Game Theory 101

It helps if you're playing the same game your opponent is. Or even if you know what the game you're playing is.

Inigo Montoya: You are sure nobody's follow' us?
Vizzini: As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable. No one in Guilder knows what we've done, and no one in Florin could have gotten here so fast. - Out of curiosity, why do you ask?
Inigo Montoya: No reason. It's only... I just happened to look behind us and something is there.
Vizzini: What? Probably some local fisherman, out for a pleasure cruise, at night... in... eel-infested waters... INCONCEIVABLE.

[In the boat in the morning]
Inigo Montoya: He's right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using...

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: He didn't fall? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Indeed. There's a lot of things being said lately that have different meanings depending on who's doing the interpretation.

Billmon observes:

...The truth... is that it isn't the Iranian nuclear program per se that's contributing to the upward pressure on oil prices and inflation, it's the Cheney administration's saber rattling, which the markets are treating with the utmost seriousness, even if the U.S. corporate media is not.

The reason, of course, is Iraq. Having proven it meant what it said about the "Bush Cheney doctrine" of preventative aggressive war, the administration has plenty of street cred -- more, perhaps, than it would actually like to have right now.

This is something the Vulcans probably should have thought about before they took their shiny new doctrine out for a test drive to Baghdad. When you launch an aggressive war after going through the motions of diplomacy, your opponents are entitled to assume you're likely to do it again in a similar situation.

Indeed, such expectations themselves can make war more likely. Believing your diplomatic gestures completely insincere, your opponent may choose defiance, forcing you to either follow through on your "doctrine" or suffer an enormous loss of credibilty -- the coin of the realm in international relations. This, in turn, can lead other players (like those pesky global energy markets) to ratchet up their perceptions of the risk of war, which in turn provides ammunition to those on your side who argue (or like Frum simply imply) that war has become the lesser of two practical evils -- i.e. if you want to bring those oil prices down, you gotta send in the Air Force.

This is all Game Theory 101, and my guess is that the neocons understand the dynamic perfectly well -- and in fact are now counting on it. But I'm not entirely sure even the saner members of the regime, like Secretary Supertanker, recognize the bind they are now in. I'm reasonably sure the vast majority of the American people don't. And the corporate media? Well, given that most of them find the game of checkers intellectually overdemanding, it's a bit much to expect them to grasp the finer points of the real life version of Risk...

A lack of understanding of what's being said seems to be occuring on both the local and national news levels.

The problem is, the volk don't distinguish between Bu$hCo tools and servants.

Paul Krugman today:

...The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times — an attack not on the newspaper's judgment, but on its motives — seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions — that it "has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it" — The Journal's own political editor pronounced himself "shocked," saying that "I don't know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that."

But anyone who was genuinely shocked by The Journal's willingness to play the treason card must not have been paying attention these past five years...

As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism."

Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)

But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. And while the White House clearly believes that attacking The Times is a winning political move, it doesn't have to turn out that way — not if enough people realize what's at stake.

For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security.

And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism...

There's a general misconception about what's going on. Perhaps it's because the name of the game is unthinkable. The game's in play and the fever grows.