Franks
Bush, in his press conference last week, said that General Tommy Franks assured him that they had the resources they needed to succeed on the Iraqi battlefield. Clearly, Bush is trying to shift responsibility from himself to Franks, and that is shameful. On the other hand, it does appear that the US military were captives to the neo-cons, filled with courage to face lead from enemy guns but bowls of jelly when it came time to speak truth to power. People like Colin Powell and Franks may have had physical courage but they were also moral cowards at this critical time in America's history.
Under pressure to go along, he studied CIA Tenet's "irrefutable" evidence that Saddam had WMD, was convinced of the threat, used it in his infamous UN speech, which after the Phase 3 victory, was proven wrong. How is his support for the war a lack of "moral courage"? If he had steadfastly continued to be against the war in the face of the CIAs supposed convincing evidence ("slam dunk"), he would have been considered intransigent for no good reason. IOW, he thought there were good reasons for going to war.
You make an excellent point. Perhaps "moral courage" isn't an appropriate phrase. I use that only to distinguish their proven physical courage against a clear failure in their belief system.
Note the words you use in the paragraph above: "Under pressure to go along" and "he thought there were good reasons." I suggest that a stronger person would have defied that pressure to go along, prevalant as it is in the dynamics of any organization. He would have also probed for the justifications to the prevailing orthodoxy. What we have here was not a bureaucratic failure. Powell and Tenet had had their disposal millions of dollars in contrary information and analysis that could have provided an alternative course of action. There was nothing inevitable about the march to war.
What we saw was a failure of epistimology on a massive and costly scale. In making the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, President George Bush employed an epistemology that accepted the reality of weapons of mass destruction, a link between the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, manpower and budget assumptions, the inclination of the people of Iraqi to welcome our troops with, as one neo-con, wrote "kites and boom-boxes" (depends on how you define "boom-box"!), and the probability that our domination of Iraq would bring peace and security to the Middle East. Although history may someday endorse the decision that Bush made, there is little question that there was a gap between what was believed and what was real in making that decision.
When I was in my twenties, I wrote a book using data from the academic wing of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Foreign Assessment Center. The quality of data was in proportion to how close I got to the data. Raw data that I used was of high quality. Data that analysts had interpreted for decision-makers was less credible. I suspect that intelligence information that reaches the President, the National Security Council, and Powell and Franks is so filtered and distorted by political needs that those conclusions may have little semblance to reality.
It recently came to light that 94 senators didn't read the pivotal NIE, including, including Reid, Clinton, and Edwards. On one hand, the intelligence agency suffered from an erosion of credability in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and perhaps some thought little could be gained by reading the document. But I think most people-- Democrats and Republicans-- wanted to climb the bandwagon of war, propelled by the illusion of public support. Like most Americans, they were lazy and credulous. I was struck by McCain and Clinton's similar answers to the same question. Yes, they didn't read the NIE, but they had multiple briefings. The question is: briefings from whom based on what? It looks to me that the senators were less interested in doing their homework and in ascertaining the truth than in positioning themselves to do the most political expedient thing. We continue to pay the price for that today in American blood and treasure.
I think this national failure is interpreting reality also comes from what I call the myopia of the brilliant, a condition where intelligent people make stupid mistakes. These people are not just smart, but they are also forceful. They think it’s shameful to admit ignorance, and place great confidence in their brilliance—brilliantly constructing problem-solving systems and forcefully acting on their results. The problem is that these people are reluctant to re-examine their assumptions. They consider it a sign of weakness. We see this especially in politics—in building too many dams and highways and in starting ill-conceived wars. In describing the debacle of the 1960s, Russell Baker wrote that these people in government “had a lust to know everything. They had a vision of total information. Intelligence. One still senses a vocal genuflection when the word passes over their lips. God may be love, but knowledge is power. Theirs was a faith in Total Intelligence. In their dream of ultimate fulfillment, absolutely everything was knowable. The astounding thing, of course, was that the harder the White House labored to know absolutely everything, the less it knew about relatively few things that it was in the business to know about.”
In addition to this arrogance that gripped the inner core of the White House and the establishment was another phenomenon that Yale psychologist Irving L. Janus called “groupthink.” Groups such as project teams adhered to group norms – an assumed consensus-- and pressured each other to uniformity. An illusion of invulnerability and the rationalizing away of conflicting self-censorship gripped the group. This pressure combined with the fear of losing influence or even your job made it difficult for anyone to make principled stands. But reality is a hard teacher, and even the mightest herd must deal with the world as it is.
Military people generally are conditioned not to challenge but to obey. But those who do challenge are among the most outstanding military leaders of all time, including MacArthur to Truman, Grant to Lincoln, and Zhukov to Stalin. I see no such people in the military today. So when Bush says he will await for what the commanders on the ground advise him, what is is really waiting for is sounds within an echo chamber.
The press also is complicit in this failure in epistomology, perhaps more so than the generals as presumably they should have had the tough-minded independence to ask the right questions.
