This talk is getting a lot of attention in the media, where it is being characterized as an attack by an insider on the Bush Administration. I think it is more important than that.
Wilkerson was Chief of Staff in Colin Powell's State Department. Prior to that he worked for Powell in the private sector, and he worked directly for Powell in the Department of Defense when Powell was Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus Wilkerson has seen decision making personnally in three administrations. Moreover, he has taught at the Naval War College and the Marine Corps War College, focusing on the national security decision-making process. Thus he has both academic and practical experience with top level decision making.
He maintains, as I read him, that the process set up by the 1947 National Security Act under Harry Truman, has deteriorated under the administrations since that of Eisenhower, but is really broken now. He portrays the process as supposed to be fully participatory in order to get all the evidence before the decision makers and to fully enlist the collaboration of those who will have to implement the decisions. He goes back to the Constitution and the framers who recognized that the government would be run by people, not by philosopher kings, and who put checks and balances in place to assure that the decision making processes of government would be open and transparent to protect against poor decisions by average men finding themselves in charge. Wilkerson also cites the Goldwater-Nichols legislation of the 1980's that successfully confronted the problem of fragmentation of the information and decision processes among the military services of the United States.
Wilkerson says that
no one, in my study of the (National Security) act’s implementation, has so flummoxed the process as the present administration.
The core of his critique is:
What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out......
in some cases there was real dysfunctionality – there always is – but in most cases it was Dr. Rice made a decision, she made a decision – and this is all about people again because people in essence are the government. She made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president.
And so what we had was a situation where the national security advisor, seen in the evolution over some half-century since the act as the balancer or the person who would make sure all opinions got to the president, the person who would make sure that every dissent got to the president that made sense – not every one but the ones that made sense – actually was a part of the problem, and probably on many issues sided with the president and the vice president and the secretary of Defense. And so what you had – and here I am the academic again – you had this incredible process where the formal process, the statutory process, the policy coordinating committee, the deputies committee, the principal’s committee, all camouflaged – the dysfunctionality camouflaged the efficiency of the secret decision-making process.
Wilkerson suggests that the Congress really needs a leader to stand up and manage a long, inclusive process to fix the government, to improve the coordination among government agencies involved in the national security process, and to reform the national security decision making process.
The following quotation from an article by Jeffrey Goldberg, based on an interview of Brent Snowcroft, supports Wilkerson's analysis:
A common criticism of the Administration of George W. Bush is that it ignores ideas that conflict with its aims. "We always made sure the President was hearing all the possibilities," John Sununu, who served as chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, said. "That's one of the differences between the first Bush Administration and this Bush Administration."
I asked Colin Powell if he thought, in retrospect, that the Administration should have paid attention to Scowcroft's arguments about Iraq. Powell, who is widely believed to have been far less influential in policymaking than either Cheney or the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, said, pointedly, "I always listen to him. He's a very analytic and thoughtful individual, he's powerful in argument, and I've never worked with a better friend and colleague."
When, in an e-mail, I asked George H.W. Bush about Scowcroft's most useful qualities as a national-security adviser, he replied that Scowcroft "was very good about making sure that we did not simply consider the 'best case,' but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not."
The Snowcroft interview is to be published in the January 31 issue of the New Yorker (on the newstands tomorrow), but is quoted at length in Steve Clemons great blog.
The theme of my blog is the role of knowledge in social and economic development. I have often focused on the quality of knowledge that is used in decision making, and I do believe "garbage in, garbage out!" I also believe process is critially important to getting high quality knowledge in decision making. Wilkerson makes the point that it is perhaps more important that the process be inclusive, open and transparent, with appropriate checks and balances. It is a good point!
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