Tomorrow the bipartisan Iraq Study Group will deliver their, "forward-looking, independent assessment," of the Iraq situation. Gee... doesn't this sound like the kind of study the Bush administration should have conducted before they rushed us into war? Shouldn't the Bush administration have been making such assessments all along? Any competent administration would have sought expert advice from across the political spectrum before sending our soldiers off to die... but not the Bush administration.
The Bush administration listened only to those who already shared their views: they disparaged the patriotism of any who questioned them. When things began to fall apart, the Bush administration became more aggressive, lashing out at the "media" for their reporting and dismissing as "nonsense" outside studies by the U.N. and others. Against all evidence the Bush administration continued to insist there were links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, continued to insist Saddam was on the verge of developing WMDs or had cleverly hid them away, and continued to pretend everything was fine. Then on November 8th Bush woke up to find he had lost the support of the American people, lost control of the House and Senate, lost his pretense of an exit strategy, and lost all credibility.
Now let's make one thing perfectly clear: the Iraq Study Group cannot change the facts on the ground and cannot generate new options. (Hey, for pro bono work, what do you expect?) All they can do is try to make Bush listen to reason. We'll have to wait and see, but if the leaked hints are correct, the emerging strategy seems to be a sort of "graceless exit," a recommendation to "cut and walk." In other words, the Iraq Study Group will issue a Report that is exactly what one would expect from a committee of old men: an artless compromise. After witnessing six years of bungling, I think we've all given up hoping for any real leadership from this administration. At this point, I am just praying those old men hit George W. Bush over the head with their hundred-page monument to the obvious until it sinks in.
Monday, December 04, 2006
At least we won't have to pay for it.
Posted by Dr. Strangelove at 12:06 PM
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15 comments:
I believe the ISG was given at least $1.3million in federal funding.
// posted by LTG
You're right. The well-known people are donating their time, but the staff are getting paid.
We have got to impose some sort of accountability on this adminsitration. Now that we have the majority we need to investigate their corruption and expose their greedy incompetence.
// posted by RBR
This Administration was dysfunctional from the start. It was all infighting and turf war brought on by Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush is not inquisitive. So people, prepared to tell him the truth, were never probed. He took whatever was said at face value because ignorance is bliss. I have yet to read where Bush ever once took a meeting without Cheney.
I hear that Bush isn't stupid, yet I see no proof in what I have read and in what I have seen that can make me believe that. It wasn't even “group think”.
Group think is a naturally occurring phenomenon where people begin to believe in their assumptions without meaning to do so. They gravitate toward a center. This Administration had plenty of outside opposition and many canaries in the coalmine. They simply choose not to listen to them. It was coordinated disinformation delivered to the White House and licked up by a more than willing president. It isn’t much different from the Nixon Administration.
I swear, Bush didn't want to be president. Just as in all his business ventures, he was the front man while everyone else ran the show. And just as in the past, when it went to hell, daddy had to step in. It is a reoccuring pattern.
I notice that they aren't calling it the Ïraqi Study group" any more. It is now called the "Baker-Hamilton Commission" or just the "Baker Commission". Newsweek ran a Baker lovefest article a couple of weeks ago. What's up with that? He isn't a super hero, nor is this report a siliver bullet.
// posted by USWest
Group Think is more than just being uncritical about one's assumptions. It's a social phenomena often observed in small decision making bodies like committees and cabinets. It occurs when people buy into what they believe is the majority point of view with out much consideration - even if they might otherwise oppose that point of view. It was a popular term in the 1970s in relation to US policies in Vietnam.
Members of the group who try to buck the trend are often ignored (Powell) or beaten down (Richard Clark) in a groupthink situation. US West is right to say that the Bush Administration has been a classic example from the start. Cheney is usually in the role of enforcer but he is not the only one. Rice and Rumsfeld have done their share of beating down dissent as well.
The new term that we often use to imply a groupthink mentality is "drink the cool aide."
FYI: If I remember correctly, in some of our very early posts, Dr. Von Brawn and I got into a debate about the nature of groupthink and whether it applied to the Bush Administration. I tried looking for it in our archives but to no avail.
// posted by RBR
The classic book that we have all read and where "group think" was first introduced was the "Essence of Decision" by Graham Allison an dit was focused on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
// posted by USWest
Thanks, USWest, for the classic "groupthink" reference... for those of us (ahem) who haven't ever read it. Somewhat ironically, the group-created (but definitely not "group-thunk") project Wikipedia has a nice disussion of group think phenomena.
Wikipedia and others seem to credit Irving L. Janis with coining the term.
They may be correct about the term. I was looking at “Essence of Decision” last night and didn't see the word itself, however the whole book is about various models of decision making and how they may go awry. It has been years since I read it. It may well be time to revisit it.
Just to give you a quick run down: Essence captures 3 “models” of decision making. this is classic Foreign Policy and Political Science theory.
1. Rational Actor: all the decision making power is centralized in one entity who is operating in his/her best interest. In other words decisions are made by “purposeful” individuals. The decisions here are “choices”.
