Why Bush would have attacked Iraq, WMD or no WMD

How does one explain a George Bush or a Tony Blair being most caring husbands and fathers but showing little remorse when bombing women and children in Iraq or Afghanistan? Answer: “We are always more caring of ‘our folks’ as compared to ‘them folks’. For that matter, why would an Obama consider the BP oil spill to be worth billions for his people but not the Union Carbide gas leak for the Indians? The answer is the same, says
V Raghunathan, a former professor of finance at IIM, Ahmedabad, and currently CEO of the GMR Varalakshmi Foundation. He has most recently authored The Corruption Conundrum and Other Paradoxes and Dilemmas. In this interview, he speaks to DNA on the various paradoxes that he discusses in the book. 

How do you define a paradox? 
A paradox is a statement or a situation that is apparently contradictory, counter-intuitive, self-contradictory, inexplicable, circular or self-referential, or oxymoronic. For example, when someone in Rajasthan describes himself as a manufacturer of antiques, isn’t it contradictory or oxymoronic? How can you manufacture an antique?

In your book you also talk of the two-envelope paradox… 
The two envelope paradox is a simple one that is not so simple to resolve! You are presented with two envelopes, one of which contains twice the sum of money than the other, but you don’t know which is which. You are asked to pick one of the two envelops and keep its contents!

You pick one and find that it contains Rs100. However, you are offered a chance to change your mind and switch your envelope. The question is, will you? You will reason that the other envelope must have either Rs 200 or Rs50. Since either possibility is equally likely (50% chance either way), the expected amount in the other envelope is Rs125 (= 0.50 x 200 + 0.50 x 50). So you are tempted to switch.  But then you realise that had you had picked the other envelope first, the same argument holds. For example, if you had selected the second envelope and it had contained Rs200, the first envelope must contain either Rs400 or Rs100, so that the expected amount in the other envelope is Rs250. So no matter which envelope you pick, the other seems to be more attractive. That’s the paradox. As to the learnings from it in everyday life, well, there is none, unless in a lighter vein you use it to explain why the grass is greener on the other side.

One of the things you write is that “no matter what Iraq did, the result was a foregone conclusion.” What makes you say that?
Consider the US war on Iraq. Before the attack, no one was certain whether or not Iraq had a stockpile of chemical or nuclear weapons. Iraq’s dilemma lies in whether or not it should oppose the UN inspection. In Iraq’s view, if they obstruct such inspection, they may be attacked by the US (which it did) on the premise that Iraq was trying to hide its weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, if they allowed the inspection, the US might still attack them, having learnt that Iraq had no counter-offensive against them.  Thus no matter what they did they could have felt that an attack was imminent. Maybe they resolved the dilemma byobstructing the inspection and pretending that they had a huge stockpile of chemical weapons that could be unleashed in the event of an attack. It would at least have some deterrent value against a US attack.

How does one explain a George Bush or a Tony Blair being mostcaring husbands and fathers but showing little remorse at bombing women and children in Iraq or Afghanistan? 
Well that’s not surprising or paradoxical behaviour at all! The ‘we-they’ syndrome is intrinsic to human beings. We are always more caring of “our folks” as compared to “them folks”. The ‘we-they’ divide could be based on nationalities, religions, caste, regions or whatever other classification is imaginable. For example, why would developed nations want to export their toxic industries to less developed countries? Why would Obama consider the BP oil spill to be worth billions for his people but not the Union Carbide gas leak for Indians? In less developed countries, the ‘we-they’ behaviour begins at the individual level. For example, I will keep my house clean but will dump the garbage on my neighbour’s doorstep. Maybe at the developed countries’ level, they keep their countries clean and dump their garbage in the less developed countries! 

What is the Theseus dilemma? 
The ship in which Theseus, the king of Athens, and a number of Athenian youth returned from Crete after the war, circa 490 BC, was preserved right up to the time of Demeritus Phalereus, that is, some 200 years. This was achieved by replacing old planks with new planks whenever the old ones decayed. This raised the question among Plutarch and other philosophers of the time as to whether the ship was still the same ship as the one originally used by Theseus. If the ship was to be considered the original, what happens if we now built another ship made up of the old parts? Which of the two will be the original one? So that's the Theseus dilemma or Theseus paradox.

This dilemma has several interesting implications which are explained in the book. For example, if each slab of the Taj Mahal is replaced over, say, a thousand years, will it be the same Taj Mahal? On a removed plane, is the Ram Mandir built over the Babri Masjid site the same temple as the original? Is the Ganga or Yamuna today the same sacred Ganga or Yamuna of yore? A dip in the clean waters of the Ganga might have been a genuinely beneficial once. Is it the same with the highly polluted Ganga of today?

Human beings categorise different events in different mental accounts. How does this lead to paradoxical situations in daily life? 
For example, you might have saved, say Rs30 lakh, to buy a house. This saving may be earning you, say 7% per annum in a fixed deposit. And yet you may borrow Rs10 lakh from a bank at 11% for the purchase of a car. This appears paradoxical or irrational, since you could easily have drawn the sum from your own savings, which is earning much less than the auto loan. And yet, often people do this. Why? There are several reasons why one may do so. In one's mind, the home savings account is sacrosanct and not to be diminished under any circumstances. It appears more acceptable to one's mind to create a separate auto account as a liability, rather than set it off against the home savings. The other reason could be that if you took Rs10 lakh out of your own savings, you may not have the required discipline to put the money back into the account with regularity every month. But when you take that amount as a loan, you are bound by the bank's contract to make regular EMIs at the threat of the car being towed away. If one is absolutely disciplined and rational, one should not be seeking the loan. But because one lacks the discipline, one resorts to a loan even if one has to pay a higher price in the process. This is the price one pays for one's lack of discipline. And this interpretation also resolves the apparent paradox of irrationality.