Do the Cossacks Work for the Czar?

There is an awful lot in this post by Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted » One-A-Day: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History. But let me, for now, focus on one issue and one issue only. Tim writes:

Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » One-A-Day: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History: [I]n Zimbabwe... there is first a disconnect between what imperial leaders did and what actors on the colonial periphery did, and that the actions of the latter sometimes drove the former, and that decisions made at either (or both) levels often were internally contradictory, improvisational as well as pre-determined, based on fragmentary or patchwork kinds of knowledge, and frequently opaque to the actors themselves....

I’m perpetually skeptical about whether we ever ought to talk about individual intentions in an atomistic way... assign proportionate value to different components of intention, and equally skeptical about whether we can ever atomistically describe the relationship between intention and result. That’s just with one individual, but it’s even more so once we talk about how a decision actually is made by small groups of advisors and is then transmitted to larger institutional networks....

[O]ne of the interesting bits of information to come out of the Iraq War so far has to do with why US intelligence was so off about Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. People who want to argue that intelligence was purely concocted for political purposes are too simplistic, people who want to reduce it all to the will of Dick Cheney or a few neocons are too simplistic, people who want to make it a sincere mistake are too simplistic. Some of what strikes me as actually involved includes....

[A]ctors inside the Bush Administration made it known that they, even more than their predecessors, would not welcome intelligence which blatantly contradicted beliefs or assumptions that they were inclined to make. No one ever sends an order down that says, “Here’s the casus belli we need, please write it up! kthnx.” This kind of pressure gets exerted when someone like Cheney says in a conversation that includes key advisors and heads of executive departments that intelligence has been “too timid.”... Cheney (or various neocons) could believe that statement as a reaction to some factual understanding of the history of US intelligence... and could not entirely know themselves why they say it, or how that statement is likely to be received or interpreted....

Another thing at play: how the movement of information through institutions is rather like a game of telephone, that there is a kind of drift and transformation which has less to do with intentionality and more to do with processes of translation, reparsing, repackaging and repurposing as information travels from office to office, up and down hierarchies....

I could add more, but it seems to me that this is what a social history of state or institutional action at the top of hierarchies might begin to look like. I wouldn’t want someone like Gaddis to take this sort of thinking on board so far that it messes up narrative and explanatory clarity, but I do think traditional political and diplomatic history sometimes mirrors a flaw of a lot of social science. Some social scientists confuse explanatory models for empirical reality; some political historians confuse explanatory narratives about decision-making for the messy processes that shape intentions and translate intentions into action and event.

I think that Tim Burke is both right and wrong. He is right: courts are the natural habitats of deceitful courtiers who tell the princes exactly what the princes want to hear, the people on the spot who control implementation matter in ways that the people around polished walnut tables in rooms with green silk walls do not, and the movement of information through bureaucracies does resemble a game of telephone with distortions amplified at every link.

But.

Those with sufficient virtu to become princes in this modern age are well aware of all these deficiencies of bureaucracies and courts.

When Lloyd Bentsen became Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, he scattered his--loyal--senate staff throughout the Treasury Department at all levels, and used them as a second, separate, parallel web of communication in order to gauge the distortions that were being introduced into the paper that crossed his desk by the game of bureaucratic telephone. When Kangxi became Emperor of China, he scattered the--loyal--hereditary bondsmen of his Manchu clan throughout the imperial Chinese bureaucracy at all levels, with instructions to write to him regularly through secret channels to tell him what was really going on, as a second, separate, parallel web of communication so that he could gauge who was telling him what he needed to know and who was telling him what they thought he wanted to hear.

It is reasonable to suppose that fifteen or twenty-five year olds raised by hereditary right to posts of especial distinction are bureaucratically unsophisticated--people who don't understand that pieces of information that come up through five layers of the hierarchy have been shaded a little bit at each level. It is reasonable to suppose that twenty-five or thirty-five year olds raised by hereditary right to positions of special ditinction are psychologically unsophisticated--do not understand that if they are pleased by and reward lies, they will ultimately be told nothing but pleasing lies.

But by the time anyone (a) possesses sufficient virtu, (b) is forty-five or fifty-five or sixty-five, and (c) has seen the world, there is no excuse for not understanding that as a czar your cossacks respond to the incentives you set them, that you can change those incentives, and that you are responsible for the behavior that your incentives elicit. By the time you are forty-five or fifty-five or sixty-five, you know very well that when you say that "intelligence has been 'too timid' in the past," what they hear you saying is "don't tell me what you think, tell me what I want to hear." George W. Bush--the feckless and virtu-less hereditary prince--may well not have clued in to the fact that Condi Rice had decided that if she told him what he needed to hear she might get fired, while if she told him what he wanted to hear she would get promoted. But Colin Powell knew damned well what the flow of "intelligence" from George Tenet to him was worth unverified, and knew damned well that taking care not to try to verify it was a way of preserving his own options for the future. And Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knew damned well--unless they are much farther into their dotage than I believe--that their confidence in Saddam Hussein's WMD program was based not on intelligence but on their judgment that they would have active WMD programs if they were Saddam Hussein.

