Meritricious versus Meritorious Arguments

Read "Falling on His Sword: Colin Powell's most significant moment turned out to be his lowest" by Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post Magazine, October 1, 2006.

This is a long article that appears to have been carefully researched. A portion of the article deals with the writing of the speech Colin Powell gave at the United Nations presenting the U.S. case for going to war in Iraq. Starting with a speech written by staff in the White House, Powell's State Department staff and Powell himself revised and rewrote the presentation. They moved to the CIA headquarters for much of the effort, in order to work with the Director of the CIA and his staff. That move facilitated their ability to check details of the case that was being made with the analysts in the CIA and to actually see the evidence behind proposed statements.

Years of on the ground efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or evidence in the Iraqi files of contacts with Al Qaida have proven fruitless. Intelligence agencies have stepped back from their earlier estimates. It now seems clear that the message delivered by Powell was flat wrong.

How could a group of very able men, supported by the full analytic capacity of the U.S. government screw up so badly. The article suggests that a part of the explanation is that they started from a very poor draft, and part is that the White House had not given them the time they requested to review the evidence and revise the draft.

I was especially struck by this paragraph in the article:

Powell later recalled that most of their time was spent "trimming the garbage" of the White House's overwrought verbiage and uncorroborated specifics from the speech. Once that was done, Wilkerson concluded long afterward, "what we were all involved in -- groupthink isn't the right word -- it was a process of putting the data to points in the speech rather than challenging the data itself." As they probed for proof of Hussein's lies, no one thought of looking for evidence that might have raised questions about their assumptions that the weapons existed.

This blog is about Knowledge for Development, and the paragraph seems to say something important about knowledge processes in government.

Nominally, Powell and his helpers were putting together a presentation of the evidence that would enable the community of nations to come to come to a decision. Powell, however, was advocating a position in support of a decision that had already been made by the White House. I infer from the article that DeYoung believes that Powell and his staff wanted to present only evidence that they felt was credible, and I find that likely myself. On the other hand, I am willing to believe that some of the participants in the discussion were more interested in the advocacy than in the credibility.

Obviously one thinks of that this is another example of the wisdom in the phrase, "a camel is a horse put together by a committee". The White House participants in this committee had different objectives than the CIA members, and both had different objectives than Powell and his staff.

I suggest too, that it is very hard to be completely objective about the evidence when you work for the President of the United States, and he wants the analysis to come out in a specific conclusion.

I am impressed by Wilkerson's insight that the team had set the wrong objective. They were seeking evidence to support a predetermined result, not seeking
* to place all the relevant evidence in view with estimates of the credibility of each assertion, nor
* to place the chain of logic in view, with estimates of the validity of each inference and of the overall conclusion.

I believe it is not only possible, but common for people thrown together in such a task to get more involved in developing a convincing presentation than in developing a credible case. The former is meritricious, the latter meritorious.

When mathematicians are offered a new proof of an important theorem, they may spend months examining the postulates and logical steps in the proof. The decision to accept a complex proof as adequate is a social one, and it is based on a lack of ability to find false steps or false postulates. But acceptance of such a proof is based on a very sound knowledge process.

The decision of the public to accept Colin Powell's argument, which the majority of the U.S. public did, is not based on that kind of process. It rests in large part on the credence we invest in the person making the argument. It is done quickly, and based on a superficial understanding of the evidence and analysis. Such judgments clearly have difficulty separating a meritorious case from a meritricious one make by a man we believe credible.