The No 2nd Order Effects Government

I have had a running twitter battle with some folks who are defending various parts of the US invasion of Iraq.  As any dedicated reader of my blog (that would be three of you) would know, nothing could irritate me more.

Anyhow, the concept of tradeoffs has been raised so let me just illustrate the complete lack of concern about tradeoffs in 2002 in the Rumsfeld Pentagon (so, I can be clear that many of us saw that Iraq would be a trainwreck--not just in hindsight).

In the summer of 2002, the US was busily trying to get ICC [International Criminal Court] exceptions written into every UN mission in which the US was involved.  I was on the Bosnia desk so I got to type up the documents concerning this issue.  The idea was that the US did not want its peacekeeping soldiers charged for war crimes while working in Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.  While this played well with the folks in Congress who were ICC-averse, it was not that real of a problem since Bosnia would not turn folks directly over to the ICC and even the ICC would give the country the first chance to try folks.

The key thing here is this: the US was antagonizing its allies because they cared about ICC a great deal when the US was planning a war at the time (Iraq) and would clearly like to have the allies involved or at least not opposed.  So why antagonize the French and the Germans over an issue that really, really, really was never likely to be a significant problem when it posed potential harm to a war the US was about to launch.  I raised this at the time with my military colleagues and obviously was not the only person in the building to think of it.  But still, full steam ahead on OPERATION ALIENATE ALLIES.

This was one of many examples where this administration, with Rummy playing a big role, where the side effects were ignored (such as empowering Iran).  As long as Saddam Hussein was dead, big victory.  Nothing else mattered.  Well, wrong, everything else mattered a great deal.  The list of the consequences that will be ever-lasting are huge.  But I have a student waiting so that is a blog post for another day.  Or perhaps just later today.

The Accountable Bush Administration

Thanks to Steven Metz's tweet.

A Reminder: Rice Was Awful

Condi Rice has a short interview in the NYT.  She still refuses to admit to any mistakes.  Oy.  So, here is a link to one of my old posts where I consider her to be the worst National Security Adviser in US history.

As I tweeted today, the fun part is having Rumsfeld and Rice point figures at each other.  Reminds me of how Rumsfeld's underling, Doug Feith, and Tommy Franks, who headed CENTCOM during the invasion, would accuse each other of being the dumbest mother@#$@#$ in government.  Rummy is right that Rice was a horrible NSA.  Why? In part because she could not manage the worst SecDef in history. 

Lots of people are pondering today the next set of National Security folks for Obama: Panetta as SecDef, replacing the retiring Gates, Petraeus at CIA to replace Panetta, and so on.  So, my first thought right now is--these folks clearly are going to be better than the Bush crew.  That is not saying much, of course. 

Folks would like an experienced administrator who is familiar with the intel process to head the CIA.  How many of those do we have?  Lots of worry that Petraeus's nomination is going to militarize the CIA.  First, as many in the army would argue, Petraeus really is not like them.  Plus he comes with an IR PhD (Princeton is known for having a decent program, I think).  In his various positions, Petraeus has not only been a consumer of intelligence--using it to figure out what to do in Bosnia, Iraq in 2003, Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan--but also a producer.  J2!  That is, in any military organization of any size, there is a section dedicated to gathering, analyzing, and synthesizing intel, including in SFOR in Bosnia, CENTCOM, his Iraq command, and at ISAF in Afghanistan.  So, Petraeus has a great background for the job.  Is this a way to sideline a potential Republican candidate at the same time?  Maybe, but I doubt both that Petraeus has presidential ambitions and that the GOP would nominate someone like him (smart, open-minded, not a loon).

Panetta? He only has experience within Congress, at the OMB, and at the CIA.  So, he has not been doing defense stuff directly, but his new job will be one where the focus is very much on the $$$.  He is better armed than most to figure out how and where to cut.  Yes, he could be blunt and do something across the board, but I doubt that he is that dumb.  Is he going to be as smart about strategy and selection of officers as Gates?  Not so sure, but there are no ideal candidates.  And the idea that Obama would give a good job to Lieberman who has proven he cannot be trusted is just laughable. 

Of course, people thought in early 2001 that Bush had picked a team of super-experts.  Experts at making huge mistakes as it turns out.  The proof will be in the pudding as they say (who? pudding addicts), so we will have to wait and see.  These names had been floating for weeks, so there will be no surprises along the way.

