Bloodless Coup

Ignorance, Incompetence, and Group Insulation

Publius (one of my favorite bloggers) has another good post up at Legal Fiction. This one is on the Chalabi affair and what he sees as the underlying problem with the Bush administration – their willful ignorance and incompetence. I think there is quite a lot to this. That some of the leaders of our government still hold high office after purposely leading us into a war-footing built upon preposterously rosy projections is some combination of ridiculous and horrifying. The degree to which many of these individuals were out of touch, whether purposefully or out of a lack of curiosity, is nothing short of scary. That, as Publius writes, “our entire Iraq policy was based on ignorance”, is a bone-chilling realization.

But I still think that this is only part of the larger story that is at the root of the basic failure of this administration to effectively and prudently pursue the national interest. It is not like Paul Wolfowitz (to take one example, and a more plausible example than the Vice President or Douglas Feith who seems to be a complete dolt) is a stupid or incurious man. As I wrote over the weekend, it strikes me that the central flaw in the decision-making style of this administration is the extreme level to which the ruling cadre in the government is insulated from other actors. By often taking the Congress, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and traditional foreign allies out of the decision making environment (to list just 4 large examples from a much longer list) the decision-making team became an ever-more homogenous body. This likely created a decision-making echo chamber that featured ever-increasing levels of allegiance to the in-group, a belief in its righteousness and ability, and variety of other behaviors associated with groupthink. This type of situation allowed for important questions to go unasked, contingency plans to be ignored, the suppression of anything approaching dissent, and the adoption of scenarios more rosy than the sunniest New Year's Day in Pasadena. In other words, the decision-making process played to the worst flaws in this set of decision makers. It encouraged their hopes and dreams, and discouraged critical thinking. Fundamentally, the people who made these decisions and created these processes are at fault. But the group decision-making structures and norms they established early in the administration laid the groundwork for mistakes of this magnitude to be made.

As a related aside, I think one of the great stories that remains to be written about this administration is how granting the Office of the Vice President unprecedented power threw decision-making processes askew, and exacerbated this policy-making maelstrom.