The frictions and distortions of the bureaucracy and the court exist. They are, however, counterbalanced by the intelligence, the sophistication, and the energy of the principals at the top. If the czar wishes, the cossacks do work for him. And if the czar doesn't want to take the time to make the cossacks work for him--well, that is his decision and what happens is his will just as well.

Comments

[Maynard Handley]

Or, to put it differently, pace Cass Sunstein: Compare and contrast GW Bush vs FDR (or, for that matter, even freaking Ronald Reagan). FDR was famous for
(a) consulting with a large number of people, with a range of opinions, to try to get a handle on the full scope of a problem and
(b) being well aware of the nature of group-think, how people don't want to state unpopular ideas in public, don't want to contradict their superiors, etc, and thus being sure to consult with these people as individuals in situations that did not lend themselves to these problems.

Reagan was hardly the leader in this respect that FDR was, but still engaged in some of these practices.

The GWB presidency, on the other hand, has been 7 years of doing his damndest to ensure that GWB, the US population, and the entire damn world don't get to ever hear alternative ideas on anything, of being sure to punish dissenting voices, and of fanning the flames of groupthink as aggressivel as possible.

[Fred]

Some of the reasoning of the Bush administration was historical rather than intelligence-oriented or ideological.

Looking at the history of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in from 2003, you can plainly see a man who has been using his oil revenue to pursue an obsession with all sorts of WMD's. And plainly see a man who does not get WMD's for deterrence or prestige but to use them as soon as possible. This is the lesson of the gassing of the Kurds and Iranians.

The torture chambers and rape rooms of Iraq, along with the attempted assassination of Bush Sr, reinforced this interpretation.

Equally clearly, the sanctions were crumbling, the Europeans were violating their provisions. The Russians were selling contraband to Iraq. The Iraqis were getting mileage out of a false story about the sanctions starving to death a half million Iraqi children.

So, coming into office in 2001, the Bush administration "Knew" that they would have to get rid of Saddam at the first opportunity, before looking at any intelligence reports whatever. After all, the Clinton administration, those weak-kneed liberals, had also stated that regime change in Iraq was US policy.

So, upon seeing intelligence reports that Saddam wasn't as heavily armed as thought, they could easily see that the intelligence was wrong.

That, in fact, the intelligence was right is merely an accident of history, not a serious challenge to their opinions. Clearly, given more years of oil revenue and free trade, Saddam would get nuclear weapons sooner or later. It was only a question of when, not if.

The whole thing is really quite reasonable. It just hasn't worked out the way it was planned. War does that.

Really, the problem of the lack of WMD's could have been swept under the rug if the dang war hadn't dragged on so long. The problem was the extended insurgency, which was predicted only by a few malcontents.

Fred

[Matt]

The President, with a little wit, could get on the web and know more about a particular subject than any of his advisers, and do it in short order. The summaries of issues that a president can find on the web are far superior to any bullshit the courtiers feed him.

Rather than deal with Condi's insecurities, George could read directly from any professor, almost, who is more well versed in some issue than Condi.

Presidents who cannot use information, look really stupid to the educated public, and their lack of knowledge is embarrassing. The problem is not that the courtiers spew bullshit, it is that the president has to spend too much time listening to it that he can't get time on the web.

[MostlyAPragmatist]

Fred--

The problem was the extended insurgency, which was predicted only by a few malcontents.

Poppycock. The likelihood of a dissolution of a unified Iraq was stated publicly by Kissinger, Yevgeny Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and almost every other international relations professional that was not associated with Bush Administration.

Much is made about the intelligence that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but the production and belief in that evidence was only one way in which the Bush administration's decision-making process needed to fail in order to get us involved in the Iraq debacle. Sunni, Kurds, and Shia were kept together by a ruthless dictator with a mustache. It didn't take 40 years of foreign policy experience to see it coming. The parallels to Yugoslavia after the end of communism were obvious then as they are now.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Brad,

I suspect that you underestimate the power of collective delusion and blind adherence to it and to authority. I also suspect that you overestimate the virtu, or at any rate the intelligence, of those who reach the top rungs of government and corporate ladders. How many hedge fund geniuses recently managed to flunk a rather simple probability exam?

[Neal]

This is an administration where beleif in an idea is proof of its correctness. Dissent is traitorous and defeatist.

That said, it was interesting to hear on NPR this morning an interview with the head of the team that wrote the latest Iran NIE. The reporter prefaced his comments at some point in the interview with "he hasn't been asked to apoligize for writing it yet..." and my head virtually exploded.

WTF!!??? What kind of Stalinist tractor production statistic manipulating country have we become where it is even accepted that a report that no-one has factually countered is to be apologized for? But GWB just "knows" that the report is wrong.

It is clear that GWB will remain a danger to this country until his last minute in office.

