WASHINGTON - In a 1972 book, Victims of
Groupthink: A Psychology Study of Foreign-Policy
Decisions and Fiascoes, Irving Janis identified the
Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as
particularly compelling examples of how very smart
people can collectively make very stupid decisions.
In studying the Bay of Pigs, for example, Janis
noted that the group around president John Kennedy made
a series of assumptions that were fundamentally deluded
- that Cubans would welcome the invasion and rise up
against Fidel Castro and that the US could credibly deny
involvement in the invasion, if necessary.
As in
Iraq, many of those assumptions were based largely on
the accounts of exiles and defectors, but the group
dynamics involved in decision-making also played a key
role in rallying the administration of the "best and the
brightest" behind an adventure that proved disastrous,
according to Janis.
A great deal more is known
about group dynamics within the Bush administration
foreign-policy apparatus today - as a result of leaks,
memoirs and books, such as Bob Woodward's Plan of
Attack and Jim Mann's Rise of the Vulcans -
than was known at the time about the Kennedy
administration.
And what is known suggests the
existence of two major groups - an "in-group" of hawks
whose captain is Vice President Dick Cheney and which
has had a decisive influence on President George W Bush
himself, and an "out-group" of "realists" headed by
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard
Armitage.
While the out-group, which ironically
boasts men, including Powell, Armitage, retired generals
Anthony Zinni and Brent Scowcroft, with real war
experience, the in-group is dominated by individuals,
particularly Cheney and virtually the entire civilian
leadership of the Pentagon, who have none at all.
Hence the moniker "Chicken Hawks", defined as
individuals who favor military solutions to political
problems but who themselves avoided military service
during wartime. Cheney, who received five different
deferments from the military draft during the Vietnam
War, famously told an interviewer once that he "had
other priorities" in the 1960s than military service.
What also makes the in-group so remarkable is
its very small size, the long history it has shared
together, and its close personal relationships.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, for
example, worked together under Richard Nixon and have
been the very best of friends ever since. Their
neo-conservative aides and advisers, such as Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy
Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, and DPB member
Kenneth Adelman, likewise have been close for more than
three decades and have personally mentored other top
aides and advisers, such as Cheney's chief of staff, I
Lewis Libby, Defense undersecretaries for policy and
intelligence, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone,
respectively, and Weekly Standard editor William
Kristol, to name just a few.
The sense of
kinship that unites the group is illustrated in part by
a dinner hosted by Cheney shortly after US troops took
Baghdad 13 months ago. The guests included Wolfowitz,
Libby and Adelman; the atmosphere warm and celebratory
as they recounted their defeat of the "realists".
"Someone mentioned Powell, and there were chuckles
around the table," Woodward noted. And then "they turned
to Rumsfeld, the missing brother", and told affectionate
stories about their past associations with the crusty
Pentagon chief.
When Adelman said he had been
surprised US troops had not yet found weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), he was assured by Wolfowitz: "We'll
find them," and by Cheney: "It's only been four days
really. We'll find them."
Students of groupthink
list a number of symptoms of the phenomenon that can
lead the group into disaster, among them:
Believing in the group's inherent morality.
Sharing stereotypes, particularly of the enemy.
Examining few alternative or contingency plans for
any action.
Being highly selective in gathering information.
Avoiding expert opinion.
Protecting the group from negative views or
information that would contradict their basic
assumptions.
Having an illusion of invulnerability.
From
what is now known about planning for Iraq, each of these
factors obviously played a role, and they continue to
inform US policy not only against perceived enemies, but
even against "out" groups in the administration or in
Congress. And, because the "in" group was so small, many
of these characteristics were unusually pronounced.
The notion that the Chicken Hawks were morally
superior, not just to Saddam Hussein or the "terrorists"
or "Ba'athist dead-enders" whom they've been fighting
since the war ended, extended even to the "realists",
who were denounced in internal battles as "appeasers" or
worse. As Cheney was recently quoted as declaring with
regard to State Department proposals to engage North
Korea, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
Middle East experts at the State Department and
the Central Intelligence Agency were likewise scorned
and excluded from both planning and the immediate
aftermath of the invasion, while the creation in Feith's
office of ad hoc intelligence analysis groups that
"stovepiped" evidence of Iraqi WMD and ties to al-Qaeda
was a classic illustration of selective intelligence
gathering that would confirm pre-existing stereotypes.
Similarly, the total failure to prepare
contingency plans to deal with looting, or even with the
emergence of an insurgency against the occupation,
displayed a confidence that turned out to be completely
unwarranted. Likewise, former army chief of staff
General Eric Shinseki's prediction that more than
200,000 troops would be needed to occupy Iraq in order
to ensure security had not only to be rejected in order
to protect the group from negative views; it had to be
publicly ridiculed by Wolfowitz as "wildly off the
mark".
In his latest expose on the
prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, New Yorker
correspondent Seymour Hersh noted that Rumsfeld's
penchant for "secrecy and wishful thinking" -
characteristics that also apply to groupthink - resulted
in the Pentagon's failure to do anything about it or
about the many other problems they have encountered.
And whenever Powell or Armitage tried to bring
to the attention of the highest levels in the
administration the growing concern about prisoner abuse,
according to a source recently cited in the "Nelson
Report", an insider Washington newsletter, they were
forced to endure from the Chicken Hawks what an
eyewitness source characterized as "around-the-table,
coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these
tough guys would do if they ever got their hands
on prisoners ..."
