Failures to Launch

News flash: U.S. government investigators have just issued a highly critical report detailing serious wrongdoing by U.S. officials and some private contractors. The report explains how and why the errors occurred and pins the blame on the responsible parties. Both Americans and other world citizens should be grateful that public officials were able to trace the origins of these mistakes and propose effective remedies to prevent their recurrence.

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the long-delayed congressional report on torture by the CIA; I’m referring to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report on the battery fires that grounded the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fleet for several months back in 2013. According to the New York Times, the battery’s problems resulted from “flaws in manufacturing, insufficient testing and a poor understanding,” and the report identifies specific failings by Boeing, the Japanese battery manufacturer GS Yuasa, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured in these two incidents; nonetheless, the NTSB investigated the origins of the problem and did not hesitate to assign responsibility.

Contrast that admirable clarity and responsiveness with the way that the United States deals with far more costly foreign policy screw-ups. Even when the strategic and/or human consequences are enormous, the U.S. government finds it nearly impossible to evaluate what went wrong in a candid, clear-eyed, and timely manner. It is even harder for the government to assign responsibility for wrongdoing; if anything, officials tend to bend over backward to shield wrongdoers, especially when they are acting in the name of “national security.”

To take an obvious example, consider the Iraq War. The entirely voluntary decision to invade Iraq (and the subsequent mismanagement of the war) cost the United States over 40,000 soldiers killed or wounded (Iraqi death tolls were far higher). The economic price tag will exceed $3 trillion by the time we’ve paid the full cost of the war, and it created a regional mess that may take another decade or more to clean up. Lots of people (including yours truly) have tried to figure out how and why the United States screwed up so royally, but nobody proposed an official investigation of the decision-making process, based on full access to the evidentiary record, in order to identify exactly what went wrong. Instead, an insider like former policy planning chief Richard Haass “said that he will go to his grave” not knowing why the United States invaded, according to journalist George Packer. And some of the loudest advocates of the war remain respected and influential figures within the broader foreign-policy community.

Moreover, when the U.S. government does try to investigate past errors, it often does so in a halfhearted and compromised fashion. To take an obvious example, the congressional investigation of the Bush-era torture regime that was released this week has faced enormous obstacles from day one. As the Intercept’s Dan Froomkin explains here, efforts to get to the bottom of this scandal have been impeded at every turn, even though the focus of the report itself is quite narrow and leaves many key issues unexplored. The full report isn’t even going to be available to the taxpaying public; you and I only get to read a heavily sanitized executive summary. Moreover, the focus of the investigation was limited to examining whether the CIA followed orders properly, as opposed to investigating who gave the orders to torture in the first place. Congressional investigators didn’t interview CIA officials or any torture victims, and they relied instead on internal documents and transcripts of interviews conducted by others. After delaying release of the report for months, a unified phalanx of former Bush administration officials and intelligence managers is now working overtime to discredit or marginalize the report. Their latest gambit is to claim that the report might inflame opinion in the Middle East and elsewhere and thus complicate U.S. diplomacy, a charge whose absurdity Dan Drezner punctures here. So if you were one of those people who (naively) thought Congress could exercise effective oversight of the intelligence community and hold its top officials to account, think again.

What about the infamous 9/11 Commission Report? Doesn’t that much-praised document show that the U.S. government can organize a rapid and serious effort to discover why a tragedy occurred and identify appropriate remedies? Not really. As Philip Shenon makes clear in his important study of the 9/11 Commission’s operations, the commission was underfunded from the start and was repeatedly stonewalled by an uncooperative Bush administration. It also dodged crucial political questions, such as the role that prior U.S. policies had played in motivating al Qaeda to attack the United States. Moreover, as Evan Thomas, then of Newsweek, later commented, “[n]ot wanting to point fingers and name names … the 9/11 Commission shied away from holding anyone personally accountable” and “ended up blaming structural flaws for the government’s failure to protect the nation.” Its main recommendation — the appointment of new director for national intelligence — merely added an additional layer of bureaucracy to an already bloated intelligence apparatus.