2. Organizational Process: Organizations are bloc boxes with highly differentiated decision making and structures within. Large decisions and actions are the result of many (often conflicting) smaller actions taken by individuals at various levels within an organization. Often the goals that they individuals are attempting to accomplish contradict each other or are only loosely compatible. The decisions are actions here are more like “outputs” that pop out of the mysterious black box.
3. Governmental (Bureaucratic) Politics: Events here are neither choices or outputs, but the “results” of bargaining fames among the players within the government. The idea is to figure out who did what to whom that resulted in the action. An example of this type of analysis may be “State of Denial” by Woodward where he focuses on the politics and infighting that resulted in certain decisions.
All three of these models are present in any large decision, such as going to war. It’s like layers of an onion. We often talk about foreign policy as moves on a chess board where one thing will trigger many others and often you will see states cut off their nose to spite their face. In the rational actor model, it is one player manipulating his side of the board. In the Organizational Process model it is a loose alliance of organizations that is moving a set of pieces on several chess boards according to a pre-determined set of operating procedures. In the third model, a number of distinct individuals with distinct sets of objectives share the power of the pieces and the final decision may be the result of bargaining or, group think.
// posted by USWest
To forestall some comments: Obviously, USWest is trying to summarize the entire field of international relations in a single comment post, so there's no point to the rest of us picking it apart. There is considerable disagreement in the academic community as to which sort of analysis is the most persuasive at any given time, but this is a good broad rundown.
I have been interested in how the subjective beliefs of policymakers as to which is the correct model influences their decisions, which is tough to model.
I should add that the "rational actor" model usually coincides with the "unitary actor" theory - that a state behaves as a single entity in making choices. Also, the "rational actor" model does not posit that decisionmakers are actually making rational calculations and choices, only that the choices they make (however they arrive at them - through prayer or the magic-8 ball) can be predicted or explained by rational analysis.
The rational actor model is both the most rigorous and sophisticated, as well as the most prone to abuse.
As for determining which is better, I offer this caveat: the number of great powers in the world is always too small to make any data set worth a hill of beans.
// posted by LTG
"I have been interested in how the subjective beliefs of policymakers as to which is the correct model influences their decisions, which is tough to model. "
I am not sure I really understand. I think you mranr you interested in how subject beliefes of policmakers affect a given decision. If that is the case, that is also very interesting to me. And it is always interesting to talk to people to see what factors they think are affecting a given decision.
I don't think policymakers really spend much time considering which "decision making models" to use because they are too busy making decisions. You also have operational people and dreamers. And I see the push-pull between these two groups all the time in my day job. For the record, I am an operational person.
// posted by USwWest
It may be interesting at this point to note that one of the administrations that was most self concious about how they made decisions was the Kennedy administration. After the Bay of Pigs (often cited as an example of "groupthink"), the Kennedy administration undertook a full review of the debacle to determine where and how it went wrong and how they could have avoided it.
Kennedy's famous brain trust of McNamara, Bundy, Rusk et al came up with a more explicitly rationalist perspective. They combined that with a willingness to listen to dissenting views (especially from people in a position to give useful insight because of their experience) and the result was the Kennedy administration's greatest foreign policy success: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Johnson fell back into the same bad habbits. Nixon's failure with Watergate was his grand fiasco.
By the time Ford was ordering the marines to assult an island off Cambodia to rescue sailors who had already been released (1975 USS Mayaguez crisis), groupthink was once again the norm.
// posted by RBR
USWest - I was opaque. I think that there are people like Rice, Kissinger, and Wolfowitz who have particular ideas about foreign policy decisionmaking. Does it matter if Kissinger actually believes he is a realist?
// posted by LTG
It doesn't matter if Kissinger thinks he is a realist. It does matter if he thinks using a Rational acotr model or government politics model is the best way. I don't doubt that these people have some idea of how they would like to see decisions made, I just think that the don't have any control over it in the end.
// posted by USWest
OK, I can't stop myself any more. This is driving me nuts.
You guys are tossing words around like "rational actor model" and "government politics model" and I don't understand what you mean. I also don't understand the implied distinction between assuming that individuals are essentially rational (that is chose their actions based on how they will best achieve their goals whatever those may be) and taking "government politics" into account.
If by "rational actor model" you really mean to refer to the widely adhered to international relations school of "realism" then you are giving rationality assumptions a bad name by not making a distinction between those rational choice approaches based on individual decisions by actual human beings acting within institutional contexts (such as "government politics") and "realism" which is based on a decidedly unrealistic anthropomorphism of the nation-state (example: "Iran wants x" instead of "the current Iranian government wants x").
Kissenger is widely believed to be a "realist." Rice claims to be but she's more of a neo-con. Neo-cons are not "realists." They believe that regime type (democracy, dictatorship etc) matters. The problem is that they are very sloppy about analyzing individual actions and motives.
// posted by RBR
I was just presenting models that were loosely named by Graham Allison, not commenting on the paradigm that people use in their decision making. Even Allison admits that the "naming" of these models creates confusion and says that he and his colleagues had a lively debate about whether they should name these models or just call them Model I, Model II, Model III. I should ha used generic terms.
// posted by USWest
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