In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chaPTer 6 George W. Bush the decision Maker Take Two Alexander Moens a great deal has been written about George W. Bush’s presidential personality and about his decision style, but do we really have a full picture of this president? The younger Bush has been enormously polarizing, evoking disdain from critics but loyalty and admiration from supporters. Any scholar of George W. Bush and his presidency will find that the literature evaluating his time in office is likewise deeply polarized. Critical commentators have employed layers of conspiracy theory and psychology to attempt to “uncover” the true Bush and his ills. Perhaps the least hysterical in this genre is Jacob Weisberg’s The Bush Tragedy. Admirers, on the other hand, have not been shy about praising Bush’s virtues and strengths. Bill Sammon, the journalist-cum-biographer, published two books in rapid succession, Misunderestimated and Strategery, to show Bush’s noble character, strong moral values, and unpopular but sound policy.1 Despite the wide variety and large number of volumes written on Bush, I argue that he is not in fact well understood. Neither the rosy nor the bleak paradigms about him offer a consistent and comprehensive explanation of his presidency. There is much about Bush’s behavior that fits neither the camp of detractors or supporters. But rather than study the personality, psychology, family background, or political career per se, I want to look at Bush through his actions, namely his presidential management and decision making. At the end of the day, the key traits of a president come out in his decision making. By studying Bush’s decision-making process, I believe we 72 • alexander moens can understand more about his complexity. It helps my point that Bush sees himself foremost as a “decider,” as he put it in a press conference in April 2006. He structured his presidential memoirs, Decision Points, around this very theme.2 I would like to focus my chapter particularly on how it applies to Bush’s foreign policy. Studies on George W. Bush’s presidential management and decision making in foreign policy converge around the following topics and criticisms: • Bush had an overconfident chief executive officer style of management in which he delegated too easily. His chairman-of-the-board approach to policy making resulted in shielding him from important policy details, from policy complexity, and from assuring that his decisions were faithfully implemented; • Bush had an emotion-based and value-driven rather than an information-based and rationality-driven focus in making decisions. As a result, the process was subject to two flaws. First, Bush attached too much importance to emotional intelligence , which generated “gut-feeling” decisions. These were made too quickly or in isolation and not subject to enough information and evaluation. Second, normative goals including faith values distorted the rational evaluation of US interests in terms of costs and benefits; • The management of Bush’s decision process by Chief of Staff Andrew Card and by National Security Adviser Condoleezza (Condi) Rice was uneven and at times very poor. In some cases Dick Cheney acted like a third manager of the process though usually at the cost of other participants. As a result, many decisions lacked a clear deliberation stage, open input by all key advisers, and a clear policy choice. Bush often lacked the benefit of hearing competitive advice debated before him; • The Bush administration fell victim to the symptoms of bureaucratic politics and groupthink. Serious policy disagreements between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on the one hand and Colin Powell (sometimes supported by Condi Rice) on the other hand as well as among their deputies led to back channels and infighting among Bush’s advisers, which he either was not aware of or did not stop. The ideal process of an open forum in which diverse points of view are debated on their merits was often abandoned for one-on-one sessions with Bush. Some have argued that Bush’s foreign policy team also suffered from groupthink, especially after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In this view, an alarmist mind-set shared by most advisers (and Bush) made it next to impossible for dissenters and contrary advice to get a fair hearing in the decision-making process. In order to reflect upon Bush’s overall performance in foreign policy, I will use the four points of critique listed above as guiding points to analyze where we [3.138.114.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 02:07...

Share