07/11/2003 Entry: "Making Good Decisions Despite Bad Information"
Posted by Maynard @ 08:36 AM MST

Making Good Decisions Despite Bad Information

There's a lot of hullabaloo on the Net right now about what George W. Bush knew about Saddam's WMD and when he knew it. Specifically, how accurate was the intelligence information that produced this sentence in the State of the Union 2003 address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"?

Now, we share lots of info with the Brits. We have agents throughout the world feeding valuable intel: some of it good, some of it bad. The job of leaders is to make quality decisions based on incomplete, inaccurate, questionable, and sometimes absolutely wrong information. The old joke about the similarities between crisis managers and mushrooms has quite a lot of truth to it: they are kept in the dark and fed horse crap.

Readers of this blog no doubt know that I tend to give GWB the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume the intel was bad and that Bush did not know this for sure. Given the history of the dictator Bush was dealing with, not only was such intel possible, it was believable. Under the circumstances, Bush chose rightly to dispose of the Mustached Menace.

He wasn't the first President to deal rightly with bad info. Eisenhower chose to press ahead with the Air Force ICBM program, despite the fact (which we know only now) that there was not a missile gap between us and the USSR. I'd say the results in this case justify the decisions.

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