[Barry]

"How many hedge fund geniuses recently managed to flunk a rather simple probability exam?"

Posted by: CapitalistImperialistPig

They didn't flunk it. They realized that either (a) things would go well, in which case they'd get fat bonuses, or (b) things would crater, in which case they'd *not* be held liable for bonuses already paid, and might also get sweet, sweet golden parachutes.

[mistah charley, ph.d.]

Previous commenter Fred, at the end of what seems a seriously-intended analysis of what may have happened, says, "The problem was the extended insurgency, which was predicted only by a few malcontents." Is this a sudden, unannounced switch into snark, or an opinion actually held by the commenter? I can't tell. If the former, it is a flaw in the writing. If the latter, it sincerely represents the colossal stupidity of the neocon Project for the New American Century ideologues, who may actually believe the "stab in the back" excuse for why the Vietnamese were able to drive the US from their country. People who sit at the apex of control in the commercial world, who can destroy the economic lives of their subordinates with a word, imagine that everyone everywhere is equally powerless against them. But bribes and threats work only so far, and the power to destroy is not the same as the power to coerce. Consider - the greatest machinery of destruction in the history of the world, the so-called Department of "Defense" (more accurately named the National Military Establishment [NME - say it quickly a few times] when it was created by the National Security Act of 1947) has never won a war against anyone with the capacity to fight back.

Second, the points Brad makes here are excellent, and I would like to explicitly point to a corollary: George W. Bush did NOT become President because of his own virtu. Those who knew him best nevertheless did those things which resulted in him becoming Chimperor. They bear a large share of the responsibility for what the Cheney Administration has done.

[Annoyed]

I find the locution "weapons of mass destruction" intensely irritating. It is a deceptive usage designed to spread the deserved horror about nuclear weapons to others who don't have them. In fact, nuclear weapons are in a class by themselves; nothing else is within at least two orders of magnitude of their destructive power. Chemical weapons are conventional weapons, and not particularly effective weapons at that. Biological weapons have never been used successfully on any mass scale, nor are they likely to be.

Pedantic correction dept.: for "Yevgeny Brzezinski" substitute "Zbigniew Brzezinski."

Questions dept,: did Sadam really try to assassinate Bush Sr.? I've heard that he did, and that he was suspected of doing so. I've always wondered why he would. From his point of view, the down side is enormous and the up side is zero.

[Michael Turner]

The diagnosis of the Senate committee investigating How We Could Have Been So Wrong: "collective groupthink." (Is there any other kind of groupthink?)

This made me take down my copy of Irving Janis' classic Groupthink and re-read it. And guess what? Donald Rumsfeld is in there, as part of a textbook case. (The Mayaguez incident.)

Now, with a certain amount of what Brad (via Machiavelli) calls "virtu", extended to include foxy shrewdness, if you've already been through the groupthink ringer at least once, and with relative impunity, you might reason thus:

"Maybe Saddam has WMD, maybe he doesn't. I'm going to start saying he does. How do I lose if he doesn't? I get called a fool. But is that so bad if everybody agrees that everybody was fooled? No. So ... start building the process that leads to intelligence cherrypicking. But also make sure that almost everybody of significance is either fooled, or willing to look like they were fooled."

Somewhere, Machiavelli warns against relying on defectors as a source of accurate intelligence. And for a reason that's obvious enough: defectors have an axe to grind, they have a grudge. And yet, the case for WMD was built to a great degree on the testimony of defectors. A close study of Machiavelli leaves you with tools that can cut both ways, and this piece of advice was one of them. If you want to avoid a war, you make sure that defectors from the target nation don't have much input. If DO you want to go to war, you make sure that the voices of defectors are amplified.

[c.l. ball]

No doubt Bush admin. heavies _believed_ that Iraq had CBN programs rather than having reliable _reports_ that Iraq did so, but it is also true that the intelligence agencies _suspected_ on their own that Iraq had or was trying to reconstitute some type of chemical, biological, or nuclear program. When one suspects one has less confidence in one's assertions than when one believes.

Iraq was breaching sanctions rules (the aluminum tubes were a contraband grade, regardless of whether they were to be used for rockets or nuclear fuel) and obstructed inspections -- why do so unless it is trying to hide something? The top-down beliefs reinforced the ground-up suspicions and made correct conclusions hard to reach. That and decreased tolerance for uncertainty following 9/11.

[Brett Dunbar]

You should remember that Saddam was an idiot. He didn't have WMDs and yet continued to obstruct inspections of some sites, creating the impression that he had something to conceal. In a situation where the US government obviously wanted to remove him and was looking for reason to do so giving the impression that he had a WMD programme was remarkably stupid. From this it is possible to deduce that Saddam was inclined towards irrational behaviour, that trying to kill Bush would be stupid doesn't mean Saddam wouldn't try.

[c.l. ball]

"The problem was the extended insurgency, which was predicted only by a few malcontents."

No dice. The main reason that the majority of international relations scholars opposed the invasion was that civil war along ethnic lines was the likely outcome absent a very good plan for forming a transitional government and establishing power-sharing arrangements. Dissatisfaction by any of the parties -- Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite -- was bound to produce a rebellion against the others and US/UK forces. It was not that the CBN/WMD case seemed weak, but that even if it was strong, an invasion was likely to create severe post-war problems. Interdiction and deterrence was a better course than invasion for mos IR scholars.

[Bruce Webb]

Fred's argument is iron-clad. If you just can take five months of history and flush them down the memory hole.

You had one set of intelligence in Sept 2002. That set of intelligence was more or less known to Congress, more known to some (chairs and ranking members of the Intelligence Committees) than to others (say Senator Clinton). On the basis of that information set Congress voted wisely or not to Authorize the Use of Military Force. If at that point in history you concluded that Saddam would not blink, that he would maintain his one, stockpile of WMD or two, his bluff that he even had such a thing, then you were giving Bush a blank check for war. Which was pretty much my position, I had concluded that Saddam was bluffing but didn't guess he would crack. Which is why I personally (not that it mattered in the event) was against the AUMF.

But Saddam to the astonishment of practically everyone did crack. He allowed Inspectors in and allowed them access to sites that had been off limits in the 1996 round (the so called Presidential Sites). As a result by Feb-March 2003 we had a wholly different information set on which to act. By which time the Commander in Chief had made two claims: 'the decision to go to war has not been made' and that 'I am the decider'.

It does not matter a bit what Bill Clinton knew or thought he knew in 1996, in the event it doesn't matter what Hillary Clinton knew or thought she knew in Sept 2002, all that really matters is what George Bush knew or thought he knew in March 2003. At that time it was clear that Saddam had no nuclear program at all and that under continued IAEC inspection and selective sanctions wasn't likely to and that moreover he had no significant chemical or biological weapons inventory or manufacturing capability. Which makes Fred's conclusion simply counterfactual. There is in fact zero reason to believe the following has any correspondence to what a reasonable 'Decider' would have decided in March 2003

"Clearly, given more years of oil revenue and free trade, Saddam would get nuclear weapons sooner or later. It was only a question of when, not if.

The whole thing is really quite reasonable. It just hasn't worked out the way it was planned. War does that."

No Fred it was not reasonable, it was irrational. Given what was known in March 2003 going to war against what was clearly an Iraq that was no threat, imminent or otherwise, to the United States was a violation of solemn treaty obligations and as such a violation of the President's oath to uphold the Constitution (which makes treaties US law). By that act George Bush showed himself to be both guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors under US law but also as a war criminal under international law. For purely practical reasons articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney would be a huge mistake, we will be rid of them with a lot less time and effort than doing impeachment right would take, if it could be done at all. But history is not going to treat these guys well. Because not everything has gone down the memory hole, Sept 2002 is simply not the same as March 2003 no matter what people might wish. On objective grounds the Decider is a war criminal. That he will never be in the dock at The Hague and instead will spend the rest of his life giving six-digit speeches with lifetime protection from the Secret Service is just an accident of history. It certainly isn't justice.

[Cranky Observer]

> But by the time anyone (a) possesses sufficient virtu, (b) is
> forty-five or fifty-five or sixty-five, and (c) has seen the
> world, there is no excuse for not understanding that as a
> czar your cossacks respond to the incentives you set them,
> that you can change those incentives, and that you are
> responsible for the behavior that your incentives elicit.

In the corporate world I call that the illusion of greater competence: the belief that somewhere higher in the organization there is a person or committee of senior managers (or outside consultants) who truly understand the situation, are much smarter than me and all my coworkers, and who make deep and wise decisions. Haven't found them yet.

Cranky

[MostlyAPragmatist]

Cranky--

I've seen people of great competence at many large organization I've worked in and apparently so has Brad. People like yourself who have never found someone of great competence in a large organization are either young, very unlucky, or incapable of recognizing competence at this level.

[drm]

I think the calculation was that it wouldn't matter if Saddam had WMD or not. The case was good enough to suit their purposes which had nothing to do with the "GWOT" anyway. The whole WMD thing was Clinton's wedge against Saddam - it was dusted off and polished up PR offensive only after the lame effort to tie Saddam to 911 fell short.

Fred is right on one point. If the war had been quick - as the Bush admin naively expected - they probably would not have paid a much of a political price. Though in the long run history might have taken a dimmer view.

[Chris Brown]

"When Lloyd Bentsen became Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, he scattered his--loyal--senate staff throughout the Treasury Department at all levels, and used them as a second, separate, parallel web of communication in order to gauge the distortions that were being introduced into the paper that crossed his desk by the game of bureaucratic telephone. When Kangxi became Emperor of China, he scattered the--loyal--hereditary bondsmen of his Manchu clan throughout the imperial Chinese bureaucracy at all levels, with instructions to write to him regularly through secret channels to tell him what was really going on, as a second, separate, parallel web of communication so that he could gauge who was telling him what he needed to know and who was telling him what they thought he wanted to hear."

