E-Mail This Article to a Friend The postmodern president (continued)

Trickle-down deception

Iraq was the most telling example. Many neoconservatives from the first Bush administration had long regretted the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. During their years out of power, as these neocons hashed out a doctrine of post–Cold War American military primacy, Saddam’s removal moved higher and higher up their list of priorities. He was, after all, the prime obstacle to US dominance of the Middle East. And holding him in check was generating serious diplomatic and military damage in the region. Those plans to remove Saddam shot to the top of the White House’s agenda within hours of the 9/11 attacks. The neocons believed that the threat of catastrophic terror required not just taking down Al Qaeda but solving the root problem of Islamic terrorism by remaking the entire Middle East. And ousting Saddam was at the center of the plan. Outrage over the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia — put there to contain Saddam — had helped Osama bin Laden recruit his jihadists. And installing a US-backed regime in Baghdad could, the neocons believed, help trigger a domino effect against the old order that would spread secular, democratic regimes throughout the region.

But that was just a theory. In practice, Saddam and Al Qaeda were largely unconnected. In fact, the two goals were often at odds with each other. When the Pentagon needed its top Special Forces to lead the search for Saddam Hussein, Michael Duffy and Massimo Calabresi of Time reported, it simply reassigned the soldiers who had been on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Again, a newly apparent problem — the Al Qaeda terrorist threat — was being used to advance an existing and largely unrelated policy goal.

The effort to make the Iraq–Al Qaeda connection stick gave rise to the administration’s grandest deception: the charge that Saddam was rapidly reconstituting his nuclear-weapons program and might slip a nuclear bomb — or the chemical and biological weapons he was thought to have already — to bin Laden’s terrorists. "We know he’s got ties with Al Qaeda," Bush said at an election rally in November 2002. "A nightmare scenario, of course, is that he becomes the arsenal of a terrorist network, where he could attack America and he’d leave no fingerprints behind." To make that scenario seem plausible, the administration had to muscle all manner of analysts at the CIA, the State Department, and elsewhere. These analysts knew the Middle East best and doubted the existence of any Saddam–Al Qaeda link. Nor did they believe that Saddam’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons justified the crisis atmosphere the White House whipped up in the lead-up to war.

The clash spilled into public view this summer, after American forces failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at all. The media began to press White House officials on how false nuclear-weapons claims had made their way into Bush’s State of the Union address and other speeches. Administration officials have given shifting accounts, and tried to frame the story as a matter of procedural breakdown. But one former official of Bush’s White House has suggested a more compelling psychological explanation. Writing in National Review Online this past July, former Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that "[t]he CIA’s warnings on Iraq matters had lost some of their credibility in the 1990s. The agency was regarded by many in the Bush administration as reflexively and implacably hostile to any activist policy in Iraq. Those skeptics had come to believe that the agency was slanting its information on Iraq in order to maneuver the administration into supporting the agency’s own soft-line policies."

We have since learned that it wasn’t just midlevel aides who knew about and discounted the CIA’s warnings, though we still don’t know exactly how far up this dismissive attitude went. But Frum’s point rings very true for those who followed the infighting between Bush appointees and the agency over the last two years. Within the White House, the opinions of whole groups of agency experts were routinely dismissed as not credible, and unhelpful facts were dismissed as the obstructionist maneuverings of bureaucrats seeking to undermine needed change.

Indeed, this same tendency to dismiss expertise shaped the whole war effort. Just before the US invaded Iraq, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki — who had focused his tenure on peacekeeping and nation-building — said that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be needed to pacify and control Iraq. Days later, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told another committee that Shinseki didn’t know what he was talking about; the occupation, Wolfowitz said, would require far fewer troops. At the time, many took Wolfowitz’s evident self-assurance as a sign that he knew something the general didn’t. Now, it’s clear that it was the other way around, and Wolfowitz was engaging in a typical undisprovable assertion. Senior officials like Wolfowitz set an example that trickled down the bureaucratic ladder. One Pentagon civil servant specializing in Middle East policy described to me how, a few months after 9/11, he was chastised by a superior, a political appointee, for delivering a negative assessment of a proposed policy in a briefing memo to the Secretary of Defense. The civil servant changed his assessment as instructed but still included a list of potential pros and cons. But that wasn’t good enough either. The senior official told him, "‘It’s still not acceptable. Take out all the discussion of the cons and basically write there’s no reason why we shouldn’t [do this].’ I just thought this was intellectually dishonest."

Hide the baloney

That cavalier dismissal of expert analysis isn’t limited to the national-security arena. In the summer of 2001, the Bush administration was looking for a decision the president could make on the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research. His Christian-conservative base wanted an outright prohibition. But such a ban would have alienated swing voters eager for the therapies that could come from that research, such as cures for Parkinson’s disease. As Nicholas Thompson explained in the Washington Monthly, Bush’s advisers came up with a scheme they thought would pass muster with both the core and the swing voters: the president would limit research to only those stem-cell lines that existed already. But before the decision was announced, federal scientists warned the administration that there simply weren’t enough reliable existing lines to be useful to researchers. The White House ignored the warnings, which have subsequently proved all too accurate, and went ahead with the decision, thereby setting back crucial medical research for years.

