In this important book, Robert Jervis reveals his solid credentials as an intelligence insider. For him, this is not a conflict in roles. He is a social scientist, first, who hopes that the U.S. intelligence community (IC) will learn from its mistakes by adhering to sound social scientific practices. Jervis offers striking comparisons between the IC's failure to predict the overthrow of the Shah of Iran with the events of 1978–79—which the author assessed in a declassified internal review for the Central Intelligence Agency—and the erroneous judgment that Iraq had stockpiled biological and chemical weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program, which the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 Iraq war. Drawing predominantly from these cases, Jervis argues that critical deficiencies in intelligence result because analysts fail to articulate their assumptions, subject these arguments to appropriate scrutiny, consider rival hypotheses that fit the evidence, test arguments by offering predictions, consider negative and positive evidence when evaluating assertions, and seek information that might disconfirm their existing point of view.
Put differently, Jervis addresses the large number of scholars, policymakers, and policy analysts who take intelligence for granted. They think they know why intelligence succeeds or fails—typically, a lack of useful information, deceptive information, and the ignoring or woeful misreading of facts. In the Iraq case, the frequent answer is also politically charged: Bush administration officials misused intelligence information and pressured the IC to help make the case for war. For Jervis, these answers are superficial and fail to do justice to the inherent challenges of intelligence. In his view, we would be far less impressed with alleged intelligence successes if their assumptions, logic, and evidentiary grounding were subject to scrutiny. As he concludes on Iraq (pp. 2–3), “it is harder to say whether it was a failure in terms of what is usual.” All predictions come with a range of uncertainty, all evidence is consistent with alternative explanations, and the best explanation—in hindsight—might have the least evidentiary support.
Thus, Jervis's sobering conclusion—his “dismal” judgment (p. 145)—is that better intelligence practices would have increased uncertainty around the prediction that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction (WMD); it would not have changed the prediction. After all, Iraq had sought to acquire (and had used) WMD in the past, had repeatedly blocked and impeded outside inspection efforts, and had taken various actions that suggested it was pursuing WMD. Indeed, the United States was caught by surprise after the 1991 war when it discovered that it had greatly understated the progress of these very programs. Conversely, the “actual” explanations for Iraqi behavior—as appreciated post hoc—were too numerous, novel, complex, unsupported, and incoherent to have commanded much attention. Who would have argued, for example, that Saddam Hussein had disarmed with the hope that sanctions would end but not so convincingly that his exposed vulnerability would provoke his enemies to pounce? Could he possibly believe that he could have it both ways, in a policy essentially without trade-offs? If such big-picture assertions would have damaged an analyst's credibility, how could anyone have championed the seemingly trite explanations that now appear to account for specific instances of Iraq's seemingly incriminating behavior? As Jervis asks, who would have argued (given the available evidence) that scientists would not disclose the location of missing anthrax because they had dumped it near one of Saddam's palaces or that Iraq was modifying the specifications of imported aluminum tubes, not for centrifuges but to work around the well-connected but incompetent official who headed the rocket program? For that matter, who would have championed the argument that Iraq was employing special-tanker trucks in conventional operations, which once were used in a chemical weapons program, because it had to find some use for them?
No one could reasonably have expected analysts to explain all of these data points, and lacking a complete explanation, the prevailing explanation—bolstered by its compelling simplicity—would have triumphed over all others. More rigor would have improved intelligence in the Iraq case. For instance, the Energy Department should have explicated its reasoning for why it thought that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear capability (when it disputed that the aluminum tubes would be used in centrifuges); analysts should have sought to explain the absence of evidence where there should have been evidence (e.g., the procurement of additional centrifuge parts) if Iraq was pursuing WMD; analysts should have been better informed of the limited number and questionable quality of sources that were supplying information about Iraqi WMD programs, and so forth. But Jervis is probably correct that the prevailing explanation would ultimately have won out. (I do think, however, that analysts might have concluded it unlikely that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program—given the centrality of the tube issue—with the result of weakening other claims, if charges about illicit programs were mutually reinforcing).
Not surprisingly, given the author's body of work, the beliefs and assumptions of analysts are front and center in his critique. What distinguishes the Iran from the Iraq case is that the former presented the greater intelligence challenge: When assessing the strength of the Shah relative to his opposition, analysts had to make challenging social scientific judgments and predictions about the future, under trying analytical conditions (e.g., the regularized but slowly growing opposition pointed both to stasis and change). But questionable beliefs survived by remaining hidden: Although never directly subject to analysis, they informed the coherent story that was constructed around the facts, when reporting practices kept analysts from straying from the evidence and avoiding speculation.
Essentially, the U.S. failure in the Iranian case was attributable to two unshakable beliefs: a) that the Shah was “strong and decisive” (p. 25)—he had weathered prior challenges to his rule—and would crack down on the opposition when conditions became dangerous, and b) that the opposition would eventually fragment—and, indeed, that the Shah could split the opposition by capitalizing on its differing preferences and concerns. These beliefs persisted because analysts did not seek disconfirming evidence nor assess available evidence for its fit with the beliefs.