When Incurious George was nominated in 2000 he appointed Cheney as his chief of transition and to head his search for a vice-president, to which many pundits expressed their relief that there would be a "steady hand on the tiller", given Bush's incapacity for the job.

Cheney did just as Mr. DeLong reminds us Bentsen and Kangxi did. President Cheney sprinkled so-called "neo-cons" throughout the war, intelligence, and diplomatic departments and agencies, to keep an eye on and undercut the likes of Powell, Rice, and the professional military whom the neo-cons mistrust, as well as to establish a "as a second, separate, parallel web of communication."

Like all fanatics, the neo-cons are so convinced of their superior rectitude, and intellects, that they are able to easily dismiss contrary points of view expressed by professional bureaucrats and military leaders, and to justify venal and inhumane acts in pursuance of their divine, neo-Wilsonian mission of reconstructing the world in their vision.

Thus, Wolfowitz could dismiss the military opinion of Gen Shinseki which turned out to be correct. Likewise the whole "cabal" could dismiss the consistently correct readings of the State and Energy Depts. intelligence analysts and could throw Garner overboard and replace him with the fealty of the congenitally incompetent Bremmer.

This is the same group of delusional psychopaths who set up the Pentagon's "Team B" to over-hype the Soviet threat, who facilitated the transfer of biological weapon precursors and chemical weapons to Iraq for use against the Iranians, and who illegally sold missiles to Iran to fund their proxy war in Nicaragua.

True believes can be dangerous, and this group has succeeded in making the world a more dangerous place for over twenty five years.

[bakho]

People enter a conversation with their own world view and preconceptions. For Example, true supply-siders believe that tax cuts increase revenue and no amount of evidence will ever convince them otherwise.

No amount of intelligence can correct for the flawed world view of these people. All they understand is power and the use of force and fear to get their way. They believe in trying to use our military to solve political problems (not possible). They are climbers that kick the chairs out from under the competition in their fight to the top. They do not appreciate teamwork, international institutions or cooperative efforts that provide win-win situations. They only win if someone else loses and the military is option #1 because they fail to understand its limits. Like supply-side ideology, their foreign policy ideology is dysfunctional. They cannot be trusted with power because their foreign policy ideology prevents them from acting in the best interests of our country and the world.

[Eric]

What the historical revisionists - who say Bush, et al, were justified in merely 'incorrectly' judging the facts - want us to forget is the rhetoric they used at the time, which failed to induce caution. Quite the opposite. Rice talking of 'mushroom clouds' over an American city and serious, sober discussions of balsa-wood drones flying across the ocean to disperse bio-chemical reagents all over the U.S., were designed to speed everyone past the funhouse mirrors of plentiful evidence that there was no threat. And, of course, in this case the funhouse mirrors were completely straight and normal.

Balsa-wood drones? One of history's big laughs.

[Emma Anne]

"But Saddam to the astonishment of practically everyone did crack. He allowed Inspectors in and allowed them access to sites that had been off limits in the 1996 round (the so called Presidential Sites). As a result by Feb-March 2003 we had a wholly different information set on which to act. "

Nice summary, Bruce. Why can't the Dems describe the sequence of events as well as you do.

[Paul J. Reber]

Just to assuage a pet peeve of mine, you don't need to assume any insanity nor idiocy on Saddam Hussein's part to make sense of what likely happened with respect to his WMD programs and inspections. He was a brutal dictator trying to hold together a fractious country with his own ethnic group a powerful minority. Worse, the majority that detested/feared him has a large, powerful country of their own ethnic/religious orientation right next door. He needed the illusion of WMD programs to keep his own country in line and maintain his grip on power. Full compliance with UN inspections could easily have been seen as a fatal weakness on his part likely to lead to his deposition and death (by popular overthrow or cabal). Note that along these lines, what he really needs is his people to think he has WMD, but to not actually have them so he can demonstrate compliance if it really comes to that. And that is exactly what he had.

So he delays and stalls until the threat of death by US intervention was higher than the threat of catastrophe from within before opening up to inspection. He miscalculated, obviously, since the US went to war and killed him anyway. But it wasn't a transparently stupid gamble, a lot of us underestimated how dangerous the Bush administration was and is.

Saddam Hussein may have been a lot of things, but I think it's dangerously bad to go around ascribing craziness or idiocy to other country's leaders in general. I don't think you get to his position if you're stupid. Look again at the incentives of his situation and I think you can see how he was rationally responding to them.

Similarly, it worries me a lot to hear crazy/stupid type insinuations with respect to Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I don't think any of his actions look out of place given his incentive structure. Is it crazier to pander to your anti-Isreal base with ridiculous statements about the Holocaust than to pander to the evangelicals by denying evolution?

