We don't need no stinkin' (Br)exit strategy!

From last week, but still pertinent, here's Tim Harford on how a chaotic, incoherent non-strategy can be a feature, not a bug - at least for a while:

The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

This got me thinking about the parallels with the almost equally protean strategy that got the 2003 Iraq War on:

• Shock and awe your (domestic) enemies with an overwhelming blizzard of ambiguous bullshit* (imply that Iraq was behind 9/11, that its WMDs can be ready in 45 minutes, that we're wasting £350 million a week which could be going to the NHS)
• Include a grain of truth in the noisy matrix of nonsense (yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator, but we were specifically told this was about self-defence against an alleged imminent threat, not regime change), (yes, there were plenty of things actually wrong with European Union institutions, like the disastrous handling of the Eurozone crisis, but these had nothing to do with the claims on the Brexit bus, or the migration/border scares, the two central arguments which fuelled the Leave campaigns)
• Use fake urgency to move fast and break things ("...we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud", "UK faces millions more migrants as Turkey and its 75 MILLION people on brink of joining EU").
• Don't have an exit strategy, because that's just a hostage to fortune that your (domestic) enemies might use against you
• Mission accomplished!

We know how the 2003 decision worked out. The 2016 decision still has a way to run, but it's already brought us to the absurd paradox of being at the mercy of people who've spent decades developing their monomaniacal obsession with exiting the European Union, but never agreed a coherent exit strategy.

The poetic justice would be highly satisfying, if only the rest of us didn't have to survive "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology."