Spin One for the Gipper

Quoting from Frances FitzGerald’s Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War:

In those years ['81-'82] Henry Kissinger was occasionally invited to the White House to talk with the President about world affairs. James Baker and those other White House aides who worried that Reagan was too much identified with the right wing of the party thought it good public relations for the President to be seen consulting with the acknowledged master of geopolitics, whose policies had come under attack from the right. Kissinger was always happy to accept these invitations, though, after a few meetings with Reagan, he realized that they were essentially for show. In the course of their talks the President displayed little knowledge of world affairs and almost no curiosity about them. What was more, he seemed quite unconcerned with foreign policy. It was as if thinking about long-term strategies was something that other people were paid to do. When Kissinger talked about what the U.S. goverment ought to be doing in the coming years, Reagan often tuned out of the conversation altogether. “He would try to avoid policy discussions,” Kissinger said. “If he couldn’t, he’d resort to his cue cards. If he was alone, I knew that nothing would go on–he was just massaging me. Only if there was someone there would there be a discussion of substance.”

After experimenting with a number of conversational gambits, Kissinger discovered that the best way to get Reagan’s attention was to talk about what he ought to say publicly on an issue. If there was talk of a speech or a public statement, Reagan would sit up and his eyes would come back into focus. “He was an actor,” Kissinger said, “the quintessential actor. What he said was what he believed. He didn’t stand in front of his mirror in the morning while he shaved wondering whether that was the truth or not. If I told him Dobrynin had just told me that the Soviets couldn’t stand it ay more and would be launching their missiles in forty-eight hours, Reagan would no call the JCS. He would talk from his cue cards, then he would tell some Hollywood stories, and when I left, he would not call someone and say, ‘You know, Henry Kissinger has gone mad?”

“It’s very unusual,” Kissinger said, “to have a president who is not interested in policy at all.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Non-Ideological Approach to Counter-Proliferation

So, here’s one of my papers from my freshman English class last fall in lieu of new content:

Since the Soviet Union’s first atomic test in August of 1949 ended the US’ monopoly of nuclear weapons, US’ strategies for averting nuclear war have evolved.  Watershed events such as the development of intercontintental ballistic missiles, the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the rise of non-state actors such as al Qaeda in the 1990’s have morphed the contours of the strategic landscape and challenged strategic thinking of how best to keep the world safe from nuclear war.  One constant attribute among most US strategic analysts throughout these dilemmas has been the dubious, though at one time probably commendable, tendency to exaggerate nuclear threats in conscious attempts to use the unique psychological impact of nuclear weapons to accomplish non-proliferation policies that were not politically possible for conventional weapons.  John Mueller, in his Atomic Obsession:  Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, quotes Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editor Eugene Rabinowitch explaining that the purpose of his publication was “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality” as one of many examples of such hyperbole.  In the context of the Cold War, these exaggerations led to the nuclear disarmament movement and fostered the development of institutions such as the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency, which were at least ostensibly established to realize these goals.  Since the US became the world’s sole superpower in 1992, and the parallel ascendancy of the right in the US’ and European political systems, the anathematic role nuclear weapons play in world politics produces a different effect–namely, to make war with so-called “rogue states” more likely, evidenced first in Iraq in 2002 and 2003 and currently in Iran.  Thus, what was once a powerful argument for restraint is, in the post-Cold War international environment, a pretext for belligerent elements in the US to wage war.

Absent the Soviet threat, a more effective US strategy for maintaining peace is, first, recognizing the moderating effect nuclear weapons have had on great powers’ since the advent of nuclear weapons and applying those lessons to current conflicts; secondly, recognizing the moderating effect nuclear weapons have had on the few smaller states which maintain arsenals and applying those lessons to current and continuing conflicts is essential for effective security policies; finally, both the inability of emerging nuclear nations such as Iran to use their new weapons to achieve anything but the worthy goal of deterring attack and, absent threats from the West, the very limited incentives non-nuclear states have for pursuing nuclear programs should be recognized.

