In the time since his gaffe on "Morning Joe," Johnson has had created the appropriate briefing book and is now speaking in a seemingly authoritative way about Aleppo and the Syrian civil war. For him, the transformation has worked like magic. The gaffe itself increased the level of attention he has received from the official mass media, and given his new level of superficial knowledge, there are even calls for him to be included in the upcoming presidential debates. Go figure!
Johnson's situation points to the power of the briefing book, so it is important to ask where these analyses come from.
They are put together by the leader's staff as well as alleged "experts." For instance, in the case of the president, that would be department heads. When it comes to foreign policy, that would include the Secretary of State, the Director of National Security, the heads of the CIA, the DIA and other "intelligence agencies." Of course these folks are also political appointees who may know next to nothing about particular topics. So they have their own versions of briefing books prepared by people down the line who may actually know something about what is going on.
In fact, as this process goes on, you do usually reach a level of staff who are real experts in, say, both the history of and the state of the crisis in Syria. They speak and read the local language, have in-country intelligence sources and so can produce a fairly accurate, unbiased assessment of the situation. They make their analysis and pass it up the ladder.
Here comes the problem. At some level of this process the relatively accurate analysis comes to people, usually those department chiefs or their immediate assistants, who are working in and responding to a preexisting political and ideological environment. Consciously or unconsciously they begin to censor the analysis of the experts so as to reconcile it with the prevailing group-think of the leadership.
Part III -- Conclusion
The ignorance of the leadership, superficially hidden by what turns out to be censored analyses, is by no means unique to U.S. politicos. Vladimir Putin of Russia, Ali Khamenei of Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Xi Jinping of China -- and the list can go on and on -- all see the world as through glasses darkened by cultural, ideological, political and historical preconceptions. And they all have their experts who do their best to give the boss a more or less accurate picture of the world. And, also, they all have their own versions of department heads who censor the picture to support the present preconceived worldview.
I offer this account of policy making to the reader not as an excuse for the near-sightedness of almost all of the world's politicians, but as an explanation, the backstory so to speak, out of which so many bad policies come. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once commented that "false knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance." Actually, the two are so tied to each other that most of us can't recognize false knowledge when we are confronted with it. There are too many panes of dark glass in the way.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
