Paul Pillar

One regularly hears much talk in Washington about accountability, but also regularly sees examples of how the concept of accountability gets applied in this town in an inconsistent and warped way. There are the inevitable calls for heads to roll after any salient untoward event, and huzzahs to senior managers who do roll heads in response. I have addressed previously what tends to be wrong about how such episodes play out. Too often there is no consideration of whether the untoward event is or is not part of some larger pattern of malfeasance or incompetence, whether those at any one level in a chain of command could reasonably be expected to prevent all such events when the action is at some other level, and whether there is any reason to expect the changes in personnel to result in any change in institutional performance. Nor is there consideration of why those who roll heads and collect the huzzahs but who also are part of the same chain of command should be allowed to determine—in a very un-Truman-like, the-buck-didn't-get-to-me way—that accountability stops just below their own level.

The converse of this is that in some instances in which there is a proven pattern of error, and good reason to believe that if we trust the same people who led us into failure in the past we are likely to be led into failure again, no accountability seems to be taking place. Accountability in this instance would not necessarily mean losing a particular job; it could mean being discredited as a source of policy advice. There is such a thing as malpractice in policy analysis. The most obvious example of lack of this type of accountability is that neocons—the people who gave us the Iraq War—still get listened to. Not only that, but they still get listened to on matters eerily reminiscent of getting us into the Iraq War.

Another example is brought to mind by the latest set of recommendations from veteran Middle East peace processor Dennis Ross. A fair reaction to this comes from Lebanese commentator Rami Khouri. Khouri observes that it is understandable to think about how the Obama administration, with its new secretary of state, might try to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. But, he continues,

Less understandable is why a leading American publication—the New York Times in its Sunday Review section—should turn for advice on this issue from former diplomat Dennis Ross...I say this is less understandable because Ross has almost nothing but failure to show for his 11 years of leadership on Arab-Israeli and other Middle Eastern issues in the White House and State Department, between 1993 and 2011. Only in Washington could a serial failure in Arab-Israeli diplomacy such as Ross be consulted on how to move ahead in Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Another type of accountability-shedding, which one sees especially on Capitol Hill but also elsewhere, is that someone who supported what turned out to be a failure disclaims responsibility on grounds of having been misinformed. This certainly has been a pattern regarding the Iraq War ever since it turned sour. Some proponents of the war have confessed to having made an error; a larger number have used the excuse of having been misinformed by the Bush administration, the intelligence community, or both about Iraqi weapons programs . The excuse gets repeated even though very few members of Congress ever bothered to look at what the intelligence agencies were saying either about the weapons programs or about anything else concerning Iraq, and even though there would not have been a case for launching this offensive war even if everything the administration had said about the weapons had been true.

A similar way of shedding responsibility, again a favorite of members of Congress, is to immerse oneself in the political mood of the moment and to disregard how that mood represents a change from earlier moods. Here the outstanding example is the practice that gets euphemistically called enhanced interrogation techniques. Scott Shane has an excellent description in the New York Times of the state of play about this issue that confronts John Brennan, and particularly about the question of how he will handle a reportedly damning report prepared by Democratic Congressional staff. He faces Democrats who have moved strongly into the anti-torture camp, Republicans who haven't moved as much, and employees involved in the interrogation process who have seen public and political standards about this subject shift markedly between the early post-9/11 days, when they were doing some of this stuff, and now, when people want to hold someone accountable for doing that stuff.

Given past patterns, the smoothest way out of this bind may be found in the report itself, in which, according to Shane, people involved in the interrogation program are described as having given “top Bush administration officials, members of Congress, the American public and even their own colleagues — possibly including Mr. Brennan himself — a deeply distorted account of its nature and efficacy.” Here's a prediction: Mr. Brennan will find places at lower levels to satisfy the appetite for accountability, while further determining that both he and members of Congress had been “misinformed.”

Vali Nasr has caused a stir—the kind that sells books—with a broadside against the Obama White House's handling of policy on Afghanistan. His book and the broadside in it, excerpted in the current Foreign Policy, have already been the focus of a Michael Gordon article in the New York Times. Nasr's tale would appear to complement a pattern that David Ignatius identified and on which I commented last week, of decision-making being highly centralized in the White House.

