If anyone has seen the comedy series "Yes, Prime Minister", they'll often understand how a leader can be manipulated by his mandarins through selective disclosure of uncorroborated information, present consequences couched in politically unacceptable terms, force the hand by setting the agenda.
This is especially true if dissenting opinion is filtered before it gets handed to the President etc.
I apologize if the following sounds a little leftist. I only intend to make a point about how mistakes come to be made, and what governments may need to do to arrive at better decisions:
Over in Australia, an ASIO analyst chose to resign rather than see Australia join the Iraq war on the basis of WMD pretexts. (Andrew Wilke is now a Member of Parliament).
The trillion dollar mistake US made was due to influencers being able to feed super-classified information to the willingly gullible people.
It is not easy for a President to call bullshit. I believe the reason is because there isn't sufficient accountability that is built into the system. In days past, members of the royalty are expected to fight in wars. Even during Roman days, only landowners could join the army. The appearance of the professional soldiers lowered the personal risk of the people in power who rush into war.
The Chinese emperors surrounded themselves with eunuchs thinking that the absence of offspring give some assurance that these people will be less biased, but it didn't work out that well. Influence is still peddled, particularly because power itself is very addictive on its own.
Some cultures resort to shamans to try to get an outcome that is independent of any one person's viewpoint. The most interesting one that I came across is the use of ibogaine, where people have a "spiritual" moment, where they see the big picture instead of worrying about themselves.
For a complex society to survive and transcend humanity's limitations, we may need to create a supermind. Some elements of this already exist. One is the idea of "opensource intelligence" that can be used to corroborate otherwise secret accounts.
Here's an example of Bill Clinton, as President, calling bullshit in 1995. A while back, Pakistan had paid a lot of money to buy 28 F-16 fighters, but that sale was voided by the US Government because of Pakistan's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. However, since the planes had been built, and the money spent, the Pakistanis couldn't have their money back, either.
The State Dept. bureaucracy had already been mobilized to defend this decision and had so indicated at various levels to their Pakistani counterparts. Clinton, of course, was briefed on this decision and expected to go along. This was US policy, after all.
Instead, Clinton told the Pakistani prime minister that it was wrong for the US to keep the money and that he would find a way to resolve it.
I note this because, according to the author of the piece linked, it almost never happens, even when, as in this case, the information involved is largely unclassified. So when decisions rely on classified information, percolated through the policy apparatus, it's surely much worse.
Is there any evidence that the Iraq War was anything but intentional by the President? Secrecy was used to mislead the public, but the entire Administration was hired based on their commitment to finish GHW Bush's war.
He's not presenting it as evidence, but saying that it can help to illustrate a pattern of behavior. There's still the larger, more important task of showing that that pattern of behavior exists in the world, but this allows exemplars of this pattern of behavior to be internalized. The internalization process is obviously dangerous, but ultimately I'm not smart enough to make rational judgments on most things, so I need to rely upon intuitive understandings of things.
(Though one could argue that stuff like this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM&feature=youtu... can be used as evidence of showing how leading language can work, if you can feel your own opinion being swayed, as Bernard talks. The extent to which one can rely upon one's own feelings of their opinions is another matter... but it's a stab in the right direction.)
It is when it is written by political scientists who attended university with the politicians they later wrote the comedy about, interviewed serving politicians while posing as a think tank to gather info, took advice from other former executive politicians, and secretly consulted high-ranking civil servants for plot ideas, and lifted whole plots from people's then-unpublished memoirs.
Yes Minister is not a normal comedy series. It is bordering on a documentary.
I'm only trying to figure how Chalabi managed to fool the entire US intelligence machinery into invading Iraq, and the only logical conclusion is he couldn't. Facts were being created by the hawks and these people decides on who gets access to the President.
As far as I am aware, the decision making process started with a desire to invade Iraq and then once it was decided to do this any evidence that could justify this decision was collected and circulated (even if it came from someone who was known to be delusional).
Even worse, the UK government knew that there weren't good reasons to invade Iraq, but went along with it simply to keep in with the United States.
This is especially true if dissenting opinion is filtered before it gets handed to the President etc.
I apologize if the following sounds a little leftist. I only intend to make a point about how mistakes come to be made, and what governments may need to do to arrive at better decisions:
Over in Australia, an ASIO analyst chose to resign rather than see Australia join the Iraq war on the basis of WMD pretexts. (Andrew Wilke is now a Member of Parliament).
The trillion dollar mistake US made was due to influencers being able to feed super-classified information to the willingly gullible people.
It is not easy for a President to call bullshit. I believe the reason is because there isn't sufficient accountability that is built into the system. In days past, members of the royalty are expected to fight in wars. Even during Roman days, only landowners could join the army. The appearance of the professional soldiers lowered the personal risk of the people in power who rush into war.
The Chinese emperors surrounded themselves with eunuchs thinking that the absence of offspring give some assurance that these people will be less biased, but it didn't work out that well. Influence is still peddled, particularly because power itself is very addictive on its own.
Some cultures resort to shamans to try to get an outcome that is independent of any one person's viewpoint. The most interesting one that I came across is the use of ibogaine, where people have a "spiritual" moment, where they see the big picture instead of worrying about themselves.
For a complex society to survive and transcend humanity's limitations, we may need to create a supermind. Some elements of this already exist. One is the idea of "opensource intelligence" that can be used to corroborate otherwise secret accounts.