Bode Hamas

Mark connects Bode Miller and Hamas in one essay at 3 Quarks Daily. The "Bode Miller Problem":

Consider Condoleezza Rice and Hamas’ electoral victory. The Secretary of State noted after Hamas’ victory at the polls that “I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing.” In fact, me, my wife, my cat, and The Economist Newspaper all knew this was coming down the track. Why then didn’t the Secretary of State, with all the resources at her disposal, not have an inkling that such a thing was going on? Perhaps what might be called ‘the Bode Miller problem’ was at work here too?...

...Filtering the data to see only one trend negates potential futures. Seeing Hamas as a trend that cannot be stopped inevitably leads one to conclude that isolation and punishment is the only way forward. But Hamas has only ever known isolation and punishment. As such, proposals to cut-off aid in order to encourage capitulation is to fundamentally misread the data. True, there has been no IRA-like change yet, but to address the situation as an inevitable conflict preordained in the data will surely bring about such a conflict since we are blind to other possibilities.

So is expecting Bode Miller to win five gold medals the same as expecting Hamas to never change? Yes, but with one difference. Whereas Miller ‘failed’ on his own terms given the competition and the randomness of the day (after all, he might win six world cup races in a row in 2007), Hamas may only really ‘fail’ in the eyes of the Palestinians if the West and Israel are seen to make them fail. Key to the West and Israel doing this is to pick the data points they want to see (Hamas as unchanging and violent due to the trend line of the data) and project it forward.

UPDATE:

I've thought about this a wee bit further, and I'm not sure how much explanatory force it has. It does if we assume Rice and the administration are entirely cherry-pickingly clueless. Clearly, the administration is incompetent. I've said over and over on this blog that there was good analysis and good evidence prior to the war (and most administration policies) that predicted precisely how the war has unfolded, contrary to Bush administration rose-petal and candycane rhetoric. But can they be this incompetent? The appearance-reality distinction may be metaphysically and epistemically problematic, but it's ubiquitous in politics.

Maybe if we read this a bit differently it makes more sense. That is, what appears more to be the case is that the administration began with a set of assumptions that proved to be false. The overarching assumption was that post-Cold War US power had no constraints on it. You can see this in the cowboy rhetoric about mandates, with-us-or-against-us, etc. The threats underlying this rhetoric appear to have been quite real and based in a genuine assumption about the strength, extent, and role of American power.

But I've been also been pretty shrill about the question of legitimacy (and here and here). Though legitimacy isn't the central issue here, the related element of empirically discovering the limits of power is. This administration has lost the backbone of power: credibility, legitimacy, and finding that they have very little control over events unfolding in Iraq and elsewhere.

When Condi Rice says the administration didn't see Hamas coming, I find it hard to believe that is truly the case. That would be omnincompetence, to coin an ugly term. I don't put this past them. But I'm sure someone somewhere in the administration saw it. "Caught off-guard" suggests, rather, that the administration has taken on the role of covering its tracks in order not to appear as weak as it really is. They're now in a reactionary position praying for any spinnable little thing on the positive side that comes their way. When it doesn't - and it usually doesn't - they resort to the language of either blame ("caught off-guard" - you mean you, Condi, or some poor staff member?) or ignorance. Pleading ignorance has had some purchase thus far with the American public because it plays into the public's own confusion about what to do in Iraq. But it no longer plays with the international audience. They have read this administration correctly.

To flesh out the Bode Miller analogy further, then, is to view Miller as a commercial product that was hyped, failed, and got recalled. Miller and NBC didn't get the return on their investment, so it's time for excuses; either that or repackaging the product (partyboy Miller - plays well with the frat crowd). Hamas is going to win democratically, the US can't do anything to stop it - not least of all because their sole remaining justification for the Iraq adventure is democratization - and then comes the reactionary reaction. "We didn't see this coming." What else could they say? Admit their impotence? "We saw it coming but were powerless to do anything about it"?

Mark is right in his criticism of what comes next. Isolating and punishing Hamas is based on an overly narrow view. The administration is in no position to carry this out anyway and there is too much uncertainty involved in terms of what isolation/punishment might mean in terms of longer-term policy in the region. If the administration has a last remaining grain of intelligence, they'll realize that aggressive tactics have made one giant long-term mess of Bush 2 Middle East policy. One important problem is that the administration's policies are likely no longer marketable, just like Bode Miller's previously alleged heroism.