Most politicians and many people in the military accept a division of people into two types, thinkers and doers. And leaders of whatever sort typically like to think of themselves as doers rather than thinkers, thinkers being pasty people who whine a lot instead of taking the hill. Yet disaster lurks when leaders are not thinkers as well as doers.

Now that the war in Iraq has shown itself to have been a bad idea, we can take that as our example of this kind of disaster, unfortunately all too frequent with the Type A personality that populates the upper level of both politics and the military. This time around, however, it’s pretty clear the military leaders were better at being both thinkers and doers than the politicians. The Pentagon produced reams of documents outlining all the different possible outcomes, and setting a plan for what would happen when Saddam was gone. The White House, it appears, didn’t want to hear anything about any of that. They just wanted to do what they wanted to do. And they did it. The result is what we now face.

What was so good about what the military did here? They ran what I call “virtual controls.” They visualized results that were not the ones they wanted to achieve, considered the possibility (no: the likelihood, the probability even) that things would not in fact go the way they hoped. This is the kind of thought that doers have to engage in: it helps them lay aside unrealistic actions, and gives them other possible plans when things diverge from their best-possible-case scenarios. Almost inevitably, of course, things do diverge from these scenarios. If you aren’t prepared for this, you’re stuck in a rut. And the only way you can justify what you did is by bellowing louder. You’re left without any justification at all. This is the situation of the current White House.

Running “virtual controls” is related to, but not the same as, scientific thinking. In scientific thinking, the “control” is the version of things that’s the same as the one you’re really testing, only with the variable held constant. Let’s say the question is, Does broccoli cause cancer? You don’t just go ahead and answer the question the way you want it to turn out, though this is precisely what many “doer” leaders do. You say: Let me get back to you. Then you stuff a set of rats with broccoli and leave another set alone and note the results. 

In real life, of course, you can’t run multiple versions of the same thing. We can’t both invade Iraq and not invade it, or invade it first one way and then another. So you do it in thought experiments. Leaders who aren’t also thinkers don’t, typically, like doing this. For them, considering the possibility that reality won’t jibe with their fantasy is “unmotivational,” the whining of “timid souls” -- to appeal yet again to Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech. And so they go to the opposite extreme of saying that no thought of any kind is relevant -- only action. Follow me, boys!

This kind of “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is what characterized the bellicose White House up to mere weeks ago: they were going to “stay the course” rather than “cut and run.” We alone have guts, this suggested; those suggesting alternatives are cowards. Yet, with the administration’s approval ratings in the cellar, suddenly we hear that their message is no longer “stay the course.” The White House seems almost sulky about this. Perhaps things haven’t worked out the way they said they would. But, they seem to say, who knew?

Well, the Pentagon apparently knew, or at least considered the possibility. And the political leaders should have known too. Of course you can’t run reality in two (or multiple) versions. But that doesn’t mean you stick to one rosy one that is your fantasy version of events, insisting that things are going to turn out that way: our soldiers will be welcomed as liberators past the first day, democracy will be triumphant, the Mid-East will become peaceful. You have to run virtual controls. That means, imagining what happens if and when things don’t go the way you’re hoping -- not merely insisting more and more loudly that they will. Running virtual controls isn’t negative thinking. It’s realism. And it’s as close to science as normal people can get.  We call it, being rational.

The current White House seems to lack any desire to run virtual controls. We hear that the US is safer from terrorism than it would have been if we hadn’t invaded Iraq. Of course we can’t roll the clock back and not invade Iraq, then place the two situations side by side in order to decide whether this is so. So the assertion is in a logical sense worthless, unless we try and construct a virtual control -- here well after the fact. We do this by looking at the evidence, such as presented by the recent intelligence report so damaging to the current White House that concluded the invasion on Iraq and its carry-through had incited world animosity against the US, especially in Muslim countries. The virtual control suggests that the White House is wrong. Besides, why do we have to construct this after the fact? Where was it before the fact, where it might have done some good?

“Doer” leaders typically get sulky when they’ve put on full speed ahead without running virtual controls, and that turns out to have been a bad idea. “At least we had the intestinal fortitude to do it,” they insist. And then, inevitably: “Those damn critics are at it again.”

But formulating a single way of doing things and carrying it out isn’t enough. You have to know before you do it that it’s better than the alternatives. Before invading Iraq, you have to say: “What if we don’t invade Iraq? What’s wrong with that?” Not: “We’re going to invade Iraq; find the justifications.”

The construction of virtual controls requires doers also to be thinkers. Life isn’t science, so you have to imagine the controls. No, you can’t prove anything. But you can reason your way to greater probability of getting things right, which is the best thing we out-of-laboratory creatures can do.