Thinking of Iran, what incentives has the Bush administration created for them? If you were a citizen of Iran, even one who hated the current government, you might easily believe that dealing with the theocracy is better than risking the destruction of your country by a US invasion. What's the only apparent way to stop the US from invading you? It appears to be posession of nuclear weapons. They have created an incentive structure that effectively demands Iran obtain real WMD as fast as possible.

That seems bad, but are Cheney's neocons stupid? Or did they actually know Iran was years away from a bomb so it was safe to set up this incentive structure? I don't know, but I'm not enjoying this particular exercise in game theory.

BTW, I try to apply the "they couldn't get that far if they were really stupid" to GW Bush as well. I don't think he's as stupid as he looks, but some days it's really hard to believe.

[Anon]

An insightful and well-written piece by Brad.

It is actually extremely clear that Cheney et. al. instructed their people to provide an excuse for attacking Iraq, a country which posed zero threat to the United States, and that those people provided various excuses, and that Cheney et. al. then used those excuses and did attack. Once the attack was under way, those excuses were no longer needed and they have been abandoned, allowing the truth to seep out.

Whether George Bush was part of the deceivers or whether he was himself deceived is unclear and frankly immaterial - one can delegate authority, but no responsibility.

To correct some of the idiots above: There is zero evidence that Iraq had any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or weapons programs after 1991. Zero. The aluminum tubes were purchased for rockets and are not and have never been contraband of any sort. No chemical weapons trailers have ever existed. There's zero evidence that Iraq CLAIMED to currently have chemical weapons - indeed, they specifically claimed that they did not. There is also zero evidence that Iraq refused to cooperate with inspectors - inspectors conducted over 900 inspections, just in the six months prior to the war, and were denied access zero times. Additionally, Iraq was demanded to provide documentation of every weapons program ever conducted by them, and they did so (which the U.S. then proceeded to attack as inadequate).

There is zero evidence that Iraq ever sponsored any acts of terrorism directed against the U.S. Although there apparently was a bomb plot against GHW Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993, the arrestees 'confessed' to being Iraqi agents under torture by Kuwaiti police and there is no other evidence that they were Iraqi agents. The 'ringleader' was a 36-year-old nurse who confessed to being a colonel in the Iraqi intelligence service. Iraq claimed at the time: "Iraq says Kuwait and the United States concocted the plot to try to tighten economic sanctions against Baghdad." This to me seems to be a statement with the ring of truth to it - Kuwait had a good motive for wanting to screw over Iraq, while Iraq had absolutely zero motive to want to assassinate an ex-President of the United States, given the likely consequences of such an action.

[robd]

To get back to economics...
perhaps Brad could apply this line of
reasoning to the boss of Countrywide and
his mortgagesellers...

[wood turtle]

I am sure that President Bush has his Cossacks. You just don't know who they are. Otherwise we could have had WW3 by now.

[bigTom]

I think it is interesting to contemplate the messy situation GWB had gotten himself into in March of 03. At great cost he had set up the material and momentum for an invasion. If he had called it off because the causus-belli was crumbling, that would have been a very serious embarassment. He would have definitely been a one termer. And he was still surrounded by neo-con true believers. Doubtlessly they were telling him that El-Baradi was a shamefaced liar. It is easy to imagine how a leader of less than stellar character can trap himself in this way, i.e. be unable to change course when new unexpected data arrives late in the game.

[Ahab]

Wow; What an "incredibly insightful and delicately nuanced revelation of how the gradually hardening turn to the hard right as if by the inevitable pull of centrifugal force like gravity itself though not felt or understood as such by the crew as their ship ( of state ) passed through the fog", blah ,blah,blah. ( though it's an interesting tack as excuses and explanations go...... I'll have to try it out some time.)

When you have the rudder in your hand you can feel which way you are steering the boat.

[Diana]

"The problem was the extended insurgency, which was predicted only by a few malcontents."
It was predicted by everyone, except the fools running our government. Here in NYC there is a nutty group of old Marxists calling themseves ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War End Racism, or something like that) who organize anti-war protests as part of their modus vivendi. Well,the anti-war protests they arranged against the Iraq War turned into the biggest mass events this city has seen in a while, not because anyone agreed with ANSWER but just because everyone heard about the war, thought, "Now that's got to be a bad idea," heard there was a protest, and went. Instant giant mass protests.

No, we all knew it was going to be a disaster. It was amazing, really, to watch the administration on the news in 2002 and 2003: like watching someone dead drunk get into a car, take six tries to start the engine, and bang half the cars in the parking lot just trying to get to the highway. It was unreal. Everyone in New York saying to each other, every month, "Can you believe this?"

Never has so much information been available so freely as now. Bush has simply no excuse for his children's crusade.

[lee]

..a large powerful country of their own ethnic/religious orientation right next door.
50% right--religious
50% wrong --ethnic
Iraqi shiites are Arab. Most of Iran is Iranian(>90%). Iranians aren't Arabs.

[Kate G.]

