Your Ignorance is not as Good; Or, You Don't Know Fuck-All About Syria

[Maedhros]

61. Here's the problem:

Your "person" at State, Defense and Langley is apocryphal.

This hypothetical bureaucrat, in your mind, is receiving unadulterated intelligence regarding the situation in Syria and is passing it along without editorializing. His superiors in turn are relaying this intelligence up the chain of command to some cabinet-level official who then informs the President. The President in turn makes his decision regarding the best course of action. All with complete objectivity with no possibility of individual agendas affecting decisions.

But this is all fairy-tale nonsense. We have seen before, time after time, how facts on the ground are manipulated or ignored to justify the actions of the Executive. Many, many competing factions exert political pressure on intelligence agencies and the persons interpreting those agencies' findings. Decision makers in the Executive Branch craft a course of action based upon that pressure, and upon what they believe they can bluster past the electorate. In so many cases, the facts on the ground are twisted to match the objectives of the Administration. Objectivity gives way to special interest. This cannot be denied; we have seen it happen over and over and over.

Your belief in a pure process, in a bureaucratic chain-of-command that perfectly translates raw intelligence into optimized reaction by decision makers, is indeed pure Authoritarianism: because this bureaucracy has draped itself in the mantle of self-proclaimed expertise, its findings somehow trump all those outside the bureaucracy that call into question its conclusions. "They" are right, because "they" are the Authority.