Let's face it. The White House press specifically and the press in general were compliant, credulous stooges. The orchestration of the mass media was both impressive and duplicitious. There are news reports that the former CIA Directory George Tenet said that his phrase "slam dunk" that many people took as a green light to invade Iraq was actually a reference to effectively propaganderizing the war. Frankly, I don't know which interpretation is worse.
I surmize that the process the administration used to sell the Iraq war and arouse public support was basically as follows:
1. Pass to reporters false "evidence" in leading liberal publications, such as Judith Miller at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
2. Cite that evidence in the Sunday talk shows.
3. Weave that evidence into a dog and pony show for Congressional leaders and the United Nations.
4. Use simple powerful images such as a mushroom cloud in all speeches.
5. Rhetorically associate at every opportunity in every speech Iraq with 9/11.
6. Co-opt the most influential reporters and columnists with private briefings, parties, and requests for advice.
7. Ruthlessly crush dissent in the intelligence services and the military.
8. Demonize or trivialize the skeptical.
9. Make it mainstream by enlisting actors and other famous people to spread the word.
10. Keep the message simple ("Iraq has WMDS") and repeat it continually, making the decision for war a foregone and popular conclusion. (The administration spin today is just as simplistic, but I don't think the public are now buying what the administration is selling: "If we don't stay, there will be genocide." )
In some hellish pit, Joseph Goebbels is smiling.
So what's the antidote for this?
1. Get away from the New York - Washinton, D.C. fishbowl, if not physically, at least mentally. David Halberstam, who recently died, wrote an influential book in 1972 The Best and the Brightest, an ironic reference to the intellectuals that led us into the Viet Nam quagmire. In it he refers to the incestuous relationship between press and power. I think the only way to look at the big questions clearly is to separate yourself from those people. The invitation to Georgetown parties, Lincoln Center concert, and White House briefings erodes the tough-mindedness needed to separate lies from truth.
2. Do your homework. The newsprint as well as the cable and web media are basically trascriptionists and there is nothing that flagship media outlets like more than to transcribe the words of the powerful. But it isn't from the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense where you will get the truth. It's from the mid-level bureaucrats and majors. Propaganda is a bottom down process. The agonizing search for truth is a ground up process.
3. Grow a backbone. This is true for everyone-- the media, the legislature, and voters. In photographs of people the start of war-- it doesn't matter if it's WWI or WWII and it doesn't matter if it's Germany or America-- there is a commonality in expression in the crowds. It's the faces of ignorant glee. But war has a way of teaching us reality-- slowly and painfully. And it is for this reason that courageous, skeptical questioning is the highest-- dare I say it?-- morality.
Under pressure to go along, he studied CIA Tenet's "irrefutable" evidence that Saddam had WMD, was convinced of the threat, used it in his infamous UN speech, which after the Phase 3 victory, was proven wrong. How is his support for the war a lack of "moral courage"? If he had steadfastly continued to be against the war in the face of the CIAs supposed convincing evidence ("slam dunk"), he would have been considered intransigent for no good reason. IOW, he thought there were good reasons for going to war.
You make an excellent point. Perhaps "moral courage" isn't an appropriate phrase. I use that only to distinguish their proven physical courage against a clear failure in their belief system.
Note the words you use in the paragraph above: "Under pressure to go along" and "he thought there were good reasons." I suggest that a stronger person would have defied that pressure to go along, prevalant as it is in the dynamics of any organization. He would have also probed for the justifications to the prevailing orthodoxy. What we have here was not a bureaucratic failure. Powell and Tenet had had their disposal millions of dollars in contrary information and analysis that could have provided an alternative course of action. There was nothing inevitable about the march to war.
What we saw was a failure of epistimology on a massive and costly scale. In making the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, President George Bush employed an epistemology that accepted the reality of weapons of mass destruction, a link between the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, manpower and budget assumptions, the inclination of the people of Iraqi to welcome our troops with, as one neo-con, wrote "kites and boom-boxes" (depends on how you define "boom-box"!), and the probability that our domination of Iraq would bring peace and security to the Middle East. Although history may someday endorse the decision that Bush made, there is little question that there was a gap between what was believed and what was real in making that decision.
When I was in my twenties, I wrote a book using data from the academic wing of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Foreign Assessment Center. The quality of data was in proportion to how close I got to the data. Raw data that I used was of high quality. Data that analysts had interpreted for decision-makers was less credible. I suspect that intelligence information that reaches the President, the National Security Council, and Powell and Franks is so filtered and distorted by political needs that those conclusions may have little semblance to reality.