Is anyone really of the opinion that the Bush/Cheney administration actually thought that Saddam Hussein *really* had WMD and that that is the actual reason, rather than the fake proximate reason, that they went to war? We know, contra that, that they *simply intended to go to war* for quite a while before they did, that they used 9/11 as their excuse, and that they *made absolutely no preparations to locate or to secure weapons caches that actually existed--let alone attempt to locate or secure super duper dangerous weapons, chemical or nuclear, which they had claimed to believe existed.* We know that because they allowed much less dangerous sites to be looted within days of taking over the country and they did not prepare the US citizenry or our soldiers to deal with WMD attacks which (had they actually believed in the existence of these weapons) would have been used against us either here or there by a desperate Saddam. All this reasoning back from the records of the courtiers strikes me as really odd. Do we really have to *guess* at what Cheney and Bush actually intended or thought by reading tea leaves? Surely its explicitly obvious not only from what Cheney and others wrote and said in the long run up to the quiet coup that was the self nomination of Cheney for VP but in the fact that our military at no time acted like it took the threat of existent WMD seriously.

Kate G.

[Cranky Observer]

> I am sure that President Bush has his Cossacks. You just
> don't know who they are. Otherwise we could have had WW3 by now.

I am willing to listen to arguments that George W. Bush is not as stupid as he appears, and that he has some knowledge of/hand in what is going on in "his" Administration. But the idea that he is a sort of evil twin of FDR, sitting at the center of his web with his own network of people and sources throughout the government, is ridiculous. Cheney would never let those people speak to Bush.

Cranky

[Cranky Observer]

By the way, there is a very interesting continuation of this discussion over at Crooked Timber:

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/17/robust-action-in-the-topkapi-palace/#comments

[Robert Waldmann]

I think you have a hint of how they got it so wrong here "When Kangxi became Emperor of China, he scattered the--loyal--hereditary bondsmen of his Manchu clan throughout the imperial Chinese bureaucracy at all levels, with instructions to write to him regularly through secret channels to tell him what was really going on, as a second, separate, parallel web of communication so that he could gauge who was telling him what he needed to know and who was telling him what they thought he wanted to hear."

That sounds a lot like Doug Feith and the office of special plans doesn't it ? Bypassing the bureaucracy and stove piping are similar actions. The Bush administration's problem is that they managed to get a product much worse than that which bubbles up from a bureaucracy.

I all except maybe Bush understood exactly how Washington works and used it to get what they (except Powell) wanted. The general defects of courts and bureaucracies can explain how the intelligence community got it wrong, but not how the Bush administration got it wronger.

We have the forged Nigerien dossier rescued from obscurity by a political appointee and the report the Curveball was a fabricator stopped above the level of the head of the CIA in Europe. The only bureaucratic failure was the aluminum tubes where the centrality of the CIA meant that one enthusiast at the CIA genuinely kept expert opinion from policy makers and the fact that the DOE was represented by a political appointee when the NIE was written kept the obvious truth out of the NIE. That might have been a normal bureaucratic snafu. The rest was extraordinary and explicit.

[prostratedragon]

[BTW, I try to apply the "they couldn't get that far if they were really stupid" to GW Bush as well. I don't think he's as stupid as he looks, but some days it's really hard to believe.]

I couldn't agree more, which is why I've always liked Brad's cossack-czar summation. The dopey persona I think is a mixture of design, perhaps some remnant of past or current addictions, and a thorough, arrogant laziness about the work of learning anything that doesn't immediately feed into his id's desires. Thinking he's merely stupid lets him undeservedly off the hook.

Of course, if the czar's method involves iron discipline of his cossacks, he can find himself either cut off from information he needs, or locked in to a course of action by the need to be seen as all-powerful. Here are a couple of suggestive timeline points for Saddam:

#315 --- Late 2001 Around this time, Iraqi scientists tell Regime leaders they cannot produce WMD
[The scientists had probably known or suspected this for some time before they told the regime, one bad lag --- pd]

#341 --- Nov 2002 MIC scientists meet and are told that Iraq has no WMD, and they must not hide anything from inspectors
[MIC was the industrial ministry in charge of weapons manufacture; it seems at times to have received orders from Ramadan (the woman microbiologist who disappeared) and Saddam himself, but it is not clear in the timeline who gave this one. But, the researchers and manufacturers were not in direct comunication --- pd]

#346 --- Dec 2002 Saddam tells his Generals he does not have WMD
[All out desperation here. No doubt many escape plans were initiated this day.]

#347 --- Dec 2002 Saddam tells military leaders/senior leaders to “cooperate completely” with inspectors

So it is possible and to me likely that Saddam was not merely sitting around stupidly unaware of what he needed to do. He was in the beginning trapped by bad information that his own structure and style of rule had probably helped to generate. You could say that bricking oneself in like that through an insistence on brutality is stupid and I'd agree, but that's not what I take most critics of Saddam's belated response to mean.

