U.S. Decision Making Process and the Outcome of War in Iraq.

Recent books and commentaries on the current Iraq war suggest that Bush's decision making reflects some of the errors found in Janis's (1982) classic groupthink model. In a previous paper, we found much evidence to suggest that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was plagued by many of the antecedents and symptoms of the original groupthink model. We found that concurrence seeking tended to result in such errors as overestimation of the group, closed mindedness, and pressures toward uniformity. This paper evaluates the decision making process and its impact on the outcome of war. We examine what types of errors were made and how such mistakes contributed to U.S. failure to achieve its stated goals in the Iraq war. The paper uses the groupthink model as a starting point but moves beyond groupthink by incorporating some of the ideas found in the suggested revision of the model (‘t Hart 1994; ‘t Hart, Stern, and Sundelius 2004). More specifically, we highlight the impact of presidential leadership style and advisory systems on group interaction patterns (management and processing of information) and outcomes. We test both models using content analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]