Revisiting the Waco Siege

Malcolm Gladwell, of all people, has published a searing

indictment of the feds’ behavior in the Waco siege of 1993,
when the ATF attempted to raid the Branch Davidian religious
community, the Davidians fired on the invading agents (who may have
fired first), and a long standoff ended with dozens of
Davidians dying a fiery death. Gladwell’s basic argument is
that the government fundamentally misunderstood what sort of group
it was dealing with:

[The FBI’s] task, as they saw it, was to
peel away the pretense—Koresh’s posturing, his lies, his
grandiosity—and compel him to take specific steps toward a
resolution.

That is standard negotiation practice, which is based on the
idea that, through sufficient patience and reason, a deranged
husband or a cornered bank robber can be moved from emotionality to
rationality. Negotiation is an exercise in pragmatism—in bargaining
over a series of concrete objectives: If you give up one of
your weapons, I will bring you water. When this approach
failed, the F.B.I. threw up its hands. In bureau parlance, the
situation at Mount Carmel became “non-negotiable.” What more could
the bureau have done? “I guess we could have fenced it off and
called it a federal prison,” Bob Ricks, one of the lead F.B.I.
agents during the siege, said last year in an interview.

But, as the conflict-studies scholar Jayne Docherty argues, the
F.B.I.’s approach was doomed from the outset. In “Learning Lessons
from Waco”—one of the very best of the Mount Carmel
retrospectives—Docherty points out that the techniques that work on
bank robbers don’t work on committed believers. There was no
pragmatism hidden below a layer of posturing, lies, and
grandiosity.

At one point, Gladwell writes, “the Davidians asked the F.B.I.
to bring milk for their children, and the bureau insisted that some
of the children be released before the supplies were handed
over”:

This is how negotiations are
supposed to work: tit for tat. But what proposal could have been
more offensive and perplexing to a Branch Davidian? The bureau
wanted to separate children from their parents and extract them
from the community to which they belonged in exchange
for milk. “That doesn’t make any sense,” a Davidian
named Kathy S. tells the negotiator. But the negotiator thinks she
means that the terms of the deal aren’t good enough:

F.B.I.: Listen. I’ll, I’ll get the milk to you for two
kids.

Again, Kathy S. reacts angrily, and the negotiator gives up. He
thinks the problem is that he’s saddled with someone who just isn’t
reasonable.

Gladwell’s argument will be familiar to people who have
already delved into the subject, but it’ll be new to a lot of
his readers. Check out the whole thing
here. And for a selection of Reason‘s
Waco coverage, go
here, here, here,

here,
here, and (way back in ’93 itself) here.

Bonus links: For the last time I said something nice
about a Malcolm Gladwell article, which doubles as the only time I
have said something nice about a David Denby article, dial the
Wayback Machine to 2004 and go here. To see me
being less enthusiastic about Gladwell’s work, go
here, here,
and
here. And to see the one time the man wrote something for
Reason himself, go here.