WAR - "NOT LIKE THE WAR GAME"(yes it is)

Last week, General William Wallace explained the stalling of the American advance against Baghdad by complaining that the enemy faced by coalition forces is different than the one they prepared for "war games against". This is not quite true. When they carried out a war game, a dry run for the real thing that is now clouding the emotions of the whole world, the Americans lost.

On Friday September 6, 2002 the Guardian reported that a £250 million war game exercise started with the sinking the US fleet. by retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, who was playing the role of the Iraqi regime, The response of the Pentagon establishment was to order the refloating of the fleet, and the resurrection of the troops that Van Riper had killed. This kind of cheating - familiar to any six year old playing with a spoiled neighbour - continued until Van Riper stopped playing in disgust.

This is a good example of the "group-think" mentality that affects the psychology of closed, decision-making groups.

Professor Marianne Frankenhaeuser, Head of Psychology Division, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm wrote:

"The group-think phenomenon is likely to develop when the stakes are high and the time pressure intense, in short, when the pressure to reach rapid consensus becomes the overriding goal. To achieve unity in a crisis situation, members of a decision-making group often abandon their own critical judgment. This group process may lead to actions and decisions which the members would never have accepted as individuals. Six characteristics can be distinguished:

1. Illusion of invulnerability: The group starts viewing itself as perfect and immune from external dangers.
2. Ignoring and rationalizing information: This state is achieved by collective efforts to ignore information which challenges already accepted assumptions, and to rationalize away any indication that these assumptions might go wrong.
3. Moral superiority: One adopts an unquestioned belief in the group's inherent moral superiority.
4. Stereotyping: The enemy is stereotyped as either too stupid to be a threat or too evil for negotiations.
5. Illusion of unanimity: An illusion of unanimity is built, which fosters feelings of immunity from outside pressures. Thinking becomes oversimplified with a tendency to see everything in black-and-white terms.
6. Mind guards: Self-appointed "mind guards" protect the group from information that does not tally with the prevailing picture. These mind guards suppress any sign of latent disagreement among the group members."

(link)

We can see now how it was that the decision to take us into this war was made. The war cabinets created their own black and white sub-world, in which Good (their values) always triumphed over Evil, where the realities of human beings torn apart by high explosives, and human psyches torn apart by grief, fear and hatred are replaced by jargon terms like "collateral" and "surprisingly light casualties".

How can we prevent this from happening in the future? There are no quick answers to this, but we may look to the idea of democracy to help. At the time of the Parliamentary debate on Iraq, two thirds of MPs voted for war at a time that two thirds of the UK electorate were against war. Constitutionally, it would have been possible for the PM to order a war even if the MPs had voted against war entirely. This is a display of democratic deficit.

It is clear that we need a constitutional reform so that in matters which affect the life of the whole nation, such as going to war, the wishes of the people should be sought, using an electronic referendum. Alternatively, MPs might be forced to vote in cetain circumstances according to the wishes of a majority of their constituents, under pain of dismissal by a constituency vote if they fail to do so.

Unfortunately, it will take years of hard work to get reforms like this onto the statute book - but it will be worth it if it prevents the a repeat of this disastrous war.

1) Professor Marianne Frankenhaeuser, and Head of Psychology Division, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. past President of the European Brain and Behaviour Society, and an advisor to government, the World Health Organization, and the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, "To Err Is Human: Psychological and Biological Aspects of Human Functioning," in Nuclear War by Mistake: Inevitable or Preventable? Report from an International Conference in Stockholm, February 15-16, 1985.

29.3.03