Rational Leaders, Organizational Outputs, and Bureaucratic Outcomes

The public 9/11 commission testimony and reports released so far suggest other possible explanatory approaches, especially given the unending tales of missed opportunities, lack of interagency communication, and charter confusion. Officials from the White House, State, and CIA, from both the Clinton and Bush administrations alike, sounded similar themes.

In his seminal 1969 article, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis”, Graham Allison posited three models of understanding national security policy and decision-making using the Kennedy administration’s handling of the Cuban standoff as a case study. The first, the “Rational Policy Model”, is largely in keeping with the power-maximizing rational, state actors described above. The second, the “Organization Process Model”, sees decision making instead as the outputs of government agencies’ standard operating procedures. The last, the “Bureaucratic Politics Model”, explains policy decisions as the often unintended outcome of competing departments and agencies with conflicting agendas, turf and egos.

For the 9/11 victims’ families and the American public in general, the Organization Process and Bureaucratic Politics models will have some explanatory power. For example, information that field level FBI agents possessed about Zacarias Moussaoui and Arab students at flight schools never reached their superiors in Washington. Similarly, two of the 9/11 hijackers were known to be in the U.S. in the summer of 2001. In addition, Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger and CIA director Tenet revealed apparent uncertainty over the critical issue of presidential authorization for the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. And Richard Clarke’s urgent request in January 2001 for a meeting of principals to discuss the Al Qaeda threat was rejected by Condi Rice, who steered her new subordinate instead to department deputies in keeping with his job title.

Despite the power of Allison’s methodology, his models seem inadequate for the immense scope of this American intelligence failure and the disaster that ensued as a result. The September 11 tragedy is not merely one of organizational breakdown or bureaucratic in-fighting. 9/11 was primarily a failure of mindset. Neither President Clinton (who at least raised the specter of the terrorist threat) nor President Bush made the case to the American people for war against Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Bob Woodward quotes President Bush as having said of Bin Laden, “I knew he was a menace, but I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.” Of course it didn’t seem urgent; in retrospect, virtually the entire American national security apparatus didn’t have a mental framework by which it could be.

In the meantime, Clarke’s book Against All Enemies and his 9/11 commission testimony have raised the specter of a Bush administration asleep at the helm before 9/11, and distracted by its fixation on Iraq, jeopardizing the war on terror afterwards. In response, the Bush White House, seeing the basis for its reelection undermined, responded with its usual fury and vitriol, with Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Andrew Card, Dan Bartlett and others viciously attacking Clarke. The media will debate whether the contradictions in the administration’s statements and its political tone-deafness in refusing to have Rice testify publicly before the commission all add up to a PR defeat for the President.

But for the American people and the 9/11 families, the answer to the question of how the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks happened will have a simple, but unsatisfying answer: apparently, we simply couldn’t conceive of it.

1. National Security Mind Games
2. The American Post-Cold War Consensus: A Broken Model
3. Rational Leaders, Organizational Outputs, Bureaucratic Outcomes