A Quote From Last March

The foreign policy/national security mess in which the Bush White House has mired itself was foreshadowed by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing on March 28 in Making Light. Teresa recalled an interview of George W. Bush by Bob Woodward, appearing on CBS' 60 Minutes in November, 2002:

Woodward says [Bush] told him that when he chairs a meeting he often tries to be provocative. When Woodward asked him if he tells his staff that he is purposely being provocative, Mr. Bush answered: “Of course not. I am the commander, see?”

Bush: “I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

Here is what Teresa said about this:

I recognize that behavior. Lord help me, I’ve seen it done. It’s one of the tactics you can use if you’re in an executive-level job that’s beyond your abilities, you have to have meetings with underlings who know more than you do, and your only concern is to save face while making sure they’re giving you what you want. ...

If ... you run the meeting in a deliberately provocative fashion, it skews the discourse out of shape, generates a lot of noise and confusion, and throws everyone off balance. This camouflages the fact that you don’t know which end of the stick is sharp. It also teaches people that they’re only safe if you’re happy.

Having to ask questions is likewise unacceptable. Being provocative is a way to get your underlings to automatically give you a recap of what the issues are, their relative importance, how the whole picture fits together, and where that underling comes into it. How so? Because of the skew in the discourse. Someone giving an answer he’s already thought about will generally just give the answer. But if you knock him off balance, make him think on his feet and talk while he’s doing his thinking, he’s more likely to narrate the whole mental process leading up to the answer. Even if you don’t get the whole process out of him, he’ll still be giving you half-formed answers, and those will have a lot of context still sticking to them. Either way, you’ll pick up a lot of framing information, and can then act like you knew that stuff all along. You’re unlikely to get called on it by someone who’s still trying to regain his balance. ...

Your more earnest and straightforward underlings are still going to be trying to fit all that random noise you’re generating into some larger overall picture. It’ll be tough going. The less honest ones will just be trying to keep you happy while pushing their own agendas—and they’ll be at an advantage. It’s tough to come up with truthful, responsible answers under those conditions, because there are thousands of bits of real-world circumstantiality one has to account for. Agenda-pushers just need to know which direction to push, and they’ve got that going in. There’ll be no one to save you from folly.

The chaos Teresa describes is just the sort of environment in which a "fact" about (say) a sale of uranium ore to Iraq can be repeatedly spiked as unbelievable and reinserted by someone else who needs to have it believed, with the man at the top having no sense of what to believe. Chaos takes over from orderly process, and backstabbing politics trumps carefully made policy.

Now we have the CIA at war with the National Security Council over the Niger yellowcake forgery; the Pentagon at war with the State Department over the role of the UN in rebuilding Iraq; and the Pentagon at war with the CIA over CIA cooperation with Syria in pursuit of al Qaeda. Nobody in the White House can keep their story straight from day to day.

I'm glad I don't work in the White House.