Social Science and Bush Policy Towards Iraq

I have already posted at the Duck and also at my blog on the spat between Tom Ricks and Peter Feaver.  Today, Feaver responded to Ricks.  I don't want to get into the he said/he said debate.  I just want to raise one point and then develop it a bit:

Feaver is not really doing social science here.  He is seeking to explain why a particular decision happened, but he is missing a huge opportunity to develop a general understanding of Presidential behavior about the deployment of troops.  He is only focused on the surge, and his narrative suggests that Bush was making some good, tough decisions to push the surge even when some (not all) of the senior military leadership opposed it.  The problem here is that Feaver could have asked a slightly different question, which would have been more interesting and more relevant beyond who gets credit for the surge: what explains the variations in Bush behavior from genial, go along, let Rummy mismanage the war to the tough decider?  In the Feaver story, Bush is pretty sharp especially with the implicit comparison to the doofus who got the US into a land war in Asia (at least Obama is getting us into an air war in Africa--no wise aphorisms about that).  So what explains that?

Let me suggest a comparison across cases: Clinton in 1995, Bush in 2006/7, Obama in 2009: all three Presidents faced roughly the same decision: to expend significant political capital to pull out troops (European for Clinton, US for Bush, US and essentially NATO+ for Obama) in a questionable, somewhat failing war effort OR reinvest with additional Americans and effort.  Once Bill Clinton committed to his European pals that he would use US forces to extract them from Bosnia if necessary, the choice of using US troops to enforce a peace became much more palatable.  With Bush facing a huge defeat in Iraq, the choice to invest just a bit further with some new generals (Petraeus and Odierno) and a new SecDef Gates and more troops, the decision was easier.  Obama did not want to send more troops into Afghanistan, but ultimately chose to do so as a last chance to find some success.

What does this scream?  Prospect theory, baby.  Gambling to avoid losses is a basic tendency according to the cognitive psychologists.  We are more risk acceptant when it comes to avoiding losses and more risk averse when it comes to gambling for gains (Jack Levy has several good pieces on this stuff including this one).  I am no expert on psychological approaches to foreign policy and international relations (that's Brian's gig), but it seems to me that we have a fairly simple (dare I say parsimonious?) explanation of Presidents making decisions about the deployment of force that is consistent across continents, economic times (good or bad), uni- or multi-lateral efforts, and so on.

The key is to think about the variation within the Bush Administration (a most similar comparison) or perhaps the similarities across Administrations (most different, more or less).  The spat between Ricks and Feaver is on the details of one case, but we can learn far more by comparing.

Deliberately Not Deliberated

Paul Pillar has a good piece taking Bush to task for trying to portray the decision to invade Iraq as a deliberate one.  "There was no policy process to consider whether the war was a good idea—no meetings, no options papers, nothing."

The funny thing (funny strange/sad, not funny ha ha) is that there were meetings and papers on how to deal with the Iraq army.  But then Rumsfeld and Bremer tossed that stuff away and thoughtlessly disbanded a group of hundreds of thousands of young men who knew where the explosives were stored. 

I have been using the Iraq decision as an analogy for other bad decisions made by collectives.  The individuals have different reasons for making a bad decision, but join together on a single specious justification to bring them together:

Far from being the prime mover of the war decision, the weapons issue was merely—as arch war promoter Paul Wolfowitz would let slip near the end of a long interview—a convenient rationale on which people in different parts of the government could agree.

Kind of like co-authorship.  Ooops, never mind.

I show Fog of War, the documentary about Robert McNamara, at the outset of my intro to IR class when I am usually at the American Political Science Association meeting (next year in Seattle!).  The three stunning things about that doc: how much McNamara and Rumsfeld look alike; how they are both described as micromanaging, arrogant, and mistaken; and that McNamara now feels the weight of his mistakes and admits that he screwed up big-time.  Will Rummy ever do that?  The stuff dribbling from his memoir (it has its own facebook page) suggests not so much.

New Details on 9/11

A new book, reviewed here, presents more information about the happenings on that fateful day.  Much less control at the top and much less obedience to procedure at the bottom.  The Air Force pilots had no clue even as they flied over the Pentagon after the attack.

Perhaps nothing perturbs Farmer more than the contention that high-ranking officials responded quickly and effectively to the revelation that Qaeda attacks were taking place. Nothing, Farmer indicates, could be further from the truth: President George W. Bush and other officials were mostly irrelevant during the hijackings; instead, it was the ground-level commanders who made operational decisions in an ad hoc fashion.

 Indeed, the hawks in the Pentagon apparently had to change the official history to prove that they were manly men:

Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed. Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad rec­ords to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”

 It is a pretty striking book and a review that is very critical of the Bush Administration.  Which is kind of funny to me, since the author of the review, Jacob Heilbrunn, was President of Oberlin's College Republicans back when I was a student [if this is the same guy, and his pictures suggest that it is].  But Jacob was a Con perhaps, not a Neo-Con.  Perhaps one of these days, I will plumb the depths of his blog to figure him out.  Unless my readers can educate us all.