Nasr's story does indeed do that to a degree, but the story itself is of a flavor that hardly qualifies it as a confirmatory source. It is a highly parochial viewpoint, with a tone that approaches vindictiveness. The strong subtext is the writer's intense personal loyalty to his boss at the time, Richard Holbrooke. Anything in which Holbrooke was prevented from getting his way is treated as ipso facto bad for the cause of sound policy toward South Asia. It is the sort of account that gets one thinking that there must be another side of this story, with neither side having exclusive rights to credibility. We may have to wait for post-Obama-administation memoirs to get the other side.

There is another sense in which Nasr's story gets to something Ignatius and I were talking about, which is how a small group characterized by a strong sense of mutual loyalty is prone to groupthink. The White House is hardly the only place in government where such groupthink can arise. The acute within-group loyalty, which comes through strongly in Nasr's account, in Holbrooke's AfPak unit at the State Department made it a prime candidate for groupthink as well. Even more obvious was another psychological phenomenon associated with such groups, which was the framing of just about everything in ins-vs.-outs, us-vs.-them terms.

The resulting dysfunction illustrates one of the things wrong in a faux-Machiavelli manual (in the same issue of Foreign Policy) by Elliott Abrams on how any president can “have his way on national security.” There are many things wrong with it, the most basic of which is the unstated assumption that an unrestrained president “getting his way” is better for the republic than a president having to deal in a more bridled way with other parts of the government, or at least of the executive branch. It is interesting that this perspective comes from Abrams, who was in the middle of one of the most vivid demonstrations—i.e., the Iraq War—of how disastrous it can be for the republic when a president and a few appointees make policy unbridled by things like bureaucracies and policy processes.

Even if one accepts the presidential-power purpose of Abrams's advice, there are other things wrong with it—contradictions, for example. Abrams is most often a fervent bureaucrat-hater; high on his list of maxims is “Don't let your cabinet secretaries put career officials in top positions.” But later on he says, “Often, the best asset can be career officials themselves—if they can be brought around.” So it is only most bureaucrats he hates, and not the ones that are “brought around” to his views.

The basic justification that Abrams, and many others, make for staffing huge portions of the executive branch with temporary political appointees is that this will ensure the president's policies are carried out. But carrying out the policies of whoever is the political master of the day is part of the essence of what a truly professional bureaucracy is all about. Conversely, many of those appointees, however much they claim to be the president's men (and women), aren't really. They are political people with their own ideas, and their own ambitions to make their marks before they leave government.

The situation Nasr describes regarding Holbrooke is a strong demonstration of this. Of course, the problem was made especially acute because the person involved had a self-image and sense of self-importance that were colossal even by Washington standards. (In a possibly apocryphal story, a State Department wheels-down cable sent when Holbrooke arrived on a foreign trip read, “The ego has landed.”) Would President Obama have been following Abrams's advice if he had never appointed Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton (on whose presidential campaign Nasr and Holbrooke were working when they forged their close relationship) to their posts? Perhaps, but the republic would not necessarily have been better off for it. This question also brings to mind Lyndon Johnson's earthy explanation, involving a camel being inside a tent rather than out of it, as to why he kept on J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI.

David Ignatius has an interesting take on national security decision-making in the Obama administration in the wake of the reshuffle of senior positions taking place during these early weeks of the president's second term. Ignatius perceives certain patterns that he believes reinforce each other in what could be a worrying way. One is that the new team does not have as much “independent power” as such first-term figures as Clinton, Gates, Panetta and Petraeus. Another is that the administration has “centralized national security policy to an unusual extent” in the White House. With a corps of Obama loyalists, the substantive thinking may, Ignatius fears, run too uniformly in the same direction. He concludes his column by stating that “by assembling a team where all the top players are going in the same direction, he [Obama] is perilously close to groupthink.”

We are dealing here with tendencies to which the executive branch of the U.S. government is more vulnerable than many other advanced democracies, where leading political figures with a standing independent of the head of government are more likely to wind up in a cabinet. This is especially true of, but not limited to, coalition governments. Single-party governments in Britain have varied in the degree to which the prime minister exercises control, but generally room is made in the cabinet for those the British call “big beasts”: leading figures in different wings or tendencies in the governing party who are not beholden to the prime minister for the power and standing they have attained.