Nuclear weapons are stabilizers in an international system historically fraught with dissension.  As John Mearsheimer shows in his seminal The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, in the one-hundred and fifty-three years preceding the invention of nuclear weapons, Europe was ravaged by fifty-five wars.  The number of casualties in these wars exceeds 28 million, not including the approximately 75 million casualties in the two world wars.  Conversely, Europe has only had one war since the invention of nuclear weapons.  That war, the Russo-Hungarian War of 1956, saw the deaths of a meager 10,000, and evidence suggests that Soviet aggression in Hungary was tempered by the presence of NATO nuclear arsenals in the European theater.  Mearsheimer concludes that “[nuclear weapons] surely account for the absence of great-power war in Europe between 1945 and 1990”.

Prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, military planners had difficulty calculating which state would have the advantage in a given conflict, leading to all kinds of miscalculations. Nuclear weapons introduce a new Weltanshauung in the world of military strategy, the result of a newly defined value in the equation of wars, the cost of aggression.  As éminence grise Bernard Brodie observed on the first page of his brief history of nuclear strategy, “The Development of Nuclear Strategy”:  “[t]hus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars.  From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.  It can have almost no other useful purpose”.  For states considering aggression against a state with nuclear weapons, strategic decision-making and cost-benefit analysis are simplified to the point where starting a war means annihilation of large, valuable portions of the aggressor state.  As analyst Kenneth Waltz has noted, the problematic nature of deterrence in a conventional world is absent in a nuclear world:

Nuclear weapons purify deterrent strategies by removing elements of defense and war-fighting. Nuclear warheads eliminate the necessity of fighting and remove the possibility of defending, because only a small number of warheads need to reach their targets.

Nuclear weapons eliminate the need for defense because they eliminate the possibility of defense.

The experience of Europe over the past 60 years clears a path though the paradoxical strategic morass presented by nuclear weapons.  Nuclear weapons, though highly destructive when detonated, are the first effective deterrent against wars of aggression in the long history of European warfare.  Their use as weapons of deterrence was a triumph in the second half of the twentieth century in the standoff between the US, the USSR and the European powers, and they could play a similar role in the multipolar world that is emerging in the twenty-first century.

Just as Great Powers have been successful in averting violence in the nuclear age, regional powers such as Pakistan and India are likely to have success averting major war with the presence of their nuclear weapons.  The product of a post-colonial mishandling by the British empire, the boundary between India and Pakistan was incompetently drawn by the British in their hasty withdrawal from the Asian subcontinent.  Since partition in 1947 numerous large-scale conflicts have been fought, mostly for control of the Kashmir region.  In almost every case threats of a wider war ensued, and the UN had to take drastic action to circumvent this outcome.

Nuclear weapons will give India and Pakistan the space in which a negotiated settlement may be moved toward completion.  Since the series of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, establishing India’s mastery over nuclear technology and Pakistan’s emergence as a nuclear power, no large-scale conflicts have occurred.  Even after it had been established that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had a role to play in the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, India did not respond aggressively.

Those who argue that nuclear weapons are destabilizing in the India-Pakistan standoff generally tend to argue that these countries use the weapons as shields behind which they can launch limited attacks without fear of reprisal.  But this misses the fact that those skirmishes used to be much larger and threatened full-scale and even wider war.  Furthermore, evidence exists that the presence of the nuclear programs in India and Pakistan give the international community more impetus for and access to processes of diplomacy in the region.  Peaceful coexistence in the region is doubtful in the near future, but making the conflicts that do arise less conflagratory is a good idea.

The success of nuclear non-proliferation in the years since the signing of the NPT in 1968 is impressive.  Aside from the five recognized states possessing nuclear weapons, only five nations illicitly joined the nuclear club.  This is more likely because most nations already have little interest in possessing nuclear weapons than due to leaders’ desires to adhere to the NPT.  Surely, the addition of an international treaty adds something to the incentives for not having nuclear weapons, but merely expecting a sudden rise in nuclear proliferation absent such a treaty is not realistic.

As Joseph Cirincione shows in his brief primer on nuclear weapons, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, “politics trumps technology”. The fact that nuclear technology may be available to states plays very little role in determining whether that state will develop a nuclear weapons program. The knowledge necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons is universal, and currently 44 countries possess the industrial capability for a nuclear weapons program.  Yet, for different reasons, leaders have decided not to pursue programs.