Anyhow, the punchline:

Farmer’s verdict: “History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”

Quick Gitmo Thoughts

I am looking forward to the reactions to Obama's speech on closing Guantanamo.

My initial thoughts are:

1. I still don't understand why Cheney is given any credibility on this or any other issue, given how His Crankiness failed the US over the past eight years.
2. I think the best part of the speech was that Obama tried to treat everyone as adults, whether that works or not, making clear what he had to do, given the laws passed by the Congress and the decisions made by the courts; what the tradeoffs are likely to be; and the willingness to subject himself to oversight.
3. I do find it ironic that there is now the Not in My Backyard sentiment, as prisons were seen in the early 90's like Intel factories--a source of jobs and communities fought for them. But then again, the critics of the closure are grasping at straws.

I must admit that my hands on Gitmo are not clean. As I mentioned before, I was part of a process where six Algerian terrorist suspects were taken from Bosnia and sent to Gitmo in January of 2002--the first people picked up from some place other than Afghanistan. Orders had to be given to allow the US commanders in Bosnia to pick the suspects up from the Bosnia government and put them on a plane to Gitmo, and the paperwork went right through my desk. It seemed like a not-so-awful idea at the time, but this is before torture started at Gitmo, I think, and certainly before it was known.

To be clear, handling detainees is a difficult problem in a war with terrorists, as there is no equivalent of VE/VJ day. But I think Obama's speech summarizes the challenges well and how the Bush Administration cut corners and trapped us in a situation that was/is messier than it had to be. And Cheney's hands are all over the mistakes in these processes.

Rice and Rummy Follow Up

Just a quick link to add another reason to regret the Rice/Rummy era. According to Salon, they are both members of the Torture 13, responsible for creating the torture regime. In other words, war criminals.

While I disagree that the latest news exonerates the folks who got the early blame (BG Karpinski and the other folks in Baghdad), it is relatively clear where most of the accountability resides. This piece names the names and places the blame where it should be. Those under them can take satisfaction that they were doing things that were approved at the highest level of government, but following an illegal order is following an illegal order. Nuremberg did away with that defense, as far as I can tell.

On a personal note, I was glad to see that the JS lawyer trying to do the right thing:

In October 2002, when the legal counsel for the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff attempted to conduct a thorough legal review of the techniques, Haynes ordered her to stop, because "people were going to see" the objections that some in the military had raised.

We had to get legal approval from the JS lawyers on pretty much everything we did (guidance cables, policy documents, etc.) and it was not a pro forma process.

Anyhow, the Salon piece is disturbing as it is quite clarifying.

Cognitive Consistency is the Hobgoblin ....

Robert Jervis's Perception and Misperception in International Politics was one of the key readings that got me hooked on IR as an undergrad. Or at least, that is what I think I remember. As a consequence, my default expectation of others is that they will look at reality through a particular lens and ignore information that does not fit, or squeeze that info into their mental boxes (lens, box, yes, mixing my metaphors). Of course, the problem is that a lens or box (a theory, that is) is only suitable part of the time, so if you only have a limited repertoire, you are going to wrong much of the time. My focus in my Intro to IR class is to present a bunch of theories so that students will be armed with multiple lens and hopefully shift to more appropriate ones as circumstances change.

For instance, there has been a debate the past few years about why the US invaded Iraq and did it so badly. This was particularly galling to those whose theories focus on countries responding rationally to threats as maximize power (Mearsheimer) or security (Walt). Because US behavior appalled them so, they ended up jumping far from their comfort zone of systemic forces to domestic politics and came up with a controversial argument about the Israel lobby (accused of being anti-semitic, but my concern is the quality of their social science). The problem is that neither was trained nor inclined to think systematically about domestic interest groups or diasporas and did not rely upon existing work in these areas to build a good argument about why one set of interests was able, they asserted, to trump the national interest.

Had they been my undergraduate students, they might have considered other theories of decision-making, especially groupthink. The most clarifying statement Bush ever made about his role as the "Decider" was when he said that he didn't read the newspapers, but relied on his advisors to keep him informed. This, plus my experience in Rumsfeld's Pentagon, where he ruled through fear, suggest that the key dynamic was not AIPAC or other interest groups drove Bush Foreign Policy, including the bungled Iraq expedition, but that administration lived in an echo chamber where new information was only useful insofar as it supported pre-existing preferences and plans.

Why does this matter now? Because we should not hold onto groupthink as the rosseta stone for understanding the Obama Administration. We don't know enough yet about how decisions get made, but it seems pretty clear that this group is far less insulated and far less ideologically committed than its predecessors. So, what can we predict? This administration is far less likely to be consistent than the previous one as it is probably more sensitive to new information, to domestic interest groups, and international pressures. After all, this is a reality based group, unlike its predecessors.