Iraq and the Danger of Psychological Entrapment --WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/03/AR2006120300932.html?referrer=email

Iraq and the Danger of Psychological Entrapment

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, December 4, 2006; A02



...a widespread phenomenon in human behavior known as entrapment. When you invest yourself in something, it is exceedingly difficult to discard your investment. What is devilish about entrapment is not just that it can result in ever greater losses, but that those losses get you ever more entrapped, because now you have even more invested.

Plous, a social psychologist and author of "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making," said experiments show that psychological entrapment comes in at least four guises: the investment trap, in which we try to recover sunk costs by throwing good money after bad; the time delay trap, in which a short-term benefit carries the seed of long-term problems; the deterioration trap, in which things that started out well slowly get worse; and the ignorance trap, in which hidden risks surface suddenly.

"What is remarkable is that the war in Iraq is a kind of super trap that has all these elements," Plous said. "Some weeks things look better, and then they look worse and then there is a setback. What we need is to take a step back and ask, 'If we were faced with the choice today without sunk costs, what decision would we make?' "

Plous is talking about the quick military victory followed by the zigzag decline into nightmare: the lack of intelligence on the ground about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction; the hundreds of billions of dollars invested to fight the war; and above all, the lives of thousands of Americans that have been lost.

Plous said his alarm bells went off when he realized that President Bush was explicitly using the language of entrapment in speeches to rally support for the war. "Retreating from Iraq would dishonor the service of our brave men and women who have sacrificed in that country and have given their lives in that country, which would mean their sacrifice would be in vain," the president said recently.

k&r

Proof that I cannot hold two separate thoughts in same mind before breakfast...

or spell or type...

weeks.

I've been under the distinct impression that we've been in a downhill spirall since the days of 'Mission Accomplished'.

Lives, geopolitical control, national prestige, as well as the credibility of the leaders who choose military action are all on the line making cutting one's losses let alone being pounded with the costs losing too wretched to accept.

So political leaders delusionally stay in the game upping the ante hoping the next roll of the dice will give us a big time win that makes everything turn out right.

It usually doesn't.

And everyone say's we'll never do that again without an exit strategy. But we do, arguing that we are compelled to sit down to play craps as if there is really something called "responsible gambling" when the wager is human lives.

You'd think national leaders would realize this before deciding to press their power, risking everything in the War God's games of pitch and toss.

They rarely do.

Instead these decisions are typically made when the leaders are drunk on power or righteousnss, or both and they enter the game under the delusion that God has loaded the dice in their favor.