Clear thinking

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Is the Bush team thinking clearly? This is not a partisan question. Whether you agree with Mary Kaldor that these hawks are “a messianic group of ideologues,” or, (say, with Andrew Sullivan) that they alone have the guts to use American power to impose the peace the world needs, you may wonder: are they realistic thinkers, who have a good chance of creating a new kind of Pax Americana? Or unrealistic ones, who are going to lead us into the quagmire?

The psychiatrist Arthur Deikman identifies four basic behaviours that people in groups are prone to, ones that cause us trouble in thinking and living realistically. They are: compliance with the group, dependence on a leader, devaluing the outsider, and avoiding dissent. These behaviours are valuable for maintaining group coherence in a hostile world. For most of human existence in small tribal groups, they must have worked well.

But much of modern civilization has depended on growing beyond them. Original thought and innovation requires breaking out of group compliance. Peaceful replacement of leaders requires a level of independence from them. Enlarging the circle of those recognized as human requires valuing outsiders enough to bring them in. Welcoming, institutionalising and learning from dissent has to replace avoiding it, if we are to think clearly.

It would not surprise me if we were genetically as well as culturally predisposed towards these in-group behaviours. Whether that is so or not, we have to work hard to identify them in ourselves so that we can choose wiser alternatives. The general tenor of the criticism of the Bush team is that they have been guilty of exacerbating these tendencies in themselves; that Rumsfeld has surrounded himself with military advisers who agree with him, and has cowed or banished the nay-sayers.

The argument, after less than two weeks of war, is that 1) the Iraqis are fighting more strongly than expected; 2) America went in with inadequate forces and supply back-up; 3) Bush should have listened less exclusively to his neo-conservative group of advisers, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense. The theory goes that these hawks underestimated Iraqi resistance, overestimated American high-tech weaponry, and wanted a quick war with scaled-down forces to prove to the world that they could fight several wars at once: because that is what they want to do. Their goal is a radical one: to use the US military to spread US institutions, democracy, peace, prosperity and corporate power. These critics do not doubt America will still win in Iraq, but maybe at a cost that harms the neo-cons’ dream.

How realistic thinking saved the world in 1962

Deikman contrasts the way Kennedy planned his disastrous invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro Cubans in 1961 (known as the Bay of Pigs) with his successful effort to bring about the Russian withdrawal of nuclear missiles from Cuba (the Cuban Missile Crisis) in 1962.

In planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, dissent was squashed among Kennedy’s advisers. They rode on a wave of optimism and belief in Kennedy’s luck or invulnerability as a leader, stemming from his extraordinary rise to power and his personal charisma. They devalued their enemies in racist and anti-Communist terms to the extent of underestimating them. The invasion failed.

Kennedy learned from the disaster. In the missile crisis, he deliberately set up an opposite method of planning. Dissent, free thought and discussion among equals were the aim. Various mechanisms were created to ensure it. “If visitors to the group remained silent they were specifically asked to state their observation and comments. Subgroups were formed to work independently on the same problem and then meet to compare findings.” From time to time President Kennedy absented himself from the group, lest his presence overawe dissenters. “Robert Kennedy, who during the Bay of Pigs discussion had chided dissenters, this time guarded against premature closure of options,” Deikman tells us.

“There was no false confidence, no shoving aside of the frightful risks that attended each option. The participants were encouraged to challenge each others’ assumptions, to speak their minds frankly and treat each other, as well as outside visitors, as equals. Dissent was recognized as vital to finding a way to the most realistic action.” As a result, early enthusiasms, such as bombing the missile silos, were abandoned. Care was taken to enable the Soviets to save face at the same time as withdrawing. It worked.

The Cuban missile crisis was arguably the closest moment to nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. If Kennedy and his advisers had not suffered the Bay of Pigs debacle, would they have gone into the missile crisis in that earlier invincible frame of mind, failed to listen to the quieter voices, and gone with the Pentagon penchant for first strike? If so, would Washington, Havana or Moscow now exist? Kennedy was President after an extraordinarily close election. Without being politically partisan, it is legitimate to wonder whether his opponent, Richard Nixon, would have been capable of the balanced collective thought process that was crucial to the outcome. Perhaps, perhaps not. Nixon was notorious for paranoid thinking, but he also made peace with China.

Incestuous Amplification?

Is this Iraq war Bush’s Bay of Pigs, or his missile crisis?

