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Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform
September, 2011
Cloth, 432 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-15792-6
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Introduction: A Comforting Explanation for Calamity
Why does the foreign and security policy of the United States so often seem to be not just unsuccessful but misguided, being based on incomplete or otherwise mistaken images of the outside world? Some of the most memorable episodes in America’s relationship with the world have included debilitating wars—Vietnam and Iraq being the leading examples—in which the decisions to wage war appear to have been based on incorrect perceptions of those countries. They have included placing bets on ill-fated regimes, such as that of the shah of Iran. They have included falling victim to surprise attack, most notably at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and in New York and Washington, D.C., sixty years later. How can the United States—powerful and resourceful as it is, with its leaders surely able to call on the best possible sources of insight and information—be so badly and sometimes tragically mistaken about events beyond its borders?
The impression of chronic error is partly a matter of selective retrospection. One can easily find offsetting successes. Along with the debilitating and inconclusive wars have been victorious ones, including the two world wars of the twentieth century, the Cold War, and the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Losing bets on specific countries or regimes are offset by winning ones such as the Marshall Plan, whose payoff came in the form of stable and strong European allies. And although the converse of a surprise attack is a nonevent and thus inherently less visible, favorable nonevents such as attacks that did not happen have also been a part of the history of U.S. relations with the rest of the world. A fair appraisal of the more than two centuries of that history suggests that, on balance, well-conceived and well-guided policies have added to the good fortune of geography and resources to help put the United States in the enviable position it reached by the opening decade of the twenty-first century. One of the most perspicacious students of American foreign relations, Walter Russell Mead, observes that overall “the United States has had a remarkably successful history in international relations.” Many of the successes have depended not only on sound judgment and skillful execution but also on accurate underlying images of the foreign reality with which the policymakers have dealt.
Regardless of whether the bottom line of the U.S. foreign-policy balance sheet is colored black or red, how can it be improved in the future? Bad foreign policy has numerous possible ingredients, but among the more important presumably are the images that policymakers hold of the foreign situations to which their policies are a response. Those images include the policymakers’ perception of current reality, their understanding of the forces and dynamics at play, and usually their sense of where the events in question are heading. The whole package is a construct that, whatever its origins, is tied more closely to the decision maker’s mind than to the outside world that the decision maker believes it represents. It is accordingly more appropriate to call this construct an image rather than knowledge.
In one sense, there has been plenty of attention to this ingredient in discussions of U.S. policy. Anguish in recent years over the twin traumas of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001—commonly known as 9/11—and the Iraq War has been expressed chiefly in terms of mistaken images: of threats that supposedly were underrated in one instance and overrated in the other. But most of the anguish has an extremely narrow focus that overlooks the most important inputs to the images policymakers hold and how images actually shape policy, if they shape it at all. That narrow focus has been on what are termed “intelligence failures” and on the need to fix or reform intelligence. Narrowing the focus even more, intelligence gets equated with the output of certain elements of the U.S. government that have the word intelligence in their names or that have the gathering of intelligence as their primary mission.
This very constricted form of attention to the causes of misguided policy stems in part from how the making of foreign and security policy is supposed to work. The textbook model of the policy process involves decision makers dispassionately reflecting on the information and analysis available to them—the principal source being an equally dispassionate intelligence service—and then selecting a course of action based on that reflection.
The narrow focus of attention stems at least as much from emotion and public psychology as it does from textbooks. We like to attribute woebegone wars and shocking surprise attacks to the shortcomings of intelligence services because this explanation is easily understandable and because it offers the comforting prospect that by fixing such shortcomings, we can prevent comparable calamities from occurring. It would be far less comforting to conclude that mistaken images underlying failed policies had sources less susceptible to repair, that relevant misperceptions resided more in our own heads or the heads of political leaders we elected than in unelected bureaucracies, or that some of the most important things we did not know were unknowable to anyone on our side, even if we had the most exemplary intelligence service.
These tendencies are especially marked for Americans. It is natural to assume that the superior capabilities that have enabled the United States to do so well in so many other endeavors apply also to the forming of accurate images of the outside world. If the United States could win world wars, put a man on the moon, and do all the other marvelous and difficult things it has accomplished, then according to reason it should be able to perform just as well the task of determining what is going on in other countries.
The tendency toward exceptionalism—the idea that the United States is not only good at many things, but also better than anyone else—contributes to this pattern. This tendency obscures inconsistency between how other countries are believed to form their images of the outside world and how America is believed to form its. Many Americans see nothing contradictory in believing that foreigners are prisoners of parochial biases, but that they themselves are not.