Furthermore, enforcing non-proliferation policies is highly problematic.  The strictures of the NPT are nevertheless toothless without enforcement, and enforcement makes non-proliferation more difficult.  In the case of Iran, the threat of attack has roots much deeper than the current nuclear standoff.  Iran has been subject to Western threat and attack since the formation of its current government in 1979, and it correctly sees nuclear arms as a guarantee against Western aggression.  In this way, the more strenuously the US threatens enforcement of nonproliferation norms, the more incentives are given to countries to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

The paradoxical strategic significance of nuclear weapons continues to confound strategic thinkers and politicians tasked with keeping the world safe from war and nuclear war.  What might have been a noble and successful counterproliferation policy during the Cold War is now delusional and problematic.  Complicating the situation, current US policy applies selectively the enforcement of non-proliferation; illicit Indian and Pakistani programs were aided by the West while Iran’s legitimate program, still not proven to exist, has caused the US to threaten war.  Absent the Soviet counterweight to the West, the temptation to intervene aggressively at will throughout the world is proving too strong for the political leadership in the US.  Non-proliferation enforcement is quickly becoming the cloak under which these interventions are disguised.  The more non-ideological policy of using the natural tendencies of non-threatened nations to abstain by choice from nuclear weapons, allowing their existence in global hot spots to deter aggression, and attempting to end the current policy of disguising brazen self-interest as a movement toward peace is a better goal.

Keynesian Masquerade

There will never be an end to Keynesian economics. Just, perhaps, an end to the Democratic Party’s ability to employ it.

Republicans pretend to disagree with Keynesianism when Democrats are in power, vociferously discouraging its use by harping on the numerous things about both Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy which are counterintuitive to average Americans who do not understand economics. For instance, Republicans during Barack Obama’s presidency have lambasted his fiscal stimulus because it just can’t be right for America to spend money when it’s already in debt, right? I mean $14 trillion’s a big number, right? And Republicans have also blasted any and all monetary stimulus out of the Fed, which is entirely consistent with Republican wishes to have hard money throughout their presidencies, right?

Democrats, on the other hand, are handicapped in that they cannot pretend to disagree with the basic premise of Keynesianism–that government, being the main actor in the US economy, must help along the economy with fiscal and monetary stimulus when it hits a rough patch–during periods of Republican reign. So, when Republicans control the executive branch and/or a branch of Congress and pass stimulative tax cuts or pass stimulative spending bills, Democrats can only disagree with the specific content of those bills, not the underlying premise, which, with an economically illiterate electorate, is a serious tactical handicap.

Supply Siders’ “Rosy Scenario” and the 1981 Tax Cut

I’ve written previously about the Reagan administration’s 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut. To add further to the narrative, I’d like to add William Greider’s perspective from his Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. I would quote it, but it makes more sense to show the entirety of a couple of pages. So rich is the content:

So, there you have it. Ronald Reagan’s economic and political teams were completely aware of the fiscal consequences of the 1981 tax cut and chose to hide the analysis from Congress, which was debating the bill. The US barely had a $1 trillion deficit at the time Kemp-Roth passed, and, despite numerous efforts at fiscal retrenchment throughout the rest of the 80′s and into the 90′s, deficits soared.

Essence and Irony

“…the essence of American politics.  This essence, when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most in touch with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently ‘elitist’.”

Christopher Hitchens, No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, p. 18

 

“The wrenching irony of American history was that, while many of the Populist ideas eventually triumphed, the people themselves were utterly defeated.”

William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, p. 243

Comprehensive Failure

Paul Krugman begins his 1994 book Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations with a quote from an unnamed Indian economist: “If you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as  a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.” Krugman goes on to explain that “[e]conomics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology.”

Staring down the barrel of what might be a dark week in American history, I can’t help but feel a sense of helplessness before a political system in which the dominant party refuses to or is perhaps unable intellectually to manage the economy according to what we, as humans know to be true about how modern economies operate. But, unlike perhaps Obama, I’m not surprised. Simpler subjects such as biology and climatology have been poorly understood in the years since “Morning in America,” and I don’t have reason to expect improvement.

