Cal Thomas - Victory or Defeat - False Dichotomies and Zero Sum Games

May 01, 2007
Defeat, Retreat, and Repeat (RealClearPolitics
[The title for this at the Anchorage Daily News was "War opponents are wrong; we must stay and fight to win"]
By Cal Thomas
For the sake of argument, let's say former CIA Director George Tenet is right in his book and that Vice President Dick Cheney pushed too hard with questionable or inaccurate intelligence because of a predisposition to go to war in Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. So what? We can't go back and fix the mistakes of the past. Only two choices are available: victory or defeat.

Thomas is presenting us with what is called by many "a false dichotomy". Don Lindsay calls it 'excluded middle:"

"Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation):
assuming there are only two alternatives when in fact there are more. For example, assuming Atheism is the only alternative to Fundamentalism, or being a traitor is the only alternative to being a loud patriot."

To get the point, we could ask Cal Thomas what he means by victory? Maybe he'd say:

Americans can claim victory when whatever Iraqis are left have a peaceful, democratic nation; with an economy that affords Iraqis at least as high an average standard of living as they had under Saddam Hussein; that is friendly to American business interests and has a strong enough military to prevent takeover from Iran or other neighbors.

If not this, what are you willing to settle for Mr. Thomas? What would a victory look like to you? Because I can't see any possible way we'll end up with the one I've pictured here. Here's an alternative to that one.

Americans can claim victory when all Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are destroyed and Saddam Hussein is brought to justice.

In this case, we can pull out now.

By giving us the choice of 'victory or defeat' Thomas is giving us no choice. If you buy into that false dichotomy, there's only one option. But as the two descriptions of victory above show, there are a lot of variables he hasn't factored in and probably an infinite number of points on a line from the first victory described above and some equally extreme defeat (maybe Islamic forces led by Osama Bin Laden taking over the United States.)

Let's look at some of the variables:

Number of dead Iraqis (but then this would have to be broken down into types of dead Iraqis - military or civilian; Sunni or Shiite; male or female, under 15 or over 15; wealthy or poor; Southerners or Northerns; educated or un-educated; you get the picture. And if you are thinking these are all false dichotomies too, I'm happy.
Number of dead Americans, non-Iraqis (you can fill in the details here)
Cost to get to the end of the war (we've already discussed lives, but there is also money, prestige, impact on US economy, on familes of soldiers - dead, wounded - mentally or physically; level of environmental degradation, archeological damage, and on and on)
Benefits(here we could list anything from ownership of Iraqi oil reserves; increased skills and abilities -knowledge of Arabic or English, skills with weapons, flying planes, inspiring others, better understanding of geography, and on and on; greater power; and I'll leave it for any readers who make it this far to think of other benefits)
Distribution of the costs and benefits (who ends up with which costs and which benefits will affect the balance of power, in individual families, individual countries, and in the world)

Of course, I'm assuming that Cal Thomas knows all this. His purpose wasn't an attempt to clarify what we know about American defense policy and to help find a path to a policy that is built on models that describe cause and effect relationships that, when implemented, lead to the predicted outcomes. Getting us more accurate models than the one that said, "if American troops take over Bagdad, the people of Iraq will welcome them like heroes." No, people who use rhetorical devices like false dichotomies are trying to hoodwink people into accepting their argument by limiting their choices. In this case he is trying to discredit George Tenet who's written a book critical of Bush by making it look like he's calling for defeat.

While I would hope the reader can see that Thomas' "Only two choices are available: victory or defeat" is a ridiculous false dichotomy, I'm more interested in readers spotting other dichotomies and learning ways to expose them. "What do you mean by victory?" "What do you mean by defeat?" "What do you mean by traitor?" "Who is them?" "Who is us?" etc.

And kids shouldn't graduate from high school without being able to spot and expose the most common logical fallacies. This link or the Don Lindsay link above will give you enough to cover most situations.

And what's the connection to Zero-Sum games? This post is getting pretty long already. Briefly, zero-sum games are those in which there is a winner and a loser, or at least when the players think that way. What the winner gains, the loser loses. It's like sharing a pie. What I get to eat, you can't eat. By framing our options as Victory or Defeat, Thomas is using zero-sum game thinking. But, as I showed above with all the variables involved (number of deaths, other costs, various possible benefits and how they are distributed, etc.) we see that the outcome isn't either/or. It's variable (non-zero sum game is often called variable sum game). We could have 'victory' by killing every last Iraqi and hundreds of thousands of Americans or we could have declared victory when there were clearly no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was brought to justice. This is a real simplification, but I at least wanted to make the connection. For those who don't know these terms already, you can look them up. I haven't found a good simple link on this, but try wikipedia for game theory, zero-sum games, and non-zero sum games.