These perspectives color Americans’ attitudes toward their own institutions, including governmental institutions. The opening words of the U.S. Constitution set the tone in referring to the formation of “a more perfect union.” Perfection being an absolute, “more perfect” does not make semantic sense. But the constitutional preamble captures well an American outlook that combines unbounded faith in what institutions ought to be able to do along with an engineer’s problem-solving perspective that when difficulties arise, the machinery of government needs to be and can be fixed. The American belief in the “indefinite perfectibility of man” that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the nineteenth century extends as well to a belief in the indefinite perfectibility of American institutions.
A consequence of this outlook is a strong belief that if the relevant institutions are working well, the United States ought to hold accurate images of the outside world. A more specific consequence is the persistent American tendency to attribute failures of U.S. foreign and security policy to the policymakers’ having been misguided, to attribute the misguidance to failures of intelligence institutions, and to believe that the proper response is to fix intelligence.
A major refrain in discourse about making U.S. foreign and security policy better is thus intelligence failure and intelligence “reform.” (I often put the term reform in quotation marks because as generally used it refers to any change to intelligence institutions not initiated by the institutions themselves rather than to improvement per the dictionary definition of the term.) The refrain has been heard for decades in a huge flow of official pronouncements and unofficial commentary. The flow is unending. It implicitly promises a reformist nirvana in which, with the right fixes, Americans finally can stop fretting about the ineffectiveness of their intelligence services. But the nirvana is never reached.
The fixation on intelligence failure and reform sustains several misconceptions that this book aims to dispel. Among the realities that are contrary to broadly held belief and that later chapters demonstrate are:
• Despite intense attention to an infamous intelligence estimate in 2002 on Iraqi unconventional weapons, most prewar intelligence analysis on Iraq was good, especially regarding the prospective consequences of the war. The policy implication of the intelligence community’s work on Iraq was to avoid the war, not to launch it.
• Despite near-universal acceptance of the 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission) as thorough and careful, the commission misrepresented much of the intelligence community’s pre-9/11 strategic work on terrorism and never mentioned large portions of it. This misrepresentation and elision distorted a record in which the intelligence community successfully identified and described the threat from al-Qaida and imparted that threat to policymakers.
• Notwithstanding some instances (such as with terrorism) of intelligence enlightening policy, the overall influence—for good or for ill—of intelligence on major decisions and departures in U.S. foreign policy has been negligible. Most notorious intelligence failures have similarly had almost no effect on U.S. policy or U.S. interests.
• Policy has shaped intelligence more than vice versa. This relationship has entailed significant corruption of intelligence through politicization, but official inquiries have refused to recognize this influence.
• The intelligence community—contrary to its common image as a stodgy bureaucracy that must be pushed into reform—has exhibited nearly continuous internally driven change and adaptation. Almost every subject raised by would-be reformers outside the community has already been a focus of concentrated attention by the community itself.
• The most important sources of images guiding policy and thus the leading opportunities for making those images more accurate have nothing to do with intelligence and instead lie within the political strata of government.
Whatever solace the common beliefs about intelligence have provided to Americans looking for reassuring explanations for past setbacks, they have done almost nothing to make American policy better informed and more intelligently formulated. Hence, the main message of this book is:
Efforts to make U.S. foreign and security policy better guided, based on the notion of intelligence reform, are themselves misguided. They miss the sources of mistaken images underlying failed policies, misconceive the intelligence–policy relationship as the reverse of how it often works, produce “reform” that does not improve intelligence and in some respects makes it worse, misperceive the limits to understanding the outside world, and encourage foreign policies that are unsound because of the failure to recognize those limits.
The dominant approach, focusing on intelligence failure and reform, to making U.S. policy better informed is misguided in part because actual formulation of policy is far different from the textbook model. Even though intelligence makes important contributions to national security every week on matters ranging from ferreting out terrorist cells to monitoring enhancements to foreign military forces, it has not had anything close to the guiding role in policy that it does in the model. One reason why it hasn’t is that images of the world abroad, from whatever source, are only one input to foreign-policy decisions and not necessarily the most influential. Other factors, from presidential neuroses to domestic political interests, are often more powerful. Another reason is that to the extent that images of the world abroad do shape policy, intelligence is only one possible source. It is much less influential than sources that are closer to the policymakers’ minds and hearts. The latter sources include individual leaders’ personal experiences of other leaders (such as Harry Truman’s likening of Stalin to Truman’s former patron, Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast) and entire generations’ historical experiences (for example, Hitler’s serving as a repeatedly invoked analogy for other foreign dictators).