Reagan Myths

Earlier this week I came across Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias commenting on a nice post from Brendan Nyhan about what effect, if any, Ronald Reagan had on the size of the federal government and on American perceptions of the size of the federal government. Which is interesting to me because I’m trying to become a bit of a Reagan wonk but also because this topic came up in a discussion on my facebook page last week.  There was a discussion between a friend and me regarding Jonathan Chait’s post about how conservatives are reading Arthur Brooks’ The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future. Based on the write-up, it’s a ridiculous book, but what is interesting about this episode is that it’s yet another example of how conservatives (at least pretend to) live in a netherworld where actual facts about the US economy do not obviate theoretical frameworks for how they would like to view the US economy.

I quoted James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, from page 112:

Taking everything together, we find that the US is not a ‘free-market’ economy with an underdeveloped or withered state sector. It is, rather, an advanced postindustrial developed country like any other, with a government sector responsible for well over half of economic activity…And it is particularly good at disguising this fact and at cutting parapublic institutions in on the action.

This is basically the thesis of Galbraith’s book. I went on to quote page 114:

Overall, the New Deal survived Reagan quite intact, and the economy recovered–partly led by housing, partly by technology, partly by military spending. This was not because the conservatives around Reagan succeeded but because they had failed. Those who describe themselves as political conservatives but who are mainly interested in power rather than in ideas drew the lesson. They adapted. Rather than defeat the system, they decided to join it. And to turn it to their own purposes. Without saying a word.

But more to the point of the current discussion:

The history of the past three decades has often been written as a struggle between the spirit of Milton Friedman and the ghosts of Keynes and FDR–between the market and the state.  The Reagan revolution was successful primarily in forcing changes in the way people thought and spoke:  it resurrected Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek and established a new church of the free market, giving the right wing of the economics profession unprecedented exposure for its most extreme ideas.

Regardless of fluctuations in public opinion, Reagan’s tenure solidified a certain type of rhetoric that you still hear today, that you didn’t hear much of before 1980.  There were harbingers, such as the “tax revolts” in California and other states, but it was a new development that outlived Reagan to have large swaths of conservatives expressing “skepticism toward government solutions to every problem.”

It’s also worth noting that Reagan, in addition to NOT actually shrinking the size of the federal government, was no free trade advocate, either. According to Benjamin Friedman in his Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After,

President Reagan’s consistent rhetorical devolution to free trade notwithstanding, America during the 1980′s has taken more steps away from genuine free trade than in any comparable period since World War II. Outright duties, like the 100 percent tariff imposed on some electronic and semi-conductor products in 1987, have been infrequent. But protectionism built on back-door devices like “voluntary” export restraints, which exclude foreign-made goods while maintaining the fictionof free trade, is protectionism nonetheless. The share of America’s nonoil imports subject to such nontariff restriction has already grown from 17 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 1986. And now businessmen abroad are concluding that the decline in the dollar since early 1985 is a modern equivalent to the Smoot-Hawley tariff we imposed in 1930.

The Power of Extremism

 

Understanding neoconservatism is requisite to understanding post-Cold War US foreign policy.  Discerning neoconservatism’s motives can be frustrating.  How is it that they honestly believed and justified some of the things they said and did?  How is it they repeatedly denied their many failures, sometimes even citing documents which prove a point opposite the ones they attempted to make?  How are they allowed to remain a part of the political system?  Are their loyalties to the Likud Party, arms dealers, or do they somehow have a Hobbesian view of the world that simply entails a perpetually offensive military posture?  There is certainly nothing new about belligerent elements in governments, but with the neoconservatives there is an element of utter incompetence that nearly defies understanding.

These questions went unanswered for some time until I saw The Power of Nightmares, a three part documentary produced by the BBC in 2004, that tied up a lot of loose ends in my mind.  I recently re-watched it because I was in a class that covered “Team B” and am also working on a post about Michael Ledeen, who is featured prominently.  Some high-profile interviews are featured in the film (I’m not sure if they were done for this film exclusively or were part of BBC’s archival footage, which was drawn upon for parts of the film) including Richard Perle, William and Irving Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Richard Pipes, Milt Bearden, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gilles Kepel, Brent Scowcroft, Melvin Goodman, Vincent Cannistraro, David Brock and Anne Cahn, author of  Killing Detente:  The Right Attacks the CIA, amongst others.  The Power of Nightmares traces in parallel the rise of radical Islam and the rise of neoconservatism.  Sayid Qutb, an Egyptian teacher and extremist, is shown as the intellectual architect of much of the strategy and thinking of radical Islam, and the University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss is shown as the godfather of neoconservative thought.

