Bush falls victim to a bad new argument for the Iraq war.
In recent speeches, President Bush has offered several reasons for staying the course in Iraq. One of them is the almost 2,000 Americans who have already died in the war. "We owe them something," the president said on Aug. 22. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
Psychologists, decision scientists, and economists have a name for this type of argument: the "sunk-cost fallacy." It has gotten the United States into trouble once before. As casualties mounted in Vietnam in the 1960s, it became more and more difficult to withdraw, because war supporters insisted that withdrawal would cheapen the lives of those who had already sacrificed. We "owed" it to the dead and wounded to "stay the course." We could not let them "die in vain." What staying the course produced was perhaps 250,000 more dead and wounded. Read on...
