The Ant in the Sand Box

Reading political "science" books was pretty dreary, back in the Jurassic Period when I was "studying" this stuff at the University of California at Berkeley, which is to say, when Berkeley was Berkeley. There was one exception - the works of Herbert Simon, the polymath who made the same sort of mistake in choosing a major as I did and then discovered that his true inclinations were more rigorous and scientific. While he knew it was hopeless to construct an actual science of human behavior, he came as close as he could with his work in companion fields such as group psychology and economic behavior. He even won the Nobel Prize in economics.

He was keen on artificial intelligence and human logical processes: how do we decide to do what we do? An arresting image that he presented as analogy was that of an insect with a simple brain, an ant, crossing a sand box. The ant gets from one side to the other. When he's finished with his journey, the resulting trail in the sand looks complicated indeed; it looks like the design of an ingenious mind. In fact, the ant simply chose, at hundreds of junctures where he confronted undulations or depressions in the sand, to go over, down, to the left, or to the right. The overall process (the general direction) was guided by some navigation-orientation we don't completely understand (although it can be interrupted, as Richard Feynman found in a clever boyhood experiment where he looked for a means of non-toxic ant interdiction). But the simple binary decisions add up and appear, in retrospect, to have been the work of higher intelligence. Simon thought humans live their lives in much the same way. We impose a narrative on our lives as we go, or at the end, but that narrative was not the guiding principle in real time. It's a fiction imposed on a pattern of binary decisions made to overcome obstacles directly in our path.

I thought about this old stuff while watching L'il Georgie in a recent interview with Charlie Rose. Bush was attempting to explain what the hell we're doing in Iraq at this point. We're trying to restore peace, he says, so a political reconciliation will be possible and Iraq will become a modern bulwark against terror. I thought about how far all of this seems removed from his initial declaration of the War on Terror following 9/11. Leaving aside the machinations and influence of the Neocons, upon whom Bush probably had very little influence, how does Bush see the journey from the World Trade Center to this war of attrition in Iraq which has been going on, and getting worse, for four years? It is mystifying. Bush probably comes closer to the binary decision-making processes of an ant than most national leaders, I would say that first. His natural impulsiveness, his impatience with deliberative processes, and the intellectual vacuum in which he makes "decisions," make it more likely that his path will double back, find a high spot against the wood planks, and carry him completely out of the sand box. It is difficult at this point to remember at all what this war was originally about, even at the level of official rationale. Bush simply slogs on, as the ant gamely struggles through a clumpy terrain in search of a final destination. The mission, as he describes it, is preposterous on its face. The American military is not going to achieve a "reconciliation" between Sunnis, Shia and Kurds by patrolling the streets of Iraq in armored vehicles. If the goal is to achieve peace by killing all insurgents, which is what would appear necessary to entice the Iraqi Parliament to emerge from hiding in the Green Zone, the task will never be finished.

But what, after all, does this have to do with the war on terror? To understand Bush's journey, it isn't enough to follow the trail that led him to this point of impasse. The ant's journey seems logical and consistent by comparison. I can't tell what sand box Bush is even playing in anymore.