Evaluation of Iraq war through group think Essay

The struggle on Iraq was decided by a smaller convention of pile that was headed by the President and comprised of the Vice-President, Defense Secretary, CIA Director and other senior administrative officials. The finis to go to war was a decisiveness of a small think-tank rather than of an individual or a larger group of people. The decision of the think-tank pushing the case for the Iraq War seems to be an apt example of stoppage bias. This confirmation bias during the unconstipatedts leading to the Iraq War has led to a outfit rift between policy makers and the scholarship community.It is coarsely believed that the war think-tank defied the pointers presented by the official intelligence. Instead, the intelligence available in a raw plaster cast was misused to publicly justify the war on Iraq and build a positive public perception that would endorse the war. As the Washington gage reports the discussion on the war The case was thin, summarized the nones taken by a Bri tish national security aide at the meeting. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.However, the think-tank was persuade about going for a war with Iraq and it used the available intelligence to confirm its beliefs. Cognitive diversity was missing in the think-tank that drew up the plan for the Iraq War. All members involved in the decision process had selfsame(prenominal) political leanings, were to a large extent a culturally uniform group and formed a small team that worked closely with separately other on various policy making issues.The team did not comprise of various political voices even though the decision to go to war impacted the entire country. It did also not take advice and bear in mind to objections of World bodies like the United Nations when some of the member countries objected to the unilateral movement of the United States and its ally Britain to go to war. The team did not invite wh atsoever new members to its coterie of decision makers to infuse fresh or ersatz thinking in its decision making process.As Senator Barbara Boxer said, Iraq was a war of choice, not necessity. The intelligence community was roped in yet to substantiate claims made by the think-tank on the reason to go to war. The group be maintaind with a preset agenda ignoring the alternatives at hand and made dyed decisions. The Iraq War is also an example of group comparison where the decisions of the individual members could clear been different from the decisions of the group that they were part of.The study of group polarization began with an unpublished 1961 Masters thesis by MIT student James Stoner, who detect the so-called risky shift, meaning that a groups decisions are riskier than the average of the individual decisions of members before the group met. After the wide public criticism of the U. S. handling of the war, two prominent members of the Iraq think-tank put in their papers. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell resigned after almost 4 years of at the helm of affairs.He was seen as less supportive of the war even though he was the public face on international forums to mystify up support amongst its traditional allies. Whereas Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld who took over the stock of foreign policy after Powells exit was seen as a hardliner. It seems that the hardliners would have grown even more resolute in their decision to go to war after several rounds of deliberations that the think-tank might have had. They would have presented intelligence information and other reasons to hard sell their belief thereby subduing the reluctant supporters of the war.