As aggravated as I am with the whole series of misteps that got up into the current morass in Iraq, if I really sit back and look at the history of how this came to be, it was mostly a series of decision and actions by bright, top of their class people.
For all the negativity I might feel toward his Administration’s policies in this respect George Bush is not, objectively, an idiot, nor are the main players in his administration. As much as we might like to fume about the chimps, morons and fools that got us into this situation, the main decisions and promotion of these actions were made by people who had risen to the top of their respective professions and fields. This was not a Confederacy of Dunces.
This was not idiots leading a trustung and gulible American electorate astray, it was the arrogance of relativley smart (some very smart) people.
Well, W himself actually ran in 2000 on the premise that he wasn’t an expert, that he was going to be a relatively hands-off CEO who’d hire the real experts to do the job. On the other hand, once in, he had the constitutional authority, & maybe he let the power go to this head, overruling other people, who then had to go along with what he wanted.
Of the Welles broadcast, columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote in the New York Tribune:
My guess as to the action of the Congress is that members knew the public was nervous and were afraid to vote against the war autorization for fear they might damage their reelection chances.
Intelligence is not necessarily incompatible with what historian Barbara Tuchman called “wooden-headedness” in her well-know book The March of Folly. This single paragraph says it all:
You also have to remember that there are a lot of different kinds of intelligence. If Bush is intelligent, I suspect that it’s mostly in a people-sense. He knows how to get along amiably with people. Beyond that, I would say that if he’s above average, it’s probably not by a lot. And as Gorsnak noted, he’s also a “True Believer.”
And probably you need to realise that “above average” intelligence isn’t saying a lot. If you’ve ever spent five minutes with just about anyone, trying to show them how to run Excel, Outlook, or whatever, you’ll realise that being “smart” actually doesn’t mean anything all that advanced. Overall, I’d say that going from Average to truly intelligent, there’s a couple of levels:
Doesn’t want to know, or doesn’t believe that he can know anything, and thus doesn’t try to understand it.
Will work diligently to learn how to do something, but thinks of being able to replicate what you do as being sufficient–even though they still lack understanding of what they’re doing.
Interested in understanding stuff, but doesn’t believe they can actually understand it. Will often say come out with something that shows they actually do understand the subject, but will never believe that they do even when you say they do.
Knows a good deal of stuff, and has a good understanding, but can’t separate out personal politics and emotions from decent cites.
Interested in everything, and undestands the basics of just about anything.
Same as 5, but also is pressing the edges of some field (be it scientific, political, sociological, or what-have-you.)
I would probably put Bush down in group 3. This board is mostly filled with people from 4 to 6. President Clinton or Bush the first were probably 5s, and Reagan more a 4.
There’s nothing stopping an intelligent person from being ignorant, even willfully so, including out and out ignoring the cries of panics from military specialists and Middle East experts.
Fear of being voted out of office? The intelligent people who were for the war didn’t think the American public could stomach a full on invasion with tons of ground troops being shot at and large occupying armies settling in for the long haul, so they took a gamble on a more pain-free “shock and awe” campaign and lost their window of opportunity for a decisive victory and a settled peace…leading to the mess we currently find ourselves in.
Not really. Bush generally seems to approach evidence as existing to prove his thesis right, rather than as something to base opinions upon. With that outlook, regardless of what expert is talking, only things that work with what needs to be proven will make any impact–and the rest marked up to intellectualist rubberish and politicising.
I’m surprised in took twelve posts to mention this, but there’s this little thing called “groupthink” that can get smart people into a whole mess o’ trouble.
The popular example is of course the Challenger disaster, where you literally had rocket scientists sending seven people to a near-certain death because as a group they created an atmosphere where nobody wanted to rock the boat by pointing out the fact - which was quite well understood by NASA - that the O-rings failed in near-perfect proportion to the prevailing termperature.
You had, in the Bush administration, that very problem; a confluence of people who for various ideological and personal reasons really, really WANTED the invasion to be a good idea, and so convinced themselves that it was while shutting out countervailing opinions. Paul Wolfowitz, to use an example, really did honestly believe they were doing the right thing, according to every single reliable thing I’ve ever read about him. He simply couldn’t see the potential problems because he was (a) blinded by his personal and ideological issues and (b) did not have the background or knowledge of military matters (Despite being deputy SecDef) to moderate his optimism.
Now, AFTER the fact, incompetence comes into play too. Paul Bremer made several decisions that essentially doomed the effort. There was no occupation plan. Rumsfeld was too personally arrogant to believe he’d made any mistakes and so would not change his approach, etc. etc.
When Powell appeared at the UN with charts and graphs ,the truth was available on the internet. Of course the internet people were disparaged as being conspiratorial and ignoring the obvious facts. They were accused of creating falsities. So who was it that did. It was the people who were looking for an opportunity to attack Iraq all along.
They had the New York Times beating the drums. And almost every TV station was in back of the war. It took effort to cull lthe truth from all the crap being thrown.
You know that’s actually an interesting point, We like to think "Well if only this or that had been done differently it would possibly have turned out OK’. I have never really considered that there may not have been enough cleverness in the entire world to keep this merry adventure from becoming the tarbaby clusterfuck it morphed into, once we set our foot down that road.
Well, I think there was a failure to take fully into account that foreign peoples do not, for fundamental Self/Other reasons, see us as we see ourselves.
There’s precedent. Robert MacNamara was a hell of a smart person. He was part of a group they called the “Whiz Kids”.
And he is famously responsible for much of the botching of the Vietnam War.
But he’s still smart. Came off rather well in “The Fog of War”.
One aspect of a person’s makeup does not cancel out the propensity for its opposite. Well meaning people can do evil things, and smart people can completely screw the pooch.