A scientific counterfactual

A professor at a Canadian research university has published a new “report” that concludes, supposedly “overwhelmingly,” that, had Al Gore been elected President in 2000 the Supreme Court not selected George W. Bush as the winner of the 2000 presidential campaign, then he too would have invaded Iraq.  Besides the (very salient) silliness of purporting to conduct a “study” on a clearly fictitious counterfactual, this conclusion is — like any “solution” of a counterfactual — based on a reading of the context that skews toward what the speculator is seeking to “prove.”  This graf, for example:

Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore “[would have been] compelled … to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest.”

Sure, this was the context in which Bush et al. misled the country into war; but what Professor Frank Harvey is neglecting to account for is the extent to which the Bush administration’s own manipulations shaped this context.  The contrived notion that Saddam Hussein was in in any way connected to the 9/11 hijackers only flourished as “accepted wisdom” because the administration unceasingly beat these drums of fabrication.  Would a President Gore have manufactured evidence of uranium from Niger?  Unlikely, but I’m not pretending to be scientific here.

(image from flickr user World Economic Forum under a Creative Commons license)

The ten most important things that happened in Africa this year

The BBC has a fun ten-question quiz on “the good, the bad, and the bizarre” in Africa this year (it’s mostly the “bizarre”).  Check it out, and find out things like whether the Chadian government did or did not stretch a big fishing net over the entrance to the capital to prevent rebels from entering.

For what it’s worth, I scored 5 out of 10, making me a “yahoo yahoo” (you’ll see).

Everyone who knows about Somalia is named Mark Bowden

Based on the book by...one of those Mark Bowdens

I had assumed that when The Washington Post commissioned Mark Bowden to write an op-ed about Somalia, it was because he had written a book called “Black Hawk Down,” which then got turned into a popular movie, which subsequently became the lodestar of American policy toward the region.  But then Bowden admitted he hasn’t been to the country since 1997.  And sure, the country is still a mess, anarchy still reigns, and all hell is perpetually on the brink of being loosed (except with pirates this time), but surely readers could use a fresher perspective.  Yes.  And that’s where the other Mark Bowden comes in:

More than $900 million will be needed next year just to avoid famine and disease, according to Mark Bowden (no relation), the U.N. humanitarian and resident coordinator for Somalia. The European Union and the United States have begun to chase pirates more aggressively, but that’s like swatting at bees while ignoring the hive.

This is way too much of a coincidence.

(image from flickr user James Spahr under a Creative Commons license)