Leaders need dissenting voices

ANDREW GREELEY

Some commentators attribute
the failure of American and
British intelligence services on
Iraq to "group think" -- the power
of a group's cohesive culture to blind
its members to data that would chal-
lenge its conclusion. The term
"group think" originated in a bril-
liant book written by the psycholo-
gist Irving Janis in 1972. It describes
how competent, intelligent, dedi-
cated humans can accept a group
consensus despite powerful evidence
that it is in error. The importance of
group unity constrains them to agree
with something that they might not
have accepted in another context.
The classic example in Janis' study
is the attack on Pearl Harbor in De-
cember 1941. The American com-
manders were able and intelligent
men, but they knew, as everyone
else did, that the Japanese would
never dare to attack Pearl.
The New York Times, which has
apologized editorially for believing
the Iraq evidence, used the group
think theory as an explanation of
what happened. That might be half
the story, but another theory from
sociology in the era after the war
must be applied: that of William H.
Whyte's The Organization Man
(1956). In this theory, loyalty to an
organization and the demand that
one keep one's bosses happy con-
strain a person to tell the bosses what they want to hear. The CIA
and the British intelligence services,
like all human organizations, permit
relatively little dissent. If you dis-
agree constantly with what the lead-
ers know is true, your career will be
in serious trouble.
The most interesting case dis-
cussed by Janis is the Cuban missile
crisis. A consensus existed that the
United States should attack the
Russian sites and invade Cuba.
However, Attorney General Robert
Kennedy said that they were not go-
ing to make his brother the Gen.
Tojo (the Japanese premier at Pearl
Harbor time) of the 1960s. Later,
the president kept asking what hap-
pens when the first Russian soldier
dies. A nuclear war was avoided be-
cause of ''no men'' -- men who vio-
lated the consensus and said ''no,''
one of them a president.
The only way to avoid disastrous
mistakes by intelligence agencies is
In this White House,
the president is never
responsible for
anything that
goes wrong.

to legitimate and encourage adver-
sarial voices -- men and women
who argue vigorously that a policy
decision is wrong (as did the tiny
and unheard State Department in-
telligence unit to whom even Secre-
tary Colin Powell did not listen). In-
deed, these men and women must
be ex officio obligated to present the
opposite case, so that their careers
will not suffer because they did
their job. Someone in every agency
has to be a Robert Kennedy. That's
a difficult, perhaps impossible, role to play when you know that the
bosses all the way up to the Oval
Office want to go in a certain direc-
tion. There need not be any formal
pressure, though Vice President
Dick Cheney's frequent visits to the
CIA certainly were pressure -- as
were Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's instructions to his peo-
ple to stay away from the CIA.
There was no pretense that the
Bush administration was judiciously
weighing the pros and cons of a war.
Everyone knew the White House
was looking for justification. Sure
enough, they got it!
An administration needs inside
its inner circle a dissenting voice,
someone who insists repeatedly:
''You shouldn't do that!'' But in an
administration that values loyalty
as much as the present one does,
that voice will not be heard. The
president wanted ''regime change,''
and the CIA gave him reasons for it
-- a "slam dunk," as CIA Director
George Tenet called it.
Some Bush supporters are argu-
ing that the Senate committee
cleared Bush of deceiving the Amer-
ican people. Such a claim is non-
sense. He may not have deliberately
lied. Nonetheless, he passed on to
the American people reasons for
war that were weak. He may not
have been aware that they were
weak, but he should have been. The
buck stops at his desk. To blame the
loyal CIA for providing him inade-
quate information is to shrug the re-
sponsibility that comes with leader-
ship. Britain's Tony Blair had the
grace to assume responsibility. In
the present White House, the presi-
dent is never responsible for any-
thing that goes wrong. Whether he
deliberately deceived us does not
matter. The fact is, he did deceive
us. He should have known better.