Is 'groupthink' driving us to war?

TEN YEARS from now, will we be looking back asking how the United States could have thought that an unprovoked, preventive war on Iraq could succeed when the signs of danger were so clear and ominous? How the impossibility of accomplishing the mission through air power would lead levels of American casualties not seen since the Vietnam War? How an oil shock and deficit spending for war would plunge the United States and world economies into a major recession? How an administration so focused on getting rid of Saddam failed to create a workable policy to shape a post-Saddam Iraq?


It may be that the most compelling way to answer these questions will be to apply the insights of the psychologist Irving Janis on what he called ''groupthink.'' Looking back on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in his 1972 book ''Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascos,'' Janis asked: ''How could bright, shrewd men like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken by the CIA's stupid, patchwork plan'' to invade Cuba?

Drawing on studies of group decision-making, Janis argued that the pressures of like-minded people deciding as a group lead to a deterioration of mental reasoning, reality testing, and moral judgment. In short, groupthink leads to a breakdown of critical thinking.

In his 1972 book Janis also examined the flawed decision making that went into the Korean War, Pearl Harbor, and Vietnam and presented in contrast the decision making process that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

So far the Bush administration's foreign policy team has manifested all the symptoms of groupthink that Janis identified:

Illusions of invulnerability leading to excessive optimism and the taking of extreme risks.

Collective efforts to rationalize leading decision makers to discount warnings that might otherwise force them to reconsider.

Stereotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate and too weak or stupid to counter an attack against them, leading to miscalculations.