Game Theory and the War Funding Bill

For those of you who have been watching the news, you are aware of the Democrats' War Funding Bill stipulating an end date for the pull-out of troops from Iraq. This whole topic is loaded with Game Theory applications. First, the pull-out date that the Bush administration opposes is based on game theory. There is a big difference in strategic games outcomes when the game has an ending point versus ones that the players perceive to have no end-date. If you take game theory here later in your schooling you will learn about that. Secondly, Bush promised to issue a veto if the Democrats passed the bill through congress. You can easily imagine a sequential game where this changed the strategy the Democrats pursued. Suppose you are a congressman who wants the political benefit of being in favor of a troop pull-out, but you also don't want to be remembered as the politician who prevented any form of success in Iraq. Now because of the veto you can have both, by supporting the bill in Congress knowing that the policy won't reach that outcome. I think the bill would have been much more likely to fail, or would hve received fewer votes anyway if Bush had not promised a veto. No way to know for sure though.