THE January/February issue of Foriegn Policy magazine contained an article co-authored by Nobel-prizewinning economist Daniel Kahneman that created a lot of buzz in the blogosphere.  His basic argument was that there are a series of cognitive biases, left over from our hunter-gatherer days on the veldt, that systematically predispose people towards hawkish positions.  For current policymakers, the most worrisome problem he identifies is the tendency to double-down when things go wrong, rather than admit a loss:


Option A: A sure loss of $890




 This came up at a very pleasant Thai lunch I had today with a quasi-reformed warhawk.  We were discussing what is, to me, the mystery of Sunni behaviour after the invasion.  After all, once the army had been disbanded and their hold over the government broken, the Sunnis lost the only weapons they had in the battle against the Shia.  The Shia are a majority; Shiite Iran is the nation's most powerful neighbour; and if the country falls apart, the Shia end up with all the oil money, while the Sunnis get . . . Baghdad, and a lot of very arid, very empty land.  Why on earth were so many of them doing their best to provoke the Shia into a civil war?

This suggests that the answer is "They couldn't yet bear to stare defeat in the face." 

Kahneman doesn't say what happens when you get two sides . . . or, heck, three . . . doubling down.  One suspects:  nothing good.