Monitoring the outbreak of war against Iraq
Robert
Hogenraad
National Foundation for Scientific Research
Psychology Department, Catholic University of Louvain
(document placed online: February 17 2003 [DSM])
We live in interesting times.[1] Yet, when I consider the Talmudic complexity of these times, I wonder what people can do to remain lucid. There is a sense in which the current political discourse on Iraq--from any side--is in tune with its epoch--the sense that the objective world is a place increasingly determined by "rhetoric and language games". Think of this: One word by this or that political or economic leader of the world, and the markets either skyrocket or go down the tube.
But language games can be deciphered. It is even one of the aims of the field of empirical studies of literature. Away from the academic habit of stamp-collecting, I analyzed the speeches pronounced by President Bush, and derived from this analysis early warning signals of risk of war against Iraq.
Theory, methods and analysis
Deciphering the speeches of President Bush rests upon the following idea. McClelland's motivation theory[2] involves three basic needs, which are the need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power. Only the last two needs are considered in the predictive model of wars. Intimacy, friendship, and positive emotional relationships with a person, as well as liking and wanting to be liked define the need for affiliation. The will to power, to have an impact on another person or to get or to keep control over people, forms the essential of the need for power. These two crisscross threads--power and affiliation--easily create an unstable balance, and are always difficult to reconcile. McClelland (pp. 314-359) shows how passionate reformist zeal for social justice--the use of one's own accumulated power to save others, whether they like it or not--is often the link between an "imperial motivation pattern" (i.e., the break created by high need for power and low need for affiliation) and subsequent wars. The gap created between a high need for power and a low need for affiliation is the measure of the imperial motivation pattern.
The argument derives much of its force from what Hobbes called the restless desire of power in all men[3]. I found also traces of the imperial motivation pattern in the literature. Thus, in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, of 1955, the following passage: "He was determined to do good, not only to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world" (p. 18). And two pages further "God save us always from the innocent and the good" (p. 20).
I collated all the speeches made by President Bush between January 3, 2002 and February 14, 2003 that concerned Iraq and the American war against terrorism[4], as reported in http://www.whitehouse.gov/response/resources2.html. All in all, I collated 67 speeches as of February 14, 2003.
In order to analyze these speeches, I built up a computer-readable dictionary around the two threads of affiliation and power. The dictionary itself was implemented in my PROTAN system of computer-aided content analysis[5]. The rest consisted of showing that the dictionary was a valid instrument, and then of applying it to the speeches of President Bush I had collated.
Validating the dictionary was achieved by analyzing a series of texts, all of which contained elements of a conflict--like conflicts with the environment, such as surviving hardship on a deserted island, or conflicts with other people, as in war narratives. The details of the validation procedure can be found in http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel/IGEL2002/Hogenraad.pdf. For example, while texts regarding the outbreak of World War II showed an increasing gap between the need for power and the need for affiliation, the analysis of Robert Kennedy's memoirs[6] of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis--a potential conflict which was finally avoided, if only just--showed that the same gap decreased over the 16 days of this international crisis.
The speeches of President G. W. Bush
With the reasonable guarantee that the dictionary of motivation was a valid instrument, I started to analyze the speeches of President Bush. The starting date was the speech held on January 3, 2002[7]. I computed the average rate of the need for power and the need for affiliation in each speech and computed the gap between the two rates. The details of the statistics involved are explained in the paper available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel/IGEL2002/Hogenraad.pdf.
Comments on the graph of results (January 15, 2003)
It is no great reach to suggest that the increase of the gap signals an heightened risk of war. Over the last 14 months, the trend did not show much else than a continuous increase, even if the smoothing done on the data shows some ups and downs.
I have been asked if there was a point in the graph beyond which war was almost certain. I do not know. All I can think of is to watch the points that fall well above the upper confidence limit.
I plan to continue monitoring these speeches and to modify the graph regularly. If war can be avoided, it should be visible from the new data. And "if I am wrong, I will be forgiven because people will be so glad I was wrong".[8]
Robert Hogenraad.
Last update: February 15, 2003
Notes
[Robert Hogenraad suggested a paper on this topic for the next Newsletter. Given the timeliness of the research, I suggested making this version available on the web now. -- David S. Miall]
1. I'm writing this in the middle of February 2003, about a week after President Bush's State of the Union Address.
2. McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience. New York: Irvington Publishers.
3. "So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death" (Hobbes, T., & Tuck, R., (Editor). (1996/ 1651). Leviathan. (Revised ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, chapter XI).
4. This White House web site stopped being fed after January 3, 2003, so I collected the speeches from adjacent pages, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/.
5. http://www.psor.ucl.ac.be/protan/protanae.html
6. Kennedy, R. F. (1969). Thirteen days: A memoir of the Cuban missile crisis. New York: W. W. Norton.
7. I know, I know, many would like to see me include the speeches from September 11, 2001. I missed the time to include them all.
8. Reflecting on the irreversibility of militarism in the United States, Chalmers Johnson concluded with these words his review of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir in the February 6, 2003 issue of the London Review of Books.