Lincoln P Bloomfield

President Bush doesn’t want to believe Iraq is like Vietnam, and in an unintended way he’s right. A better analogy is the US-organised Bay of Pigs attack in 1961.

That was a classic case of a president being misled by inexperience and bad advice into backing an ill-conceived invasion of Cuba. US-trained attacking forces were supposed to be greeted with flowers, but it turned into a fiasco when they were overwhelmed by the Cubans. Afterward, President Kennedy said two remarkable things. “I will never again trust the experts” and “the policy was wrong because its underlying premises were faulty.” Experts, of course, are indispensable, and more expertise within Bush’s inner circle in 2003 might have provided needed clearheadedness about the perils of occupying Iraq. But Kennedy also pointed to a common flaw of foreign policy-making: We don’t often test our premises or understand how the other side is likely to react.

A State Department game I helped run in the early 1990s projected negotiations between North and South Korea, which some considered feasible. But the game indicated poor prospects for a meeting of minds between booming South Korea and the sullen communist state to the north. But a game simulating black-white negotiations in South Africa, then officially doubted, achieved a positive outcome that also anticipated reality. Careful preparation and skilled, mature players are essential for a successful game with meaningful result. Who among Washington’s final deciders was thinking about the difficulties of managing a large, broken country while invading Iraq? How many focused on Sunni contempt for Shiites who would become the democratic rulers? Who remembered that as recently as 1921, three Ottoman provinces were cobbled together in London and called Iraq?

Instead, the 2003 premise was that Iraqis would greet American forces as liberators and sit still while they taught them political science. Six months before the invasion, a State Department political game employing more than 30 experts came out with post-combat needs for more troops and allies, preservation of the Iraqi army, and priority for quick results in security and electric power generation. The findings weren’t absorbed by the inner circle because they ran counter to the presidential mindset.

Political games are typically run at the working level, and are virtually unknown at the White House and cabinet level. If not this president, then the next one will need to fix a flawed decision-making system. Running top-level, premise-testing planning games would be a modest start. Presidents can’t role-play themselves without risking damaging leaks.

But how about White House games with deputies role-playing their chiefs, opposite the country’s best experts in a setting free of intimidation? A new disaster might be averted if greater rationality and expertise can break through the present bureaucratic ceiling to the place where critical choices are actually made.