With respect to (a), analysts did not duly acknowledge that the Shah had a history of indecisiveness, had employed violence erratically in the past, had consistently attempted to placate the opposition, had committed to liberalization, had not appeared well to some observers, and so forth. These beliefs survived, as well, because they were not directly subject to scrutiny. Predictions appeared to follow from assumptions without attending to the logic that bound one to the other. As Jervis puts it (p. 37), “those who thought the Shah was weak and had not been a good leader took the unrest very seriously whereas those who believed he was strong and, on balance, had done a great deal to benefit Iran thought he would have little trouble riding out the disturbances.” Consequently, analysts did not recognize that (a) was essentially tautological: The pairing of the beliefs that the Shah had not cracked down because the situation was not dangerous and that the Shah would crack down when the situation became dangerous amounted to a nonfalsifiable proposition. In turn, analysts failed to recognize that (b) did not adequately account in Iran for the role of religion, the depth of anti-American and nationalist sentiment, and the unique standing of Ayatollah Khomeini as a rallying point for the opposition.
Analysts did no better in recognizing that (a) and (b) were somewhat inconsistent. Might a crackdown on the opposition prevent it from fragmenting, or might the Shah run out of options if he waited to crack down until the opposition split? Nor did analysts probe the consequences should their assumptions prove invalid. Could the Shah remain in power if the opposition did not split? These questions were lent urgency because neither (a) nor (b) were testable short of catastrophe, when the United States, itself, was largely without options.
In the case of Iraq, this book will likely receive attention because it challenges the assertion that the intelligence failure was owing to administration pressure on the IC to deliver the justification for war. As Jervis concludes, there is little evidence of such pressure: The IC had reached similar conclusions under Bill Clinton, the IC had strong (nonpolitical) reasons for its judgments, and the IC had challenged the administration on other issues related to Iraq. But Jervis does speculate that analysts recognized—in the existing political environment—that dissent carried a high burden of proof and came with professional risks. Under these conditions, as Bob Dylan would say, “you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.” The book will certainly be remembered for its “psychologically disturbing and politically unacceptable” conclusion that the basic problems of intelligence cannot be fixed and that “better intelligence would not have led to an effective policy” (p. 3). Despite the potential for improvement and the panoply of managerial and analytical correctives that are routinely proposed with failure, Jervis concludes that critical deficiencies are defining features of intelligence analysis. Indeed, the Iraq case is troubling because theorists suggest that the intelligence task should have been easy: For realists, capabilities are palpable and endure; it is intentions that are variable and elusive.
Unanswered questions remain, however. Given the challenges to intelligence and the resources required for the IC to do its job well, what functions is the IC best equipped—and most needed—to perform? Jervis recognizes that a premium might exist on “actionable intelligence,” that “there probably is a trade-off between breadth and depth in intelligence coverage,” and that the IC is preoccupied with some issues at the expense of others—during the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and China, and, today, with rogue states and terrorist groups (p. 179). So how should the IC and political leaders set intelligence priorities? Noteworthy, in this regard, Jervis does not repeat the recommendations of the original Iran report that the IC embrace a basic research agenda—studying multiple cases, generalizing across cases, and so forth. Such research is perhaps best left to universities, given the large resource investment and long gestation period necessary to deliver findings with useful intelligence applications. Yet the predictions on Iran hinged on answers to various social scientific questions. What combination of economic and political conditions gives rise to public discontent? How might religion exacerbate or ameliorate public grievances? What accounts for the rise and spread of public opposition to a government, and the opposition's success (failure) in overthrowing a government? For that matter, were manipulable conditions present in Iran that might have allowed the Shah to stay in power?
The alternative to addressing these questions through social scientific research is arguably to “stay close to events” and therefore to engage in description, ad hoc (and implicit) theorizing, and forecasting that assumes simplistically that future behavior is some function of past behavior—practices that might place the IC in the position of rendering predictions when options have diminished. With the challenges and constraints of social scientific inquiry, greater benefits would be realized, perhaps, were the IC to focus on providing “facts” to policymakers in order to improve the quality of their decisions. Leaving aside the question of whether the relevant facts in descriptive analysis are functions of implicit theory, a question still remains regarding which facts to emphasize over others. Maybe priorities should be set by the consumer. But the danger of giving policymakers what they want is not giving them information that might provoke them, when necessary, to reconsider their priorities or policies.
More generally, then, this book serves as a cautionary tale of the consequences when policymakers are strongly wedded to their priorities. By concluding that the Bush administration would probably have gone to war even had the IC rendered a more judicious and careful judgment, it suggests that as students of international politics, we should not ask “why intelligence fails?” but, rather, “why policy fails?” or “why policymakers fail?” The Bush administration, which tried to shift the blame to the IC for the wrong judgment on Iraqi WMD, did question the IC's conclusions and make the IC work harder when it challenged the administration's judgments (e.g., on the link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda). Other administrations have put substantial pressure on the IC to deliver analyses that affirm administration policies. Given the challenges to the professional community that Jervis identifies, it is fair to ask whether policymakers can make sound decisions—and exercise due caution (or take necessary risks)—when they, too, are deficient information processors, when related “intelligence is likely to provide a complicated, nuanced, and ambiguous picture” (p. 166), when policymakers have a very different picture in mind and have committed to a course, and when policymakers (with some justification) have reservations about the bureaucratic agendas of intelligence providers. In Vietnam, U.S. policymakers adhered to a bombing strategy that intelligence indicated was not working; in Iraq, U.S. policymakers sought to impose their vision despite pitfalls that the IC detailed before the U.S. invasion. For that matter, the Bush administration shunted all analysis aside in its headlong rush into Iraq so as not to sidetrack the invasion. History does not judge these actions favorably.
These various issues acquire urgency from an important lesson from Iraq: A vast store of military resources is unavailable to the United States to shield it from its mistakes. In my view, Jervis speaks broadly to informational and analytical constraints that give rise to overreaction and underreaction in policy, thereby stressing already limited and often overstretched U.S. military capabilities.