Look at just about any policy or department of government and you’re likely to see the same pattern. In July, Slate’s Russ Baker reported that the Bush administration "muzzles routine economic information that’s unfavorable." Last year, the administration simply stopped issuing a report that tracks factory closings throughout the country, the better to hide evidence of mass layoffs. The report was reinstated only after the Washington Post happened to notice the cancellation, disclosed only in a footnote to the Department of Labor’s final report for 2002, issued on Christmas Eve.

The sidelining of in-house expertise is nowhere more apparent than on the environmental front. This Bush administration came into office just as the consensus was solidifying among scientists that human activity contributes to climate change. That consensus, however, ran counter to key administration goals, such as loosening regulations on coal-burning power plants and scuttling international agreements aimed at limiting fossil-fuel emissions. Rather than change its agenda, the administration chose to discredit the experts. As GOP pollster Frank Luntz wrote in a memo just before the 2002 election: "The scientific debate [on global warming] is closing against us but is not yet closed. There is still an opportunity to challenge the science." The idea that global warming was a reality that actually had to be grappled with simply didn’t occur to Luntz. Indeed, when questioned about whether administration policies might contribute to global warming, White House spokesmen direct reporters to the small, and rapidly diminishing, group of scientists who still doubt that humans contribute to the problem. In June, when the EPA released an "Environmental Progress" report, the administration edited out passages that described scientific concerns about global warming.

In any White House, there is usually tension between the political agenda and disinterested experts who might question it. But what’s remarkable about this White House is how little tension there seems to be. Expert analysis that isn’t politically helpful simply gets ignored.

The boys in striped pants

Educated, liberal-leaning professionals are apt to see this conflict as an open-and-shut case: expertise should always trump ideology. This has been the case for more than a century, ever since Progressive Era reformers took on corrupt city machines and elevated technocratic expertise above politics. Those early progressives restructured government by turning functions hitherto run by elected officials over to appointed, credentialed experts. And many of the ways they refashioned government now seem beyond question. Few would challenge, for instance, our practice of assigning decisions at the FDA or CDC to panels of qualified scientists rather than political appointees.

On the other hand, anyone who’s worked as a political appointee at the higher levels of government and tried to get anything new done has been frustrated by the myriad ways in which bureaucrats manipulate numbers and information to thwart the new agenda and maintain the status quo. There is a long tradition in American politics of finessing policy initiatives past stubborn bureaucrats. Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, routinely used amateur diplomats and personal intermediaries to sidestep the professionals at Foggy Bottom — the "boys in striped pants," he called them — for fear they would slow-roll, walk back, or generally meddle in his chosen course in international affairs. As the historian Warren Kimball aptly notes, Roosevelt shared the conviction that Foreign Service officers believed they had a "priestly monopoly against intervention by members of Congress, journalists, professors, voters, and other lesser breeds."

All of this is to say that the Bush administration’s unwillingness to be pushed around by the bureaucratic experts or to have its ideas hemmed in by establishment opinion isn’t by itself a bad thing. Nor is this administration the first to ignore or suppress unhelpful data or analyses from experts that run contrary to its agenda — foolish as such conduct usually proves. But in this administration the mindset of deception runs deeper. If you’re a revisionist, someone pushing for radically changing the status quo, you’re apt to see "the experts" not just as people who may be standing in your way, but as people whose minds have been corrupted by a wrong-headed ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, "the experts" look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation, and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad. The Pentagon civil servant quoted above told me that the standard response to warnings from the Joint Staff about potential difficulties in Iraq was simply to say: "That’s just the Joint Staff being obstructionist." Even if the experts are right in the particulars — the size of the deficit, the number of troops needed in Iraq — their real goal is to get in the way of necessary changes that have to be made.

Après nous, le déluge

In that simple, totalizing assumption, we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months — and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in various countries, the administration hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how that would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction, and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration’s take on economic and environmental policy, and almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through. But in numerous cases it prevented them from implementing even their own plans effectively.

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn’t just the prism through which we see the world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is ... well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and postmodernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don’t agree with you, they’re just the other side’s argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that’s all the facts are, it’s really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.

Doctrinaire as they may be in the realm of policy, the president’s advisers are the most hard-boiled sort of pragmatists when it comes to gaining and holding on to political power. And there’s no way they planned to head into their re-election campaign with a half-trillion-dollar deficit looming over their heads and an unpredictable, bleeding guerrilla war in Iraq on their hands. At the level of tactics and execution, the administration’s war on expertise has already yielded some very disappointing, indeed dangerous, results. And if that gets you worried, just remember that the same folks are in charge of the grand strategy too.

Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and editor of www.talkingpointsmemo.com. This piece was reprinted with permission from the Washington Monthly. Copyright by Washington Monthly Publishing, LLC, 733 15th Street NW, Suite 520, Washington, DC 20005.