corrente

It looks like there are two parts to the WhiteWash House cover story to protect Bush from being held accountable for the Iraq WMD fiasco.

Part one is that Bush was given bad information: the one page memo (back) that, for some crazy reason, suppressed any evidence Bush didn't want to hear.

Part two supplies the crazy reason: The intelligence agencies that gave Bush his information were engaged in "groupthink." Well, how plausible is part two? Psychologist Robert Jervis of Columbia answers "Not very." Here's his reasoning:

In an unusual foray into psychological diagnostics, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Friday that CIA analysts had succumbed to what it called a "groupthink" dynamic. According to the committee's report, the analysts suffered from a "collective presumption" that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction and they blithely ignored any evidence to the contrary.

But was that indeed what happened? "Groupthink" -- identified in the early 1970s by the late Yale psychologist Irving Janis -- refers to a process by which conformity grows out of deliberations in small groups. It can indeed be quite powerful. The way Janis explained it, groupthink operates when individuals work closely together over a sustained period. It isn't merely that members of the group come to think alike but that they come to overvalue the harmonious functioning of the group. In their eagerness to reach consensus, they become inhibited from questioning established assumptions or from raising questions that might disturb their colleagues and friends.

But although groupthink has played a part in past foreign policy decisions, it does not appear to explain the CIA's current intelligence failures, despite the contention of the Senate committee. First of all, intelligence gathering is work done by individuals, [not groups. And] from what I have seen of them, intelligence analysts tend to be highly individualistic, if not intellectually combative. They have selected the career of an analyst rather than a more public and people-oriented career in part because they like to work on their own.

There are, of course, some larger group meetings where members of the broader intelligence community convene. And as in any such group situations, there will be times when individuals shape the views they bring in anticipation of what they think will appeal to the other attendees.

But these meetings are not likely to be susceptible to groupthink. Many of them are quite large, which precludes the formation of close ties among participants. Indeed, many of the meetings are ad hoc, with different people participating at different times. Although the members probably know one another, the stability required for groupthink is rarely present.

Finally, many intelligence officials these days -- unlike top political leaders -- are on guard against groupthink.

It appears that another dynamic was at work in this case. Intelligence officials, like the rest of us, hesitate to tell their bosses what they do not want to hear -- and may even, on occasion, convince themselves that alternative views are groundless. The Bush administration made it clear early on that it was seeking to prove the existence of WMD in Iraq -- not disprove it. The intelligence community was under pressure to deliver that evidence.

There are lots of ways political psychology can help explain what went wrong and how intelligence could be done better, but groupthink was not the main problem in this case.
(via Dodge City (!) Daily Globe)

Case closed.

Let's look at one portion of Jervis's reasoning again:

[Groupthink is a] process by which conformity grows out of deliberations in small groups. It can indeed be quite powerful. The way Janis explained it, groupthink operates when individuals work closely together over a sustained period. It isn't merely that members of the group come to think alike but that they come to overvalue the harmonious functioning of the group.

As we've seen, the intelligence community isn't a candidate for groupthink. But I can think of one small group that is: Bush, Condi, Rummy, Wolfie, and the rest of the neocons and assorted sycophants.

As usual with Republicans, they project onto others the sins that they themselves commit, in overplus. Winger projection!