The Structure of Leadership: Presidents, Hierarchies, and Information Flow

As President George W. Bush readied himself for his second term, he made no apologies for his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Indeed, in December 2004 he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the individuals most integral to the war: former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Ambassador L. Paul Bremer. Each, the president declared, had "played pivotal roles in great events,.., made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty" (Bush 2004b). But outside the cozy confines of the medal ceremony, less flattering accounts of those "great events" were in play. In October, commenting on the comprehensive report compiled by weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, President Bush had admitted that "Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there" (Bush 2004a). Administration war plans had assured Americans--and a reluctant Pentagon--that the cost of the war would be minimal and that preparing for postwar security needs was unnecessary, because troops would be greeted with flowers, not grenades (Fallows 2004a). For his part, Bremer oversaw the disastrous disbanding of the Iraqi army (Langewiesche 2004). By the end of 2004, the United States had spent more than $130 billion in Iraq. Worse, American troop deaths had surpassed 1,30{) (plus another 10,000 wounded). And this was itself a small fraction of the Iraqi police and civilian casualties targeted by insurgents or caught in the crossfire. Implicit in the criticism was an old query first broached in a rather different context: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" In 1973, when Senator Howard Baker first posed it, he was asking whether Richard Nixon knew about the crimes committed by all (or at least many of) the president's men. Asked three decades later, the question was quite literal. Namely: what information was available to President Bush as he made the key decisions about going to war? For instance, the president needed good estimates of the true likelihood that Saddam Hussein's lraq possessed chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons; the willingness of Iraqi guerillas to fight on and undermine the occupation; the chance that Iraq could become a democracy; and the cost of the war and reconstruction, in dollars, lives, and fi)rgone opportunities. Was he provided sufficient data to calculate the probabilities of various outcomes? Did information that might have changed his mind get lost somewhere on its way to the White House? Were bad data somewhere made good? As early as February 2002, a senior administration official complained that President Bush "finds out what he wants to know. But he does not necessarily find out what he might need to know" (Balz and Woodward 2002, A13). Consider in this vein the questions surrounding the reconstitutinn of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush told the nation that Iraq had sought to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger. The CIA knew this to be false; but National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice told reporters in July 2003 that the many doubts about the veracity of the claim "were not communicated to the president" and that she herself was also "unaware" of any such concerns (Pfiffner 2004, 33). In September 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney claimed lraq had purchased aluminum tubes that were intended for nuclear centrifuges, constituting "irrefiltable evidence" of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The highest levels of the administration embraced this thesis as proof of an imminent Iraqi threat. However, a lengthy examination by the New York Times two years later found that most experts outside the CIA thought the tubes were meant for conventional artillery rockets (Barstow et al. 2004; see Pfitfner 20()4, 34-36). As the Senate Intelligence Committee later reported, the CIA used its access to top policy makers to downplay dissenters' views: of fifteen reports on the tubes between April 2001 and September 2002, not one included Energy Department specialists' doubts that they could be used in a nuclear centrifuge. …