Major Failures of Process and Judgment: National Security Policy Making in the Bush Administration

It was said after Vietnam, "Never again," and thirty years later, we have Iraq. The United States should be able to do better. In our view, the governmental and political processes that brought the United States to the current state of affairs in Iraq are deeply flawed and badly in need of reform and revitalization. Trying to assess where the critical deficiencies lie and what might be done to remedy them is the task we have set ourselves. Ideal solutions are neither available nor necessary, but critical changes in how the United States thinks about policy substance and makes policy decisions can meet the need.

There are at least two fundamental obstacles that stand in the way of improving the quality of national security decision making. First, the American system of governance seems paralyzed, torn by deep-seated divisions in beliefs and values and unable to address critical long-term issues like immigration, energy efficiency and availability, environmental degradation, and a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure. In this context, it seems like a bad joke that one of the domestic political foci in the first half of 2007 was the maneuvering of various state governments to advance the dates of their presidential political primaries for whatever added political influence, surely modest, they might gain.

The second fundamental obstacle may prove to be somewhat easier to deal with. In our view, in the case of Iraq as well as Vietnam, there was a strong sense of American exceptionalism on the part of the American public as well as its political leadership.¹ The assumption that the United States and its people are wiser and more capable and have better values than other nations undergirded what turned out to be the overly ambitious, indeed grandiose, presidential views of what the United States could accomplish in the international arena.

The reality is that many foreign societies, particularly in the Third World, have indigenous cultures and religious beliefs that differ significantly from the American versions; furthermore, most Americans have little understanding of or interest in them. Often, in the post–Cold War period, the United States has proven ineffective in accomplishing its purposes in Third World countries in spite of ambitious policies and programs directed toward them. Iraq provides only the most recent and costly example of this experience.

The great challenge for American political leaders—complex and frustrating—is to strike an appropriate balance between active international engagement and protection of vital American interests around the world, still essential for the rest of the world as well as the United States, and an approach to external threats that is more critical, more skeptical, even cautious.²

The Postwar National Security System

Before moving to a diagnosis of present weaknesses in the system and how they might be remedied, the development of the national security structure after the Second World War requires a brief review. Its origins can be found in American wartime experiences and, particularly, exposure to how our British allies coordinated their national security policy making. The landmark legislation was the National Security Act of 1947 and amendments to it in 1949, 1953, and 1986.

The act established the National Security Council (NSC), designed to assist the president in coordinating more effectively the relevant departments, notably State and Defense. In the end, the most important development was the transformation of the original executive director, designed to manage the council's work, into an assistant to the president for national security affairs. His role became, with the help of a growing staff, one that oversaw the processes of national security policy formation and implementation on behalf of the president and, inevitably, one that provided policy advice to him.

As the role was played by Henry Kissinger under President Richard Nixon, the national security adviser became the dominant national security policy figure in the government. While none of Kissinger's successors have matched the potency of his role, the national security assistant has remained a major player in policy-making processes, in a position to at least...