They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision.Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials? And the documented evidence in the book is substantial-there are 800 footnotes in the book. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. GLENNON: I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government? And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine-they still have a column named after him. GLENNON: It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from? This interview has been condensed and edited. How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”-without any meaningful oversight to rein them in. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops. Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way.
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