It recently came to light that 94 senators didn't read the pivotal NIE, including, including Reid, Clinton, and Edwards. On one hand, the intelligence agency suffered from an erosion of credability in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and perhaps some thought little could be gained by reading the document. But I think most people-- Democrats and Republicans-- wanted to climb the bandwagon of war, propelled by the illusion of public support. Like most Americans, they were lazy and credulous. I was struck by McCain and Clinton's similar answers to the same question. Yes, they didn't read the NIE, but they had multiple briefings. The question is: briefings from whom based on what? It looks to me that the senators were less interested in doing their homework and in ascertaining the truth than in positioning themselves to do the most political expedient thing. We continue to pay the price for that today in American blood and treasure.
I think this national failure is interpreting reality also comes from what I call the myopia of the brilliant, a condition where intelligent people make stupid mistakes. These people are not just smart, but they are also forceful. They think it’s shameful to admit ignorance, and place great confidence in their brilliance—brilliantly constructing problem-solving systems and forcefully acting on their results. The problem is that these people are reluctant to re-examine their assumptions. They consider it a sign of weakness. We see this especially in politics—in building too many dams and highways and in starting ill-conceived wars. In describing the debacle of the 1960s, Russell Baker wrote that these people in government “had a lust to know everything. They had a vision of total information. Intelligence. One still senses a vocal genuflection when the word passes over their lips. God may be love, but knowledge is power. Theirs was a faith in Total Intelligence. In their dream of ultimate fulfillment, absolutely everything was knowable. The astounding thing, of course, was that the harder the White House labored to know absolutely everything, the less it knew about relatively few things that it was in the business to know about.”
In addition to this arrogance that gripped the inner core of the White House and the establishment was another phenomenon that Yale psychologist Irving L. Janus called “groupthink.” Groups such as project teams adhered to group norms – an assumed consensus-- and pressured each other to uniformity. An illusion of invulnerability and the rationalizing away of conflicting self-censorship gripped the group. This pressure combined with the fear of losing influence or even your job made it difficult for anyone to make principled stands. But reality is a hard teacher, and even the mightest herd must deal with the world as it is.
Military people generally are conditioned not to challenge but to obey. But those who do challenge are among the most outstanding military leaders of all time, including MacArthur to Truman, Grant to Lincoln, and Zhukov to Stalin. I see no such people in the military today. So when Bush says he will await for what the commanders on the ground advise him, what is is really waiting for is sounds within an echo chamber.
The press also is complicit in this failure in epistomology, perhaps more so than the generals as presumably they should have had the tough-minded independence to ask the right questions.
Let's face it. The White House press specifically and the press in general were compliant, credulous stooges. The orchestration of the mass media was both impressive and duplicitious. There are news reports that the former CIA Directory George Tenet said that his phrase "slam dunk" that many people took as a green light to invade Iraq was actually a reference to effectively propaganderizing the war. Frankly, I don't know which interpretation is worse.
I surmize that the process the administration used to sell the Iraq war and arouse public support was basically as follows:
1. Pass to reporters false "evidence" in leading liberal publications, such as Judith Miller at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
2. Cite that evidence in the Sunday talk shows.
3. Weave that evidence into a dog and pony show for Congressional leaders and the United Nations.
4. Use simple powerful images such as a mushroom cloud in all speeches.
5. Rhetorically associate at every opportunity in every speech Iraq with 9/11.
6. Co-opt the most influential reporters and columnists with private briefings, parties, and requests for advice.
7. Ruthlessly crush dissent in the intelligence services and the military.
8. Demonize or trivialize the skeptical.
9. Make it mainstream by enlisting actors and other famous people to spread the word.
10. Keep the message simple ("Iraq has WMDS") and repeat it continually, making the decision for war a foregone and popular conclusion. (The administration spin today is just as simplistic, but I don't think the public are now buying what the administration is selling: "If we don't stay, there will be genocide." )
In some hellish pit, Joseph Goebbels is smiling.
So what's the antidote for this?
1. Get away from the New York - Washinton, D.C. fishbowl, if not physically, at least mentally. David Halberstam, who recently died, wrote an influential book in 1972 The Best and the Brightest, an ironic reference to the intellectuals that led us into the Viet Nam quagmire. In it he refers to the incestuous relationship between press and power. I think the only way to look at the big questions clearly is to separate yourself from those people. The invitation to Georgetown parties, Lincoln Center concert, and White House briefings erodes the tough-mindedness needed to separate lies from truth.
2. Do your homework. The newsprint as well as the cable and web media are basically trascriptionists and there is nothing that flagship media outlets like more than to transcribe the words of the powerful. But it isn't from the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense where you will get the truth. It's from the mid-level bureaucrats and majors. Propaganda is a bottom down process. The agonizing search for truth is a ground up process.
3. Grow a backbone. This is true for everyone-- the media, the legislature, and voters. In photographs of people the start of war-- it doesn't matter if it's WWI or WWII and it doesn't matter if it's Germany or America-- there is a commonality in expression in the crowds. It's the faces of ignorant glee. But war has a way of teaching us reality-- slowly and painfully. And it is for this reason that courageous, skeptical questioning is the highest-- dare I say it?-- morality.
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