Those more personal and formative sources of images have a much greater chance than any report from an intelligence service to break through and to mold worldviews—which in the political realm are usually called “ideologies”—that shape our perceptions of the world around us. This shaping is how our brains avoid being paralyzed by the torrent of information our senses continually gather and the inconsistencies within it. We discard or distort new information to fit into a preexisting worldview far more than any new information changes the worldview. This is at least as true of political leaders, who lack time for contemplation and reeducation, as of the rest of us. Doris Kearns Goodwin has noted this pattern, which she saw firsthand in Lyndon Johnson but can be applied to political leaders generally: “Worldviews, once formed, are difficult to change, especially for politicians. Always reacting and responding, their life largely one of movement among and contact with others, politicians are nearly always bound to the concepts and images formed in their minds before taking office, or those evolved from well-established and therefore safely followed sources of knowledge and guidance. If their ideas about the world sometimes sound like assumptions from a forgotten age, it is, in part, the price they pay for a life of continual motion.”
In addition to the more personal sources of images of the outside world and to the personal and political considerations that influence policy regardless of the images, policymakers share with their countrymen whatever peculiar ways of looking at the world flow from their nation’s history, physical circumstances, and culture. The very distinctive history and circumstances of the United States has made for some distinctively American ways of looking at problems in the rest of the world. It therefore should be no surprise that inputs from an intelligence service have had so little influence in guiding American foreign policy. There simply is no contest between someone’s memorandum or briefing, on the one hand, and the decision maker’s political and psychological well-being, the belief system that got that decision maker to a position of power, and the accumulated effects of more than two centuries of American history, on the other.
The fixation on intelligence reform also is misguided in that it fails to recognize the very large amount of uncertainty that is an unavoidable ingredient in policymaking, no matter how effectively an intelligence service may be performing. The uncertainty is inevitable for two fundamental reasons. One is that adversaries (and sometimes friends) withhold information, and there is no reason to expect them to be any less adept than we are at keeping secrets and uncovering those of others. The other reason is that much of what would be nice to know while formulating policy is essentially unknowable (even without anyone keeping secrets) because it is the result of processes too complex to fathom. This is especially true of the anticipation of future events, which result not only from unfathomable complexity but also from decisions that others have not yet taken.
The fixation on intelligence failure and reform feeds on itself. It has become part of a worldview that most Americans share. As with other worldviews, information is selected, discarded, or distorted to fit existing beliefs. And thus many specific misperceptions add to the more basic misconceptions about what intelligence influences, what it should be capable of knowing, and how it currently functions.
The theme of intelligence failure fits comfortably into characteristically American ways of thinking about politics, policymaking, the U.S. encounter with the world, and the nature of the United States itself. The theme is firmly entrenched in American political discourse—so firmly and so continuously that it is a safe bet it will remain entrenched indefinitely. References to failures of intelligence and the need to fix intelligence are a kind of throat clearing—an obligatory preliminary to ensure that one’s contribution will be accepted as in touch with mainstream thinking on national security.
Although the theme has been entrenched in American discourse for decades, failures—or perceived failures—of intelligence inevitably occur from time to time, thereby sustaining the theme, adding to the related lore, and giving participants in the discourse material that helps them to sound fresh and current. More important, it enables them to sound responsive to genuine and sometimes deeply felt anger among the American people over national tragedy or trauma. Playing this role far more than any other subjects in recent years have been the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the presumed Iraqi unconventional weapons program that the George W. Bush administration used to sell the Iraq War. The searing effects of both 9/11 and the Iraq War on the American consciousness account for the fact that these two topics overwhelm almost everything else the intelligence community has done during the past couple of decades in shaping popular American perceptions of that community’s performance.
The fact that the terrorist attack and the souring of the Iraq War occurred in rapid succession amplified the impact of both. One event is only one event; two events are taken as a pattern. The 9/11 attack and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have become a two-verse mantra whose utterance is now another required part of mainstream discourse on security issues. The details of what intelligence did or did not do or say or of how it did or did not affect policy related to these events do not seem to matter. The two tragedies are repeatedly invoked as a widely understood shorthand reference to the equally widely accepted common lore about how U.S. intelligence is broken and needs fixing.