Qutb and Strauss are similar as they thought their respective societies could be saved from decay only by an elite vanguard–groups such as radical Muslims or neoconservatives–who would deceive their countrymen into constructing a kind of society that those thinkers thought desirable.  The interweaving of these stories is masterfully done.  Qutb’s writings remain a watershed for modern radical Muslims, and, interestingly, Strauss is praised by neoconservatives for his insights into Western society.

All three parts can be streamed here and here.

Towards an Understanding of the Tea Party

I’ve been working toward a post on the Tea Party phenomenon but wanted to read Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons first in order to get some historical perspective.  My view is probably in line with most progressives in that I am continually frustrated by what seems to be pretty obvious–that popular resentment of elite control of the systems of power in our society have, in the case of the Tea Party, been co-opted by those very same interests and channeled toward further entrenching those interests.  (The Jane Mayer New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers has obviously received much well-deserved attention.)

My general view of the Tea Party differs from many condescending progressive and liberal critiques in that I both empathize with many middle class economic grievances related to personal income stagnation and also sympathize with frustration related to federal fiscal mismanagement. And I cannot help but think that if true liberalism, the likes of which have not been seen in recent US politics,  is to have any place of power, THE ONLY WAY TO GET THERE is to capitalize on the reality that people should be really pissed off about what the Conservative Revolution has done for their economic interests. Absent a mass-movement centered on real, concrete self-interest, the structures of US democracy are inherently opposed to working in the interests of those without wealth and privilege.

So, I’ve made it through the first couple of chapters of Right-Wing Populism in America and already have some interesting ideas to relate.  It turns out that the authors see the entire history of the US through the right-wing populist lens, with one form of elite co-optation of populist sentiment being funneled into another.  Their model is of a sort of revolving situation whereby “outsider” elements of the elite manipulate lower class popular sentiment in order to oust more prominent elite or to carve out a more elite role for themselves.

The US War for Independence is even portrayed as a “repressive populist movement”.  Berlet and Lyons maintain that the war was fought not only to end “excessive taxes and arbitrary government” but also “for greater freedom to attack American Indians and expand slavery”:

First, by equating tyranny with the British crown, the struggle for U.S. Independence promoted a form of antielite scapegoating that deflected discontent away from inequities within colonial society. Second, the drive for independence was also a drive to expand and intensify the system of White supremacy.  People of color were not simply “left out” of the Revolution–they were among its major targets…Efforts to keep African people enslaved and to crush their resistance were in fact central to the Revolutionary movement…From Georgia to Maryland, fear of British-inspired slave revolts became one of the key factors rallying Whites to the cause of independence.  In many areas, patriot militias were charged with two tasks: to fight British troops and to suppress or recapture disobedient Blacks…In addition to targeting people of color directly, the Revolutionary movement used fears of Indian and Black resistance to bolster its critique of British “tyranny”. In Common Sense, Paine–who earlier had advocated Black emancipation–denounced the British government as “that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us.” A few months later, the Declaration of Independence, in its list of accusations against King George III, charged that “He has excited domestic Insurrections [slave revolts] amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Condition.” Here is a classic example of repressive populist scapegoating.  Not only did this passage hide the colonists’ own muderous aggression and project it onto their victims, but it also treated people of color as passive beings manipulated from the outside.  Thus the founding document of the United States of America harnessed a racist stereotype to a classic conspiracist image: the plot by a power-hungry elite, controlling a primitive, violent horde, to dominate freedom-loving people. (emphasis my own)

The other major targets were American Indians and loyalist colonial elites.  Rather than addressing the inequities between the land-owning elite and the bond slaves (lower class Europeans worked alongside African slaves on land owned by the colonial elite) the War for Independence allowed for the revolutionary elite to buy off the lower class whites with promises of land from westward expansion, which was forbidden by the British [through the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774] because of the large costs of quelling and exterminating American Indians in the process:

To an overwhelming extent, however, the Revolution deflected popular aspirations away from the possibility of radical land reform and focused on the supposedly empty land to the west. Rather than tax the rich to pay their troops, the proindependence forces offered western land as standard payment for those who enlisted in the Continental Army or state militias.  In the South, soldiers fighting for liberty from Britain were also paid in slaves captured from loyalists.

