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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group

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To: carranza2 who wrote (129757)	4/27/2004 11:34:38 AM
From: Elsewhere	Read Replies (2) of 281500

The New Politics of Intelligence: Will Reforms Work This Time? Richard K. Betts From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004 foreignaffairs.org Summary: The failure to prevent the September 11 attacks or find Iraqi WMD have put intelligence at the center of this year's presidential campaign. The key to better performance, however, lies not in major reforms but in the character and sense of responsible officials. Richard K. Betts is Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/siwps/> and Co-editor of Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/071465471X/>. He previously served on the staff of the Senate's Church Committee investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies and as a consultant in the intelligence community. ---------- For posterity's sake I've added the full bibliographical data of the FA article (for being found in later SI searches) and put it to the top of the post (for being seen in FADG TOC browsing). My FA copy has arrived today, and I've just read the Betts article. I agree with most of what he wrote. For me, as somebody who is not so intimately familiar with US intelligence, the historical juxtaposition of "too much intelligence" in the 70ies vs. "too little intelligence" regarding 9-11 was interesting. The one point I disagree with: "No sensible intelligence estimator could have concluded in 2002 that the Iraqis probably did not have WMD." (p. 5) A good analyst with "out-of-the-box" thinking could have imagined that Saddam is just playing poker with the world - especially since the UN inspectors didn't find any WMD anymore; their remaining questions mainly concerned the accounting of the destruction.

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