I am just starting to read Pillar's FA article, but I was really struck by the following three paragraphs, right on page one:
If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.
A MODEL UPENDED
The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and policymaking sharply separates the two functions. The intelligence community collects information, evaluates its credibility, and combines it with other information to help make sense of situations abroad that could affect U.S. interests. Intelligence officers decide which topics should get their limited collection and analytic resources according to both their own judgments and the concerns of policymakers. Policymakers thus influence which topics intelligence agencies address but not the conclusions that they reach. The intelligence community, meanwhile, limits its judgments to what is happening or what might happen overseas, avoiding policy judgments about what the United States should do in response.
In practice, this distinction is often blurred, especially because analytic projections may have policy implications even if they are not explicitly stated. But the distinction is still important. National security abounds with problems that are clearer than the solutions to them; the case of Iraq is hardly a unique example of how similar perceptions of a threat can lead people to recommend very different policy responses. Accordingly, it is critical that the intelligence community not advocate policy, especially not openly. If it does, it loses the most important basis for its credibility and its claims to objectivity. When intelligence analysts critique one another's work, they use the phrase "policy prescriptive" as a pejorative, and rightly so.
In paragraph one, Pillar basically says that the White House must always obey the analysis of the intelligence community. In paragraph two and three, he says that the analysis of the intelligence community should not be "policy prescriptive".
Doesn't paragraph one completely contradict paragraphs two and three? If the CIA is not prescribing policy, then presumably the White House is free do its own analysis and choose its own policy.
What Pillar is REALLY saying is that the White House is free to choose its policy ONLY if its chosen policy has the imprimatur of the intelligence community, who have already decided on the right answer, even if they don't tell it outright.
Otherwise, the CIA will feel perfectly free to undermine the White House policy and try to implement some other policy, as we have seen.
I do agree that this is the crux of the problem. The Bush Administration was arrogant enough to believe that it, not the CIA, had been elected to decide the foreign policy of the United States. It was even dumb enough to think that the CIA, like the military, was supposed to obey civilian control!
The CIA has set to punish the Bush Administration so harshly for its temerity that all future administrations will learn from the example. Not incidently, it will manage to pass off all the blame for its own errors if it succeeds. |
