“These guys are relentless”

I had started writing something about the wider context of the Hutton report, when I just felt weary. The thought of ploughing through all the junk that led up to the invasion of Iraq again suddenly seemed as attractive as wading through a sewer. Fortunately I found three links which I think says anything I wanted to say much better than I could manage plus a whole lot more. The first is an article in Mother Jones that details the lead up to the invasion. The second is a piece in the London Review of Books by Conor Gearty that neatly sums up the report itself. The third is a blog by a young Iraqi woman, Riverbend, that I have been following for some time. This, as well providing some wider insights into what is happening in Iraq, gives a vivid account of the daily life of a Baghdad family as the war the continues – a definite must read.
But one snippet from my original intention remained. In the months before the invasion I found a piece in the New Yorker, which contained one paragraph that I felt caught the mood of the whole thing:
“In September (2001, my addition), Bush rejected Paul Wolfowitz’s recommendation of immediate moves against Iraq. That the President seems to have changed his mind is an indication, in part, of the bureaucratic skill of the Administration’s conservatives. “These guys are relentless,” one former official, who is close to the high command at the State Department, told me. “Resistance is futile.”
As I found myself resisting what I had thought I wanted write, I realised that the “relentless guys” phenomenon had a much wider relevance. The sense that “Resistance is futile” is something that many people in many organisations, both public and private, have felt as some bright new idea tramples its way through the system. Sometimes the idea is simply a utopian phantasy, more often the idea contains a kernel of good sense, but in either case any reservations or qualifications about its implementation are brushed aside. Its proponents know it is the right thing to do. People with more knowledge and experience on the ground or those who hold more nuanced views are dismissed as being old fashioned or feeble.
So how does this phenomenon work? At the beginning there is almost always some bright people who develop a nice, simple clear idea that seems to offer certainty. This gets picked up by a bunch of careerists and other special interests, who can see personal benefit from what is proposed. Then you need a crisis of some kind. The response to that crisis produces the momentum that enables the idea to be pushed through. The key to whole thing is the lack of doubt in its advocates, the rewards in terms of career or status that they accrue, their ability to brush aside any evidence that runs counter to their project and most importantly their ability to move upwards out of the organisation before the debris from their enterprise becomes too apparent.
Sounds familiar to you?