three years to change its policy.

How might Holling have fought the postwar in Iraq? How would he have prepared? Well, he’d have delivered an adaptive management
approach that didn’t lock in simple ideas. His plan probably would have involved building up a huge reserve of skills and
people and tools — everything from translators to health and security experts. He’d have been more focused on how many Arabic
speakers he had who understood Iraq than on how many smart bombs were available. He would have made sure we delivered more
toys to Iraqi children than we did soldiers to their communities (and made sure those soldiers knew how Iraqi kids played
and learned). He would have restocked libraries and made sure any homes destroyed by the fighting were rebuilt and were twice
as nice as they’d been beforehand — that old Hizb’allah reconstruction trick. He’d also have been ready to move fast: no postwar
vacuum for him — after all, you never knew which particular grievance (water shortages, no electricity, a mosque bombing)
could avalanche into a disaster. He would have put stability above everything and not relied on the idea that a paper constitution
could ever control the full dynamism of a just-invaded nation.

In his analysis of what works best in managing chaotic ecosystems, Holling looked at places such as the Mae Nam Ping basin
in Thailand and the Kristianstads Vattenrike in Sweden, where adaptive management had worked to save species or stop ecosystem
collapse. Among the elements common to successfully resilient systems was an ability to constantly reconceptualize problems,
to generate a diversity of ideas, to communicate with everyone from fishermen to truckers, and to encourage novelty and even
small-scale revolts or crises and recoveries instead of waiting for a big, unanticipated collapse. Holling would have invaded
Iraq with technicians, with ideas, and with a far better sense of the landscape than the United States had. He would have
engaged Iraq from top to bottom instead of relying on a few elites to help reorder the country. He would have amassed his
bank of translators, cultural experts, engineers, and other skilled operatives well in advance so they could begin building
relationship networks that would hold up under pressure. In fact, this would have been so urgent that he would have postponed
an invasion until he felt he could manage much of what lay ahead, which he would have characterized in one word: uncertainty.
That Wolfowitz line about needing fewer troops
after
the war than during? Holling would have labeled that as exactly what it was: a marker of a very maladaptive system at work.

There’s one final point we need to come to terms with. It’s very tempting for us to look in the mirror and remark that we
live in systems that are already very resilient or to think that the policies we choose are resilient or adaptive enough.
Certainly this is true in a relative sense. We’re much better off than that creaking centralized system Gorbachev was trying
to repair; our ability to change and adjust in Iraq shows that we have some flexibility. But we should bear this in mind:
we are now tied to one another in ways we can’t see, through webs of finance or disease or information, and — here’s the dangerous
paradox — the more closely we’re bound, the less resilient we all become. Studies of food webs or trade networks, electrical
systems and stock markets, find that as they become more densely linked they also become
less
resilient; networks, after all, propagate and even amplify disturbances. Worse, the more efficient these networks are, the
faster they spread those dangers. Interconnections such as the ties between brokers and banks or between the health of every
passenger on a long-distance airplane flight are vehicles for sharing risk, for triggering hysteresis. In a simple linear
system, say one bank and one farm, you can map out the effects of a crisis as if you were plotting the route of falling dominoes.
But in a networked society, lit up by revolutionary change, such easy prediction is a fantasy. Drop a shock into a network
and you get, the strategist Edward Smith has written, “the chain reaction that is set off when a single ping-pong ball is
tossed onto a table covered with mouse traps upon which other ping-ping balls are balanced — an almost explosive reaction
whose direction and end-state cannot be predicted.”

The more closely we are bound together, the weaker we may become. Simon Levin, in his worried essay “Ecology for Bankers,”
included two charts: one of the financial system as it is, which looked like a giant dense hair ball, and the other of the
way regulators see the same system of interconnections, which looked like a child’s Lego project. His point was that we can’t
hope to manage or control systems that are tens of thousands of times more complex than our conceptions of them. So we have
to find ways to build resilience into the system itself instead of imposing it slapdash from the outside at times of crisis,
as if we were trying to repair an already buckling bridge. “Older models of systemic shocks in the financial system may no
longer fully capture the possible channels of propagation and feedback arising from major disturbances,” Levin and other colleagues
observed in a report for the Federal Reserve. “Nor can existing models account entirely for the increasing complexity of the
financial system.”

He could have been writing about any aspect of our lives in which unmappable interconnections bring speed, convenience, and
— in direct proportion to how speedy and convenient they are — danger. How much does resilience matter to a deeply secure
future? Think of each new relation or connection in our world as an unsprung ping-pong-ball trap. Every day now we are bound
more closely. We are less resilient at this moment than when you started reading this book, and we shall be less resilient
still when you finish. But those same connections, dangerous as they may be, also offer the best possible way to transmit
changes for radical decency. This table full of unsprung traps that seems to fatally imperil us is, understood properly, about
to be the key to our salvation.

One morning in August 1982, a British mathematician named James Moffat was sitting in his office in the Ministry of Defence
(MoD) in London when he received an urgent message. Moffat was then one of the MoD’s senior scientists. “Staff mathematician”
was perhaps not the most macho title in the British military establishment, but the link between science and warfare, one
that emerged long before the Royal Navy ruled the seas, assured at least that it was among the most influential. The urgent
message was in tune with other code-red dispatches flying around Whitehall that morning. Argentina had, rather improbably,
just invaded the Falkland Islands.

The British were desperate to stem the flow of Argentine soldiers and weapons now streaming through the lone airfield on the
islands, at Stanley, as if it were a duty-free store. This wasn’t an easy task. The Falklands are a twenty-hour flight from
London. The only plane that had a hope of getting all the way to Stanley was a Vulcan bomber, which would have to be refueled
in flight several times, and even the refuelers themselves would probably have to be refueled in midflight. The Vulcans, designed
to carry nuclear bombs, would need to be rerigged. But before any of this could be arranged, Moffat had to answer a math problem
for his commanders: “How many bombs do we need?”

Moffat returned to his office and, this being a few years before the advent of online information, ordered up a map of the
Stanley airfield from archives in the basement of his building. Then he poked around a bit and found the name of the firm
(a British firm, fortunately) that had built the runway there. They gave him a detailed description of the runway’s structure
so that he could calculate how to bomb it with utmost efficiency. Moffat then set out to determine the number of craters he
needed to make on the runway and, importantly, the number of bombs the planes would have to drop to guarantee that many holes.
Tossing bombs onto a runway is a bit like throwing darts, and he wanted to calculate the most probable distribution of hits.
Moffat worked through the math, wrote up a report, and, almost as an afterthought, tucked in a copy of the map and the hand-marked
plastic strips he had used to chart the possible craters. Within hours, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was herself laying
the strips on the map, counting the blast holes Moffat had predicted, and, finally, ordering Vulcan planes into the air. The
operation was code-named Black Buck. Just days after Moffat received his first call, the bombs had landed, and, as Moffat’s
math had suggested, one had hit the runway hard enough to knock it out.