Bureaucracy, The Individual and Rational Decision Making?

This was originally a response to a question my lecturer posed my class, "Individual cognition and bureaucratic interests undermine rational decisions in the “War on Terror". I didn't really like the question, so i went my own way in answering it...

The post 9/11 years have been marked with a distinct loss of civil liberties and “The ‘War on Terror’ serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities” (Newman, 2008). The ‘War on Terror’ can be seen as the forefront of, as Newman put it, this “creeping conservatism’s” initiative to reaffirm its hold on power by using the 9/11 event to do so. I cannot in good conscience argue for or against the fact that individual cognition and bureaucratic interests are undermining rational decisions for this 'war', for in doing so leads me to experience a peculiar form of cognitive dissonance as it is in my opinion, that this 'war' is in essence irrational. However I can agree with the fact that rationality in decision making can be undermined by falsely perceived notions of truths, individual cognition and bureaucratic interests which actually does, in my opinion, exemplifies the 'war' in all entirety. Namely it is an irrational 'war' that was created based on falsehoods to serve bureaucratic (and private) interests using an abhorrent act of terrorism as its vehicle to push through policies that would never have taken shape otherwise.

That aside, rationality can sometimes be impaired by individual cognition (or in the case of the neocons, group cognition). Individual experiences, bias, self-interest, personality or even delusions are want to persuade decisions one way or another, an example of which could be seen in Thatcher's poll-tax in 1989. Against all advice she persisted to push through this highly unpopular system for, as some analyst put it, her "Iron Lady" persona made it impossible for her to "U-Turn" on any decision she made. This trait was an asset for her in the past, unfortunately for her it eventually led to her being toppled from government in 1990. A more curious example irrational decision making due to individual cognition would be the late Saparmurat Niyazov, or Turkmenbashi, the 1st President of Turkmenistan who amongst other things renamed the month January after himself and shut all hospitals outside his capital, Asgabat.

Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.", and no doubt he said it with the intention satirising the insanity of this monolithic organ of government. In essence, the bureaucracy of a nation officially exists to execute, maintain and perpetuate the policies of the nations political core. However, more often than not, a bureaucracy exists with the sole intention of perpetuating itself whilst expanding its budget, and it is this instinct of self-interest and self-preservation that sometimes undermines rationality. In 2008, Tom Sauer, of the International Politics University of Antwerp, presented a paper at the SOAS Conference ‘Globalisation and Disarmament’, entitled "US nuclear weapons policy under the Clinton administration: a missed opportunity due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of political leadership" in which he outlined how the US military-industrial complex managed to prevent Clinton from revising the US' nuclear weapons policies as any change to the status quo could threaten its relevancy. This is a clear example of how bureaucratic interests can subvert both policy and clear, rational decision making. It is in the US' best interest to reduce its nuclear armaments as this would not only help reduce an already bloated defence budget but would also provide it with the moral high ground to insist other nations to follow suite and help it prevent newer upstart nations from insisting on joining the nuclear club. However, bureaucratic self-interest won over rationality.

In his paper, Sauer concluded that arms control was limited by "the power of the bureaucracy and a lack of political leadership. " and one could say the same concerning the rationality of our leaders decisions. The power of the bureaucracy can and does subvert rationality, and so does the personal limitations, in other words individual cognition, of the decision makers. An apt analogy would be when a car hits a tree. If you consider the tree as a constant, then there are only two variables left to consider in such an accident to determine why it happened, one being the inertia and mass of the car along with any mechanical problems it may have could make it impossible for the driver to correct any mistakes or miscalculations he made to cause the crash, and the other would of course be the state of mind the driver was in during the accident. If the drivers drunk and the breaks don't work, then you could say that the accident was inevitable.