Iraq War: Groupthink or Warmongering?

In management theory, the psychology taught tends to be pretty limited.  Not surprising, given that the main psychological question that management theory asks is, "How do we get employees to produce more without paying them more money?"

But one of the more useful concepts that did somehow make its way into the management textbooks is that of "groupthink."  In this article, David Levine of the UC-Berkeley business school talks about how that concept can help us understand the nature of the decision-making in the Bush Administration that led to the Iraq War. 

The Wheels of Washington: Groupthink and Iraq San Francisco Chronicle 02/05/04

One force that can fight against groupthink is independent analysis. For example, the CIA's core competence is finding the well-supported arguments within vast amounts of noise and rumor. Before the decision to invade Iraq, however, these safeguards were short-circuited. The Pentagon established its own intelligence agency largely to bypass the more independent CIA. Under pressure from the White House, the CIA then abandoned some of its independence and delivered a partial view of the information it held. The resulting reports gave credence to sources the CIA had historically (and apparently correctly) discounted, and downplayed cautions the CIA had (correctly) emphasized in the past.

As Levine points out in this piece, the concept of groupthink came from studies of the Kennedy Administration and how the decision-makers became self-deluded in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a foreign-policy disaster very early in Kennedy's term.  Levine mentions, "Groupthink can often be combated by including a devil's advocate in the group -- someone who points out the weaknesses in the group's accepted wisdom."

What he doesn't mention is that the decision-making process the Kennedy Administration used during the Cuban Missile Crisis is also a classic example of applying exactly that insight.  In the crisis management team Kennedy established, Bobby Kennedy deliberately and consciously played the role of devil's advocate, challenging the various proposals that came up to make sure that relevant questions, doubts and consequences were thoroughly taken into account.  They had learned from the Bay of Pigs the cost of shutting out dissenting opinions.

While I'm glad to see this groupthink concept being used, I'm not convinced that it was really the problem here.  Because we already have substantial and convincing evidence that many of the decision-makers in the Bush Administration were looking for an excuse to go to war with Iraq practically from the day they took office.

In his instantly-famous book Against All Enemies (2004), Richard Clarke presents a gripping narrative of the crisis management in the White House on 9/11/01.  Clarke realized immediately after the second plane hit the World Trade Center that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, because they had already established a pattern of going for multiple attacks to achieve spectacular destruction.  And on that very first day, Dale Watson of the FBI told Clarke that they had confirmed that the passenger manifests of the hijacked flights included names known to the CIA as those of al-Qaeda members.

After going home briefly that night for a shower and change of clothes, Clarke was surprised at what he heard when he got back to the White House on September 12:

I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short run.  Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq.  At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda.  Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Don] Rumsfeld and [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda on Iraq.  Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq.  My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.

In other words, if so many of the principal decision-makers were looking for ways to invade Iraq, was all the hype about "weapons of mass destruction" and ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda really the kind of self-deception that goes on in groupthink?  Or was it just plain deception?  Or cynical war propaganda, in somewhat more blunt terms?