Among the many issues raised by James Lebovic's perceptive review are two that strike me as crucial: the relationships between intelligence and social science and those between intelligence and policymaking. The first itself has two parts, one being how scholars can study intelligence. Both access and methods are difficult. For years, diplomatic historians referred to intelligence as the “hidden dimension” of their subject. Now it is much more open, and Great Britain, generally more secretive than the United States, has just issued the authorized history of MI5 (see Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2009). Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has released extensive, if incomplete, records, and the bright side (for us) of intelligence failures is that they lead to the release of treasure troves of documents, which can often be supplemented by memoirs and interviews. But even more than in other aspects of foreign policy analysis, we are stuck with evidence that is fragmentary. In this way, we resemble scholars of ancient societies, who forever lament the loss of most of the material they want to study.
As Lebovic explains, I approached the two intelligence failures partly through the lens of political psychology. But I do not think this is the only tool we have. Indeed, when I did the Iran post mortem, I was struck by the importance of organizational culture. Forms of constructivism may be particularly useful for uncovering the “unspoken assumptions” that characterize both the intelligence community (IC) and the wider political community (see James Joll, “1914: The Unspoken Assumptions” in The Origins of the First World War, ed. H. W. Koch, 1972, pp. 307–28). We—both scholars and members of the IC—could also learn a lot by comparing intelligence failures with intelligence successes, but for a variety of reasons the latter are rarely studied.
My book argued that intelligence could be improved by greater use of social science methods and greater self-consciousness about methodology. In the discipline, we have come to equate methodology with statistics, but the broader questions concern how to draw inferences from evidence, and both scholarship and public policy still have a long way to go here. In the cases I studied, skilled and conscientious analysts made serious errors in this regard. Interestingly enough, much of the discussion in the media about my study of the Iraq failure falls into similar traps. As Lebovic notes, interest centers on whether the failure was caused by political pressures. I used forms of the comparative method to show that this is unlikely, but this approach is alien to those without social science training, and those who have disagreed with me have simply ignored this evidence. The official reviews of the failure in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, while rejecting the charge of politicization, made similar methodological errors. We have a lot of educating to do here.
Of course, intelligence only really matters if it informs policy, and Lebovic is right that what citizens and scholars care most about is getting better policy. As I explained in my book, on broad political issues the impact of intelligence—whether it is right or wrong—is likely to be slight. When they disagree, policymakers are likely to ignore intelligence, if they do not politicize it. The different tasks and mind-sets of policymakers and members of the IC mean that there will always be tensions between them. But not all policy decisions are driven by leaders' needs and predispositions, and so on a range of issues intelligence does matter. It is more than an academic conceit to believe that a better understanding of the world can contribute to a better world.