That lore, along with all of the associated perceptions about intelligence guiding policy and about bad intelligence being responsible for failed policies, functions as a national myth, which in turn is a component of mainstream American ideology about foreign affairs and national security. All nations have myths, which serve a variety of cultural, psychological, social, and political functions. They are mainly a source of reassurance about shared problems and the nation’s ability to overcome them and a reinforcement of faith in the people themselves and in what is most important to them. The mythology about American intelligence provides a sense that the problems (in this case, destructive policies and shocking loss of life) and their causes (presumed faulty intelligence) are understood. It provides a sense that everyone agrees that the problems should be fixed. It offers assurance that as long as the fixes are made, the people will elect leaders who will follow sound policies and will protect them from harm, thus bolstering the people’s faith in the worth and effectiveness of their political system. And like some other aspects of national culture, the myth strengthens national cohesion, giving people of different political persuasions something to agree upon even if they disagree on other things.
An unrealistically high expectation for what intelligence should be able to achieve is a major element of U.S. mythology about intelligence. Americans expect that an intelligence service that is performing properly should be consistently accurate and accurate in detail about a wide range of questions. That range may have become even wider in recent years. Former director of central intelligence (DCI) George Tenet thought so when he reflected on criticism of the intelligence community for not predicting the timing of Indian nuclear tests in 1998. The “field of expectation had changed,” he said; when the adversary was the USSR, the community had not been expected to predict or prevent weapons tests, but now it was. Like so much else about criticisms of U.S. intelligence, however, inflated expectations are not altogether new. When Walter Bedell Smith was appointed DCI in 1950, he insightfully noted the impossible expectations he would face. “American people expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin, and I’m not sure they are so much interested in God,” Smith observed. “They expect you to be able to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32 p.m."
Myths are not necessarily false in their entirety. Most national myths are at least based on truth, and in the case of intelligence there is the truth of actual intelligence failures. But the myth typically departs from reality in ways that preserve the myth’s ability to reassure. The myth may encourage policymakers to act differently from how they otherwise would have acted. Myths thus can have major downsides even though they serve important purposes. The Cold War myth that America’s Communist foe was a single, global movement intent on imposing its ideology throughout the world helped to sustain national will to wage the Cold War for four decades, but it also helped to misguide the United States into the Vietnam War.
The mythology of American intelligence damages U.S. interests in several ways. One is to pursue fruitless intelligence “reform” that is at best a diversion of national time and attention and at worst a disruption that impedes an intelligence service’s work in the short term and might even make it less effective over the longer term. As a spasmodic reaction to a few salient national tragedies, such “reform” is based on truncated and distorted perceptions of U.S. intelligence that miss not only most of what intelligence is doing right, but also much of what it is doing wrong.
The mythology misses the fact that images of the outside world flow from preferences more than preferences flow from the images. That is how worldviews and ideologies work. Because the mythology further misses how policy influences intelligence more than intelligence influences policy (especially on high-profile foreign-policy issues regarding which sentiments are strong), it fosters blindness to the politicization that infects intelligence and to those possible reforms that would help to correct the problem.
Mistaken notions about the influence of intelligence on policy lead to inattention to what really influences policy and to changes that would have the best chance of making policy better guided in the future. The mythology of intelligence ignores the much larger role of other sources of images of the world abroad, in particular ones within the policymaking layers of government. This means overlooking yet another possible avenue of reform that, unlike the endless tinkering with the intelligence community, actually might make U.S. foreign policy better guided.
The most damaging consequence is to encourage the making of policy that is prone to fail because it exceeds the limits of our knowledge. The mythology does not recognize those limits. So we embark on policies that would work well only if certain things we believe—but do not know—were true, and then we curse our lack of knowledge when these things turn out to be false. Or rather, we curse the intelligence service we expected to provide the knowledge. We fail to appreciate that some of our images, no matter how carefully they are constructed and no matter how much the intelligence community has been reformed, will be wrong. The reformist nirvana will never be reached because it does not exist. The mythology diverts us from the truth that sound policy needs to take account of unavoidable uncertainty and to be designed to advance the national interest no matter what way that uncertainty is ultimately resolved.