To conclude, they maintain that “the central tragedy of the American Revolution is that, with few exceptions, it deflected people’s legitimate grievances and aspirations away from a fuller examination of the oppressive structures and elite groups within colonial society.  The British monarchy provided a scapegoat for the system of elite rule.”

Indeed.

Lessons Not Learned

I recently read The Essence of Decision:  Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow for my first upper level political science class, the politics of nuclear weapons.  My primary reaction is awe at the competence of most of the key players in the Kennedy administration, especially Kennedy himself.  The book makes clear that there was a lot of luck involved in the successful resolution of this crisis, and that there was plenty that was out of the hands of the principal players on both sides, but here was an executive who rolled up his sleeves and immersed himself in the gritty details of policy and followed through their implementation. And, inexorably, the descriptions of the internal deliberations of the Kennedy administration lead me to think of the administration I’m most familiar with, the Bush administration, and, more specifically, its handling of Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

Consider, for instance, Allison and Zelikow’s description in Chapter 4 of the implementation of the naval blockade, which is representative of the Kennedy management style as a whole during the crisis:

Kennedy and his advisers eventually knew each of the ships by name and argued extensively about which should be stopped first, at what point, and how.  [Theodore] Sorensen records “the President’s personal direction of the quarantine’s operation…his determination no to let needless incidents or reckless subordinates escalate so dangerous and delicate a crisis beyond control.

Contrast that with the remarkably consistent descriptions of former Bush administration insiders, who outline a sort of  deliberational mimicry and  bankrupt policy formation process in general but especially with regard to Iraq.  Typical of these is Paul O’Neill’s account as former Bush administration Treasury Secretary, recounted in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty:  George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill.   O’Neill describes meetings and policy formation on page 147 and following:

Everybody played their parts:  literally. For this President, cabinet meetings and the many midsize to large meetings he attended were carefully scripted.  Before most meetings, a cabinet secretary’s chief of staff would receive a note from someone on the senior staff in the White House.  The note instructed the cabinet secretary when he was supposed to speak, about what, and how long.  When O’Neill had received his first such note, he was amazed.  The idea of a cabinet meeting or any significant meeting between the President and his seniormost officials being scripted seemed to kill off the whole purpose of bringing people together.  He had been in many White Houses.  He had never heard of such a thing.

Recounting a cabinet-level meeting on energy policy on the heels of Cheney’s energy task force, Suskind reports:

O’Neill had been made to understand by various colleagues in the White House that the President should not be expected to read reports.  In his personal experience, the President didn’t even appear to have read the short memos he sent over.

That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any questions.  There are so many worth asking about each of these areas, O’Neill thought as he sat quietly, dozens of queries running through his head.

Suskind goes on to quote John J. DiIulio, Jr., who ran Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, on the Bush administration’s deliberation process:  “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one:  a complete lack of a policy apparatus.”

Into the void that was President Bush’s role, stepped Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, consummate bureaucrats.  Condoleezza Rice, whose role as National Security Adviser meant she was responsible for the policy formulation process in the NSC, completely failed in that regard, and is generally regarded as the most incompetent person to ever hold the position.  Again, there is a remarkable consistency to virtually all the insider accounts and studies of the Bush administration, from Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies to DiIulio’s Tempting Faith, extending into the books analyzing the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

…

Aside from being a work of history about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Essence of Decision is a reflection of the different ways of understanding complex organizations’ decision-making.  Chapter 5 explores the most refined of the three models of understanding discussed in the book, Governmental Politics, in which it is understood that not only are nations’ decisions made by individual institutions within, but also that those decisions are “formed, and deformed” by bargaining amongst and within these institutions.

The section beginning on page 265 entitled “Better Decisions” reflects on the different ways in which organizations can produce good and bad outcomes.  The authors cite Brian Villa’s study of the Dieppe raid during World War II as a good example of how bad outcomes occur, so-called “‘orphan’ actions”.  They quote a section from Villa’s book:

“[A]n unrecorded decision may well be, indeed should be, considered as a sure sign that something fundamental has gone wrong with the decision-making process; that one should also look for the presence of schemers who can impose projects on those who should know better; that one should also look for powerful external pressures reverberating through the decision-making process–pressures that cannot be resisted and lead to decisions for which there is no real acceptance of responsibility (and are therefore unrecorded).  All of this serves to underline a point that is not stressed enough in the political-science literature:  decision-making is fundamentally a process for assuming responsibility for a proposed action.