Once the first information wall was breached, one can imagine the usual combination of rebalancing, facesaving, cost-benefit temporizing, and plain old sludge that often accompanies a forced decision until Dec 2002, which seems to be the first date at which everyone who needed to be was on the same page.

Part of the trouble for Bush et al. is the ease with which a scenario like this could have been --was, if I remember some commentary from the period correctly-- pieced together, and thus the ease with which some result well short of war could have been arrived at.

The links are from the CIA's 2004 timeline:
http://tinyurl.com/2h5end

[piotr]

One comment about "stupidly ejecting WMD inspectors".

Every country has some secrets. Having a bunch of guys running around trying to open every cellar and safe they can think of is something every government hates, and our government is not an exception. Actually there were some protocols proposed for anti-bioweapon treaty that USA rejected to avoid inspections. As if we had something to hide, other that say, the best anthrax program in the world.

Clinton basically made it clear that USA will NEVER accept a conclusion that sanctions on Iraq can end, and then Saddam ejected the annoying and useless inspectors.

Other stuff -- assasination plot against Bush the elder is know due to ever reliable testimonies given under torture and extracted by a motivated enemy of Iraq, "torture rooms" probably are not much different from what we were running later and what the democratic government of Iraq is doing right now. Bloody supression of ethnic uprisings -- well, we were applauding bloody suppressions of leftist uprisings, with hundreds of thousands of victims.

CIA also had reliably looking testimony of high rank defectors to the effect that WMD programs were abandoned and scrubbed. Other defectors had contrary claims. But it is not like inspection results from the winter of 2002/2003 came totally out of the blue. A-priori it was a distinct possibility.

[lucklucky]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1189182.stm

"Iraq could produce nuclear weapons within three years, according to a German intelligence assessment.
The report also says the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has evidence that Baghdad is working to develop its short-range rockets.

Germany believes Saddam Hussein is restoring Iraq's weapons capabilities

The BND also believes Iraq still possesses the capacity to resume the production of biological weapons at short notice.

Details of the information contained in the report was published in various German newspapers following a briefing to journalists by BND officials."
(...)

Saddam Regime had the equation that made it necessary to be destroyed in time of Al Qaeda: WMD technology, Imprevisible to the point of being suicidal, Hostile, Extensive resources to finance anyone he wanted.

It was a big mistake resorting only to WMD existence as justification(they were found, but neither were many or new) when the other factors matter much more.

[garhaneg]

One cannot doubt that many extremely intelligent and thoroughly rational persons come into the precincts of the White House, and once there that they work as faithfully as they can, believing that what they do is in the best interest of the country. Even the twisted and treacherous followers of Straussian guile and treachery in statecraft can probably claim they too are motivated by such conceptions. But if you are a passenger in a helicopter with a missing tail rotor, when you believe you are the gunner in a jet fighter, you are going to make a lot of sincerely dumb decisions. Remember McGeorge Bundy and all the sharp guys of the Viet Nam era.

Right now the world audience is watching with mounting horror as it becomes brutally obvious that all those clever people who were figuring out what to invest in, and husbanding the assets of the customers with skillful diligence, are really just a bunch of clowns suckered by the bank hucksters who were suckered, in turn, in the mortgage "market". They have even tried to hide it, and still are, even though in many cases the capital of many businesses is now not adequate to regulatory requirements. And the last such collapse, dot com, is only a few years back.

So I think a pretty big margin has to be allocated to irrationality, in trying to figure out what comes next. I mean, if it is the case that nobody is really in control of the system, short term, and the policy tendencies of those who we thought were in control are no better than in 1929, we are in for one hell of a ride.

It is not just that as we read history we can see that the "authorities" were too passive as the Great Depression hammered world economy, the fact is the main authorities of the time, bankers and their agents did what it seemed the economic system required, and that is exactly what is probably going to happen again. Trouble is, it looks like countries that are set up as state capitalist, like China, and more-every-day Russia can plan their way out a lot better than, say, the USA were no one is in charge and we have to pass through the Slough of Desperation where bankers rule, before sensible ideas have any chance.

Was there anything really new about Viet Nam, or more recently Iraq? Is there any sign at all that "ruling circles" as they used to say, in the USA have given up the idea copied by the Straussians, to invade the middle east, set up bases and manage the important project of sucking out its oil wealth in the interest of American business. They are stumbling into incoherence, it is true, but where is there any sign the project has really been cast into doubt, never mind a change of course. But if that is so then Bush in the White House is no more in control than King George III was in charge of British Colonial policy during the War of Independence.Nor is there any sign of a challenge from below, as the Dems and the Republicans seem to compete in supporting the war as to what they actually do in the Congress. Does anyone see any sign the Middle East project is encountering a weighty challenge in, say, CFR publications. It seems nobody is in charge, the foreign policy is just an expression of short sighted greed, and the leaders of the USA are marching backward toward a nearby cliff. Could we please have a new Empire builder, as the present one is unsatisfactory.