These and other examples demonstrate that it’s easier for government agencies to evaluate battery fires and other technical issues (such the 1986 Challenger disaster) than it is for them to identify strategic or political errors and hold the people responsible for the latter to account. And when you think about it, these recurring failures aren’t all that surprising.

For one thing, debates about policy and strategy are rarely as cut and dried as the technical questions that organizations such as the NTSB routinely address. It is easier to make firm judgments when the criteria for evaluation rest on well-established scientific principles, but this is rarely the case when dealing with a controversial foreign-policy decisions. (And the phenomenon of climate denialism shows us that plenty of people – -including some U.S. senators — find it easy to reject scientific evidence that they happen to dislike.) Even when it is clear that key decision-makers blundered or lied, their defenders can usually construct after-the-fact rationales to excuse their behavior. Just look at how unrepentant neocons are now blaming the failure in Iraq on Obama, instead of owning up to their own responsibility for the original decision to invade.

Even when the facts aren’t in serious dispute, political pressures usually limit official attempts to evaluate past government misconduct. When things go badly, whichever party was in power at the time will go to great lengths to kick up dust and evade blame, while the party out of power will be tempted to launch witch hunts of its own (see under: Benghazi). And when policy evaluations are likely to have big budgetary implications — as the post-World War II Strategic Bombing Survey did — groups with a big stake in the outcome will do whatever they can to sway the analysis in their own favor. When it comes to issues of strategy and policy, in short, political self-interest can compromise the ability to learn the right lessons from the past.

A third barrier is the lack of a well-developed institutional capacity for objective historical assessment and evaluation. To be sure, the Congressional Budget Office does excellent and nonpartisan analysis of contemporary policy issues, and some inspectors general have done impressive work on past government failures, but as both Aaron Wildavsky and Stephen Van Evera have written, government organizations are notoriously bad at evaluating their own performance. As a result, even major policy mistakes often go unexamined.

In theory, other institutions in a free society could step in and provide the evaluation and assessment that government agencies find difficult to perform. Journalists and academic scholars can investigate past conduct and bring errors to light, and they are free (within the limits of libel law) to name names and hold top officials up to public censure. Not surprisingly, significant foreign-policy failures usually produce a cottage industry of books and articles exploring what went wrong and seeking to either blame or defend those responsible. The vast literature on Vietnam and the rapidly growing library of books and articles on Iraq, Afghanistan, counterinsurgency doctrine, the 2008 financial crisis exemplify this important feature of an open society.

Yet the effectiveness of these efforts should not be overstated. For starters, people who try to evaluate recent failures usually lack access to classified information, which may not be available for many years (if ever). Comprehensive historical assessment only emerges many years later, after the damage has been done and when it may be too late to be of much use. Moreover, as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, insiders who try to bring mistakes to light often get punished or ostracized for their efforts, instead of being honored or rewarded.

Furthermore, policy evaluation has become unfashionable in much of the academic world, and especially in political science, which tends to prize theoretical novelty and methodological fireworks rather than careful or sophisticated efforts to evaluate actual real-world policies. Academic scholars could be helping society learn from past errors, but relatively few of them try to do this anymore. Plus, neither journalists nor academics are immune to temptation, and well-heeled individuals or special interest groups with a stake in the issue will usually stand ready to fund think tanks and other research organizations designed to defend past policies no matter how dubious their results. In today’s marketplace of ideas, “truth” is sometimes determined not by the facts, but by the highest bidder.

I’m not saying the United States never holds anyone accountable and never learns any enduring lessons from the past. In general, I’d argue that democracies do a better job of learning from mistakes than authoritarian societies do and that this is a huge long-term advantage. But the process is slow and uncertain, and lessons that once seemed well-established are often forgotten with the passage of time. And the difference between how we deal with commercial aviation and how we deal with foreign policy helps explain why flying is a lot safer than it used to be, but the conduct of foreign policy has if anything gotten worse.

Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images News