Ignatius overstates his case in a couple of respects. Although he acknowledges that Obama is “better than most” in handling open debate, he could have gone farther and noted that there have been egregious examples in the past of administrations enforcing a national security orthodoxy, and that the Obama administration does not even come close to these examples. There was Lyndon Johnson in the time of the Vietnam War, when policy was made around the president's Tuesday lunch table and even someone with the stature of the indefatigable Robert McNamara was ejected when he strayed from orthodoxy. Then there was, as the most extreme case, the George W. Bush administration, in which there was no policy process and no internal debate at all in deciding to launch a war in Iraq and in which those who strayed from orthodoxy, ranging from Lawrence Lindsey to Eric Shinseki, were treated mercilessly. Obama's prolonged—to the point of inviting charges of dithering—internal debates on the Afghanistan War were the polar opposite of this.

Ignatius also probably underestimates the contributions that will be made to internal debate by the two most important cabinet members in national security: the secretaries of state and defense. He says John Kerry “has the heft of a former presidential candidate, but he has been a loyal and discreet emissary for Obama and is likely to remain so.” The heft matters, and Kerry certainly qualifies as a big beast. Moreover, the discreet way in which a member of Congress would carry any of the administration's water, as Kerry sometimes did when still a senator, is not necessarily a good indication of the role he will assume in internal debates as secretary of state. As for Chuck Hagel, Ignatius states “he has been damaged by the confirmation process and will need White House cover.” But now that Hagel's nomination finally has been confirmed, what other “cover” will he need? It's not as if he ever will face another confirmation vote in the Senate. It was Hagel's very inclination to flout orthodoxy, to arrive at independent opinions and to voice those opinions freely that led to the fevered opposition to his nomination.

Nevertheless, Ignatius is on to something that is at least a potential hazard for the second Obama term. The key factor is not so much the substantive views that senior appointees bring with them into office. As the cliché goes, a president is entitled to have working for him people who agree with his policies. The issue is instead one of how loyalty—not only to the president, but collective loyalty as part of the president's inner circle—may affect how senior officials express or push views once they are in office.

In this regard it is useful to reflect on the meaning of “groupthink.” The term has come to be used loosely as a synonym for many kinds of conventional wisdom or failure to consider alternatives rigorously. But the father of research on groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis, meant something narrower and more precise. Groupthink is pathology in decision-making that stems from a desire to preserve harmony and conformity in a small group where bonds of collegiality and mutual loyalty have been forged. It is the negative flip side of whatever are the positive attributes of such bonds. LBJ's Tuesday lunch group was one of the original subjects of Janis's writing.

With this in mind, the second term appointment that becomes even more interesting regarding Ignatius's thesis is that of John Brennan. Ignatius has Brennan well-pegged, including a comment that he “made a reputation throughout his career as a loyal deputy.” One might expand on that by observing that among Brennan's talents—and they are considerable—is a knack for what is often called managing up. Earlier in his career he was a protégé of George Tenet, and during the past four years he appears to have forged a similar relationship with Barack Obama.

One ought to ask what all of this might mean for Brennan's ability and willingness to speak truth not only to power, but to his patron—and to do so especially at politically charged times when his patron may be under pressure or may have other reasons for wanting to move in a particular direction in foreign policy. This is more of a question with Brennan than it would have been with David Petraeus if he were still the CIA director. Petraeus was very conscious of the truth-to-power issue, and more generally of the importance of objectivity, when he was appointed. As he himself observed, on matters relating to Afghanistan he might find himself “grading my own work.” Because the issue was recognized and involved obvious matters such as the Afghanistan War, and because there was nothing even remotely resembling a patron-protégé relationship between Petraeus and Obama, the issue was not destined to be a significant problem. The intimate, cloistered nature of the patronage involved in the Obama-Brennan relationship is something quite different.

Against this backdrop—and given how the Obama administration appears to have signed on to the conventional wisdom about unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear weapon—one ought to look more closely at a troubling line in Brennan's statement submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for his confirmation hearing. In listing some of the national security challenges that require “accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA,” the statement said: “And regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems rather than fulfilling their international obligations or even meeting the basic needs of their people.” Two countries, Iran and North Korea, get equated in this statement even though one already has nuclear weapons (and recently conducted its third nuclear test) while the other forswears any intention of building any. There are other related differences as well, including ones having to do with international obligations: North Korea renounced the Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003 and has been a nuclear outlaw for ten years, while Iran is a party to the treaty and conducts its nuclear work under IAEA inspections.

