In his insightful book, Paul R. Pillar assesses the role of U.S. intelligence in two contemporary national-security controversies—the exaggeration of Iraqi WMD capabilities before the 2003 Iraq War and the failure to anticipate the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C.. Although serious and informative, his is not a work of dispassionate, arms-length academic analysis. From 2000 to 2005, Pillar served as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. From that vantage point, he observed U.S. preparations—and non-preparedness – for the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the launch of the so-called War on Terror. Consequently, he also observed the uses and misuses of intelligence information and, in his view, the maligning of the U.S. intelligence community by those who bear principal responsibility for what amount to policy failures. Pillar calls out the central protagonists of the period and subjects them to unsparing criticism. With an insider’s perspective, a briefcase full of notes and materials, years to prepare a defense, and an obvious drive to set the record straight, Pillar methodically and meticulously dismantles the prosecution’s case.

He assails the conclusions and inner-workings of the 9/11 Commission and its proposals for intelligence reform. Pillar argues that the commission (bound by investigatory bipartisanship) cared little about the truth, bowed to a grieving, mobilized public that was looking for someone to blame, and found, in the intelligence agencies, a convenient and vulnerable target. Pillar argues that the commission could have acknowledged that the intelligence community had continuously monitored and warned of an Islamist terror threat, that the threat was in fact an intelligence priority, that “connecting the dots” to reveal an implicating pattern is always easier in hindsight, and that the private and public sectors chose not to take corrective measures, with advance warning of a threat, for economic and political reasons. Instead, he insists that the commission focused unduly on what the intelligence community did not do, selectively and inaccurately compiled the implicating evidence, and then offered, as fixes, a set of incongruous, prepackaged proposals for organizational reform.

The book will likely evoke its greatest interest for Pillar’s spirited indictment of the Bush administration's performance in the lead up to the Iraq War. Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy dispels the illusion that politics played no role in the infamous 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program, used by the administration to make its case for war. The author’s argument can be reduced to five well-supported claims. First, Pillar claims that in the onset of the war, the administration's policy preceded evidence gathering. The administration decided to attack Iraq, with limited input from the U.S. intelligence establishment—and well before the 2002 NIE was released. Second, Pillar argues that the administration eschewed neutral fact finding: It sought material from the intelligence community that would help “sell” the war and (paraphrasing Paul Wolfowitz) found, in Iraqi WMD, “a convenient consensus selling point” (p. 30). Consequently, administration officials pressed the intelligence community to focus on Iraq to uncover implicating evidence; they pushed back – hard—against exculpatory evidence (such as evidence contradicting claims that Iraq sought uranium from Niger), and they ignored the equivocations and actual guardedness of the conclusions in the intelligence assessments. Third, Pillar asserts that the administration would likely have made its argument for war absent implicating evidence: The administration could easily have dismissed the lack of such evidence by citing historical intelligence failures or the possible Iraqi acquisition of WMD. Fourth, he claims that the administration sought input from the intelligence community only when it suited its purposes. Whereas Bush administration officials persistently pressed the intelligence community to explore (and presumably expose) the link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, they did not seek the community’s evaluation of conditions that the United States might encounter in Iraq and ignored its warnings of dangers that might greet U.S. troops and confound U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq. The fifth and final part of Pillar’s argument suggests that the administration imposed an implicit standard of proof that inhibited professionals from challenging the administration's conclusions. Professionals could read the writing on the wall. They knew what the administration wanted; they also knew that raising doubts about administration claims was a losing proposition.

Of course, the book has its limitations. Pillar is sometimes a bit overzealous in making his argument. In places, Pillar leaves the unfortunate impression that he desires to shield the U.S. intelligence community from blame. For example, he does not explore the well-established failings and biases of the intelligence community in the production of the 2002 NIE; elsewhere, he dismisses the importance of such NIEs by arguing essentially that “they’re not all that important and no one ever reads them anyway” (p. 252). He could also afford more balance in assessing the motives of those that he criticizes. He suggests that the 9/11 Commission tipped its political hand—or, at least, showed a “lack of seriousness” (p. 244)—by allowing testimony from a person who maintained that Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center attack when the Commission might well have permitted her to testify to deflect charges of bias. Moreover, Pillar sometimes exhibits the same intellectual tendencies that he criticizes. He takes U.S. policymakers to task for ungrounded beliefs that sent the United States to war in Vietnam and Iraq, yet interjects his own beliefs without necessary evidence or analytical support. For example, he argues for engaging the government of Syria (albeit writing before its civil war) in insisting that such a policy carries little or no risk (p. 341); and he sees a potential upside—and no downside—for the United States and Israel should Hamas hold or share power in a Palestinian state (p. 342).

But these shortcomings do not detract from the book’s significant contribution. The book places necessary focus on the complexities and uncertainties of intelligence analysis and its invaluable—often unheralded—contribution. Perhaps, most importantly, it casts light on the misguided American tendency to view intelligence shortfalls as failures that require fixes. We ask ourselves, why didn’t we know? We should be asking, why do U.S. policymakers ignore sound intelligence analysis, rely on dubious images of the adversary, and bow to political pressure?