Did The Invasion of Iraq Make Us Safer?
or:
How Do We Answer Such Questions?
or:
Deferring to Authorities, Again.

Bush says 'yes', of course, but (a) politicians can't really be trusted to give objective answers to such questions, since they usually have at least one eye on politics and (b) Bush does not even seem to be a particularly honest politician.

The real question here is: how do we answer such questions? They're hard, and folks like you and me usually don't know enough to have valuable opinions about them. So we tend to fall back on our antecedently-held beliefs about the actors or policies. Since I think that Bush is a bad person and a bad president, and since I know virtually nothing about the Middle East, my natural inclination is to doubt and deny that Bush's policies have been responsible for the seemingly positive changes there. Since I in particular think that the case for war was deceptive I am loath to conclude that the war has had good effects. Where I should admit that I don't know, I rather tend to render a negative judgment.

The problem with such a strategy seems to be, however, that it makes early judgments disproportionately influential. Since I followed the election of 2000 with extraordinary care and understand the issues involved fairly well, I can say with some confidence that Bush & co. exhibited a willingness to in effect steal that election, and that it is unlikely that Bush was, in fact the winner. This, of course, leads me to take an extremely dim view of the Bush administration.

My ignorance of Middle East politics then creates a kind of epistemic vacuum--I'm not qualified to judge whether Bush's policies have been effective there or not. But my low opinion of the administration and its policies and tactics in general make me disinclined to give them credit or view their actions favorably. So I find myself leaning toward a conclusion I'm really not in a position to make--that Bush is not really responsible for positive developments in the Middle East.

So what I really need is a general epistemic policy that will help me to settle such questions in a rational manner, rather than allowing myself to incline unconsciously toward judgments I'm not qualified to make. I can't think of any way other than identifying some relatively objective and non-partisan experts and accepting their opinions on the matter--in this case, on whether the invasion of Iraq has, in fact, lead to positive developments in the ME.

Any suggestions?