The judgment of the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran has not to date decided to build a nuclear weapon and, as far as the community knows, may never make such a decision. One would think that senators would be making better use of time if, instead of asking for the umpteenth time for still more information about the Benghazi incident, they would ask instead why the nominee to be CIA director, by saying that Tehran is “bent on pursuing nuclear weapons,” disagrees with a publicly pronounced judgment of the intelligence community.

If a crunch comes that is related to this issue, perhaps the rest of the intelligence community will play a beneficial role. I have been quite critical of the intelligence reorganization of 2004 as being a poorly thought-out response to the post-9/11 public appetite to do something visible that could be called “reform.” The rapid turnover in the job of director of national intelligence is a symptom of the problems the reorganization has entailed. The current director, James Clapper, deserves the public's thanks for taking a thankless job and performing it with distinction. But maybe in the face of certain types of personal relationships and certain decision-making patterns, the new arrangement can have some payoffs. If Clapper—who does not figure into Ignatius's discussion of Obama's inner circle—becomes, on Iran or any other issue, a counterweight to any White House-centered groupthink that might emerge in that circle, he will have earned even more thanks.

Richard Betts offers a characteristically perspicuous essay in the newest Foreign Affairs about what has happened to the U.S. use—or nonuse, or misuse—of deterrence in the years since the Cold War. His overall observation is that the United States appears to have unlearned some of the lessons that it successfully applied during the Cold War. It has used the mechanisms of deterrence in situations where this use has needlessly worsened relations with the apparent target of the deterrence; confronting Russia with an expanded NATO is the leading example that Betts analyzes. Conversely, the United States has failed to use deterrence in situations where it should have done so. Here the glaring example is the George W. Bush administration's launching of a war against Iraq—rather than relying on deterrence to keep Saddam Hussein where Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was as of May 2001: “in a box.”

In addition to the issues of NATO and relations with Russia, Betts draws policy implications regarding the handling of Iran. He reviews the reasons—which ought to be easy to understand, but seemingly to many people aren't—why deterrence of even a nuclear-armed Iran is far preferable to launching a war against Iran. He also criticizes as sometimes muddled and inconsistent the way deterrence figures into the U.S. approach toward China and the Far East—scene of a Cold War failure to use deterrence properly, in Korea in 1950. Betts appears to prefer a clear either/or approach to deterrence, in which we make unmistakable the places where we are willing to respond forcefully while not leading others to believe that we are making deterrent threats in other places.

This preference leads to one point on which Betts's analysis can be challenged, as it relates to Cold War deterrence of the USSR. Insofar as U.S. nuclear weapons figured into deterrence of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, there necessarily was some ambiguity. The West never did come up with a good answer to the question of whether, and why, the United States would risk incineration of New York for the sake of saving Hamburg. But that involves an unresolvable point of historical debate. On matters of current policy relevance, Betts's observations are astute.

Betts does not really address why lessons were unlearned and the same nation's use of a strategic concept as basic as deterrence has been so much less skillful in the past couple of decades than it was for most of the four decades before that. Let me offer two explanations.

One is that this is another indication of the tendency, which Americans in particular exhibit, to overestimate the newness of things, especially when moving from one identifiable era to another. A drastically changed world was the common way of looking at the end of the Cold War. The nature of threats was seen as having become thoroughly different from before, and thus altogether different strategies had to be used. Such views were significant exaggerations of actual change. But it nevertheless meant that many Cold War lessons were discarded not only because one generation succeeded another but also because the lessons were mistakenly seen as obsolete.

The other explanation involves the post-Cold-War-victory hubris of the unipolar moment. Some—including some who got into positions to shape policy—thought we didn't have to think as much about deterrence anymore because the United States now had the freedom and the power to accomplish much more directly through the application of military force, and to do so by taking the initiative rather than waiting to respond to someone else's transgression. The Iraq War demonstrated some of what was wrong with that line of thinking. But some lessons not only get forgotten; in some quarters they never seem to get learned in the first place.