A Response To: Managing A Mideast Revolution

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page A17
Washington Post

Editorial Link: Here

My Response:

I believe two more known terms are "Chaos Theory" and "Complexity Theory". The theories together state the following:

Complex behavior arises from the interaction of several variables or "actors" that may be following a very simple set of rules. Chaos arises when the stability of the complex behavior is acted upon by either an external force that causes a system perturbation OR one of the undefined or unknown variables in the self-feeding (meaning the results of activities effects the next iteration of that activity), iterative system reaches a critical or "tipping point" that causes the perturbation to be expressed from an internal source.

Given the paraphrase above, we need to realize one thing: truly chaotic systems are NOT predictable. It's not because the math cannot be done, its because the equation is too complex AND we do NOT know the initial conditions that set the system in motion. This is why weather is so hard to predict more than 3 to 4 days in advance. Given the penchant for self-organization of all worldly systems, the system will either continue on a chaotic path, completely unpredictable, and may eventually destroy itself and become something new (usually meaning a complete new SET of systems) or will be "pacified" by another jolt from an external force. (This is the theory behind defibrillators.)

What this means is that we planned for and provided the initial force that caused the perturbation in the "relatively" stable system (a system of which we apparently have little understanding) but did NOT plan for and have NOT dedicated enough resources to supply the follow-up force necessary to put the system back into a relatively stable cycle - forget whether that system cycle ends up being to our liking. The end result is that the costs of doing this are so high in terms of money and time (see the 40+ years it took to recover from WWII and our associated nation building) that we may have started something we cannot finish no matter how good are our intentions.

Can we afford to bankrupt our country on such a theory?

You touched on many of the issues that make our task of bringing stability to the region difficult, but you didn't even come close to the depth of the problems that are a DIRECT result of the judgment and approach of this administration. It has never been the WHAT that this administration has proposed, it has always been the HOW.

The HOW in the past four years both foreign AND domestic has put us into a position in which we may NOT be able to finish what we started. In terms of your editorial, we have mathematically opened a "Pandora's Box" that we neither have the will or resources to close or rebuild to our liking.

HOPE is NOT a planning tool.

As we say in the military, Bush gets an O for Initiative and a U for Judgment. And like in the military, when you do that in war, people die unnecessarily and resources are wasted.

We should never mistake activity for accomplishment.