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I recently re-read `The Best and the Brightest'. There are fascinating parallels between the process of making bad policy and deciding to go to war in Vietnam, and much of al Bushid's foreign policy apparatus. For example, the division between State and Defense (Rusk v. McNamira) then, and now (Powell v. Rumsfelt), and the internal agency divisions between the politically appointed, or politically motivated (career conscious) support and their realistic opponents. In B and B, support for the likely success of the war, and opposition to the idea that the war would be a success were seen in the light of friends and enemies. Internal agency careers in State and Defense were sidelined or destroyed on the basis of such support or opposition, and particularly so within the military. The negative early CIA assessments and military field reports were ignored or `disappeared' along with the people who filed them. The total effect was `realism' was bad for career advancement, while `groupthink' support was an enhancement to career advancement. This entire bureaucratic employment syndrome is obviously ubiquitous in business, academia, and elsewhere.
There gets to be a party line issued from on high, and whatever that line is can not be corrected by `factual' appraisals from below. In the groupthink mind, opposition is simply counter-factual. Such counter-factuals are considered ideological bias and bad faith, therefore the product of disloyalty.
Chuck Grimes