There are plenty of US military insiders arguing that Rumsfeld has arrogantly overruled them; and plenty of US diplomatic insiders saying, in effect, that hubris, not good intelligence, is behind the idea that military intervention can create democracy in the Arab world. Some conservatives even argue that it is the Marxist backgrounds of some of the neo-cons that make them believe with Mao Zedong that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

In a recent column Paul Krugman (perhaps the most vocal and consistent critic of the Bush administration in the US press) pointed out how Dick Cheney, the vice president, read the Californian energy crisis of 2001 wrongly.

There were blackouts and brownouts, people’s electricity bills soared out of control. “The Cheney task force was convened in the midst of that crisis,” Krugman wrote. “That task force concluded that the energy crisis was a long-term problem caused by meddling bureaucrats and pesky environmentalists, who weren’t letting big companies do what needed to be done. The solution? Scrap environmental rules, and give the energy industry multibillion-dollar subsidies.”

Now the facts are in. Even the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which for a long while discounted claims of market manipulation, has reported that California’s power shortages were largely created by energy companies in order to drive up prices and profits. Maybe the collapse of Enron made it possible for the FERC to think, or to publish, such thoughts.

Why did Cheney get it so wrong, Krugman asks. One reason, he argues, is that the vice president surrounded himself only with insider, industry voices. “So the task force was subject to what military types call ‘incestuous amplification’, defined by Jane’s Defence Weekly as ‘a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.’”

Does faith help thought?

The Bush team pride themselves that they get things done. Bush is described as that rare thing – a politician who follows through on his promises. True, he promised initially to have few foreign adventures, but 9/11 changed that. Now this foreign policy novice is crusading abroad in full armour and overwhelming force. We are told he makes decisions quickly, and his religious faith gives him the certitude that he is right. Newsweek tells us he sleeps well.

Is that the sleep of the just – or of those who think they are the just? Was Osama staying up sleepless nights worrying he might have made a mistake after 9/11? One doubts it.

Don’t most of us think those leaders who lie awake at night worrying they might have done wrong are more likely to be among ‘the just’? I trust George W. Bush’s faith will give him pause in listening to the siren voices of those who say that dissenters are unpatriotic. Frankly, it scares me more than it consoles me that Bush is a man who believes so strongly in God that he questions evolution. That is the group-think of US fundamentalists.

I have not named the (out of print) book in which Deikman lays out his ideas about group behaviour. It is called The Wrong Way Home and subtitled Uncovering the patterns of cult behaviour in American society. Deikman studied cults, but concluded that our contempt for them as bizarre phenomena is wrong. We are all enmeshed in similar behaviours, if typically at less intense levels. The difference with cults is simply that when you get into one you may invest more of yourself than in any comparable group: you may give it your money, have your home in it, be employed by it, get your ideas and deepest faith from it, find your leaders, spouse, friends in it. And so it is harder to retain any independence of thought, a quality which is devalued, in some religious circles, as doubt.

There are of course different levels at which one may think realistically or not. The suicide bombers of al-Qaida were successfully realistic in thinking out their attacks of 9/11. There is speculation that they were unrealistic about the aftermath – imagining that America would not come after them so fiercely. Though maybe bin Laden wanted that as much as Rumsfeld wants chaos in the Arab world, if you believe Josh Marshall in the Washington Monthly. Both may dream that chaos will serve their ends. They can’t both be right. They aren’t both thinking realistically. Perhaps neither of them are?

Personally, I want the Bush team to get realistic on the highest level – that of how you best support the growth of democracy and mass prosperity in the world (not that of how you best support American corporations’ short term interests). If they are unrealistic about that, but manage to get thoroughly realistic about how to invade and occupy rogue states, then I fear we are in for much unnecessary misery, and much recruitment to al-Qaida type resistance. There has to be a better way: a Kennedy missile crisis response instead of a Bay of Pigs. If not, I fear al-Qaida may do to Washington what the Soviets did not do in 1962.

Of course, while faith is implicated in all this, it is not simplistically implicated. Many of those who have stood out against group-think and unrealistic long term goals have been motivated by their own faith. It is not, in the end one’s faith, so much as one’s behaviour in the group and one’s clarity of thought, that is at issue. On the topic of America’s role in the world, I have faith that some of Bush’s neocons, on their knees in prayer, will hear the still, small voice of doubt.

Want to share your thoughts? Email: dave.opendemocracy@earthlink.net