A better description of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its execution of the invasion and occupation could not be fit into a paragraph. The first things I thought of when reading “an unrecorded decision…” were the disastrous decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and de-Baathify the government, taken in May 2003, at the beginning of the 13-month reign of Paul Bremer and the CPA.  The decision to do so is generally credited to Bremer, but responsibility for such a crucial decision has generally been difficult to pin down, with reports that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith from their posts at the Defense Department played roles in the decision.  That these two decisions were not even discussed or approved by the Executive branch is symptomatic of the more general failure of leadership during Bush’s tenure.

That the neoconservative influence was instrumental in directing the response to 9/11 into an attack on Iraq is by now a forgone conclusion.  Neocon “schemers” were spread throughout the relevant cabinet-level agencies, and exercised their influence to a considerable extent.  New offices were created to compile raw intelligence, which were “stovepiped” directly to the executive branch.  The effect of this was that of the five purported Iraqi threats presented by the Bush administration (uranium purchases in Niger, mobile bioweapon labs, UAV’s as WMD delivery vehicles, aluminum tubes for uranium centrifuges, and an Iraqi connection to al Qaeda), all of them could have been and indeed were disproven before the March 20, 2003 invasion.  Cheney’s unprecedented trips to CIA in the months leading up to the war were instrumental in pressuring the analysts to reach the accepted conclusions in the October 2002 NIE.  Not to mention the fact that Hans Blix’s UNMOVIC had free rein throughout Iraq in early 2003, and, despite earlier administration claims to know where WMD facilities were located, and despite coordination between the administration and UNMOVIC, none could be found at this most critical juncture.

Which brings me to Jeffrey Record’s Wanting War:  Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq.  Record, a perennial contrarian, professor at the Air War College, and author of two previous books on the quixotic American experiences in Iraq, maintains that the 2003 war in Iraq was “irresistible” for a Bush administration drunk with hubris arising from its perceptions of American military power.  That there were “irresistible” pressures from the administration’s unprecedented close ties to the oil industry, hawkish elements in the Defense Department, and close ties to Israel’s Likud Party are given as a matter of course.

Record points out the reason behind Bremer’s hurried orders, namely a complete lack of planning for the post war.  His view is that neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney shared neoconservative plans for democracy and transformation of the Middle East, and used their power to limit planning.  Also noted are Rumsfeld’s plans to transform the military, which ran completely counter to the force requirements and duties necessary for a post-war occupation.  For Record, this rift is ultimately what explains the lack of a post-war plan planning.  According to Record, “Rumsfeld didn’t want any plan for post-Baathist Iraq, and because President Bush had granted Rumsfeld complete authority over the entire American enterprise in Iraq, there was no plan.  Rumsfeld wanted a ‘hit-and-run invasion,’ and he got it”.  Record continues:

Rumsfeld created a fundamental contradiction between the war plan and the critical objectives of quickly securing Iraq’s suspected WMD sites and the provision of security necessary for Iraq’s political reconstruction…Rumsfeld’s obsession with the technological transformation of the U.S. military into a lighter and more agile instrument that could quickly win wars and do so on the human cheap, irrespective of political policy and context…Rumsfeld either did not understand the disconnect between his invasion plan and the war’s political objective, or he did understand it but simply chose to ignore it because he had no intention of prolonging the U.S. military’s stay in Iraq beyond the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime.  In either case, he subverted President Bush’s purpose in Iraq.

I think this is mostly right, but I can’t readily dismiss the explanation given in David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s Hubris:  The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.  The authors maintain that the neoconservatives were themselves not receptive to sufficient post-war planning because doing so would reveal the utter nightmare of a US invasion of Iraq.  Corn and Isikoff quote a military analyst:  “They felt arguments that it would be hard were actually designed to cause people to rethink whether the war was worth doing in the first place.  This was appalling.  They were trying to rig the cost-benefit analysis.  So they ended up not properly planning for the aftermath of the invasion because that might interfere with getting the war they wanted.”