Intelligence often fails, sometimes demonstrably. But illusions about the reasons and ideas for reform based on such illusions and on naive expectations about what can be done risk producing different failures at least as bad as those we have already seen. Intelligence mythology leads to policy pathology. Real improvement—rather than feel-good pseudo-solutions that have been peddled and in some cases unfortunately implemented—requires cold-eyed appreciation of many unwelcome realities that human psychology and emotion make difficult for policymakers and citizens alike to grasp. This book presents such an appreciation, based on long study of the problems and many years of personal experience with them.
Chapters 2 through 4 address a recent and extreme illustration of some of the main propositions in this book and one that has contributed heavily to the mythology: the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Intelligence, which figured prominently in the selling of that decision, played almost no role in making it. The war was launched in spite of, not because of, most of what the U.S. intelligence community said about Iraq. The U.S. Congress went along for the political ride, and its passivity provided incentive for its own later contribution to the mythology about intelligence and the war.
Iraq is an especially strong example of the irrelevance of intelligence to the making of a major U.S. foreign-policy decision, but it is hardly the only one. Chapter 5 reviews how several of the other biggest departures of U.S. policy since World War II, including successful as well as unsuccessful ones, exhibit the same pattern.
Chapter 6 discusses how politicization has been a fact of life for the U.S. intelligence community and a major blind spot in the mythology of intelligence and associated agitation for reform. The Iraq War provides an extreme example of politicization, but earlier episodes foreshadowed it.
The narrow focus on intelligence failure as an explanation for misguided policy has become so narrow that discourse on the subject loses sight of whether intelligence has any impact on policy at all. Intelligence has become a spectator sport, with selected bits of intelligence output being scored as successes or failures not because they matter for U.S. interests, but instead because they happen to be easy to score. As chapter 7 shows, some of the most notorious intelligence failures have had virtually no impact on U.S. policy or U.S. interests.
The theme of intelligence failure and reform has been sounded for so long that it raises the questions of why this theme has such persistence and why something that supposedly has been broken for so long still has not been fixed. Chapter 8 examines the possible answers to these questions. The most commonly voiced answers, consistent with the mythology, have some grains of truth but ultimately are unable to explain the theme’s persistence. More cogent—though less comforting—explanations are that intelligence failures are inevitable, that the performance of intelligence is perceived as worse than it is, and that the theme of intelligence failure serves purposes that no amount of reform can ever serve. Providing a reassuring explanation for calamity is the theme’s chief but not sole purpose. Others are the diversion of blame from political interests and the sustenance of what amounts to an intelligence reform industry.
Chapter 9 turns to the other (besides the Iraq War) great shaper of contemporary U.S. perceptions of intelligence: the 9/11 attack. It was one of the most traumatic episodes in U.S. history, so the need for comforting explanations was greater than ever. The impulse to make intelligence failure the chief explanation for tragedy and intelligence reform the chief hope for preventing a recurrence was thus stronger than ever. Accounts of events surrounding 9/11 were bent as necessary to furnish such a reassuring explanation. The chief bender was the 9/11 Commission, which became a vehicle for achieving postattack national catharsis. It accomplished that mission with a highly politicized inquiry and report that fostered the false impression that U.S. intelligence had neither recognized the threat underlying 9/11 nor conveyed appreciation of the threat to policymakers. The strength of the nation’s appetite for the catharsis and reassurance that the commission provided was further manifested, as chapter 10 describes, in the unthinking, adulatory acceptance of the commission’s account and recommendations.
The centerpiece of those recommendations was an intelligence reorganization scheme that Congress adopted after cursory consideration in 2004. As discussed in chapter 11, the reorganization was an exercise in which Americans deluded themselves that redrawing lines on the intelligence community’s organization chart would somehow make them safer. It has not. That chapter also addresses how recurring themes in intelligence reform pay little attention to what the intelligence community already does along the same lines or to the reasons it does not do more.
Possible reforms that offer genuine hope for better guiding policy are few, and the probable impact of most is limited. Chapter 12 discusses one type of reorganization that actually might improve intelligence on the most significant and controversial policy issues, but that has been completely ignored by mythology-based “reform”: making the intelligence community more independent of executive-branch policymakers and thereby reducing politicization. The same chapter also addresses the single reform that would be most likely to improve the accuracy and objectivity of images that come before policymakers and are most likely to influence their policies: a substantial paring down of the unusually large political layer of the executive branch.
No matter what reforms are enacted, substantial and unavoidable uncertainty will forever characterize the making of foreign and security policy. Much about the outside world we will never know, regardless of how intelligence performs. The makers of policy should accept that fact and shape policy in recognition of it. Chapter 13 sets out principles for doing so.
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