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Brooks on Intelligence
I think today's David Brooks column on pseudo-technical versus broadly humanistic approaches to foreign intelligence is genuinely interesting. What would have been more interesting still would be if Brooks had acknowledged that the behind behind this line of critique thought, before the war, that the CIA was underestimating the extent of the Iraqi threat. Likewise, this group believed in the late 1970s that the intelligence community was underestimating Soviet strength. In both instances, the IC was, in fact, overestimating threats. The intellectual dishonesty of the neoconservatives on this front has been pretty breathtaking. The Iraq WMD intelligence certainly makes the IC professionals look bad. Neocons have long been critical of the IC, so they've nicely incorporated this fiasco into their critique. But if you look back on it, their ex ante critique of the intelligence was uniformly pushing in the wrong direction on the issue at hand. This is, or so one would think, something serious people would want to acknowledge and confront.
April 2, 2005 | Permalink
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I was looking for the Eastern European dissident who said around 1989 that people in his country wanted to be a real or normal country that could deal with its real problem, instead of a fake one dealing with fake problems.
Google directed me to a post here back in Feb talking about real problems in Russia; I thought therefore that you and your readership might be worth asking about the source of that remark.
Anyone know?
Posted by: sm | Apr 2, 2005 1:36:04 PM
Vojislav Kostunica said something along those lines when Milosevic was voted out in 2000, though for all I know he was (consciously or not) quoting the earlier source.
Posted by: Marshall | Apr 2, 2005 1:39:24 PM
Brooks' column is "a little self righteous" (to borrow a phrase) on critical point.
Yes, as he argues, creative analysis with context is valuable. However, it is no more or no less likely to be wrong than the cold hard fact sort.
And when "subconscious" creative analysis goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong. (Was the Office of Special Plans from the creative or statistical school?)
Brooks is just another guy struggling to come up with 700 words twice a week.
Posted by: def | Apr 2, 2005 1:57:19 PM
def, it's at least an idea worth considering. But, at the very least, isn't limiting ourselves to one form of analysis self-defeating? And Brooks' suggestion that decision-makers be exposed to more conflicting opinions certainly has merit. The idea that the IC has to come up with one "correct" answer seems to be asking for problems.
On the one hand, we want the IC to be able to answer a question like "does Iraq have WMDs," but on the other, I'd hope that if there were any conflicting opinions, they'd bubble to the top rather than be ignored in the name of delivering an authoritative answer.
Posted by: ispivey | Apr 2, 2005 2:22:53 PM
What would have been more interesting still would be if Brooks had acknowledged that the behind behind this line of critique thought, before the war, that the CIA was underestimating the extent of the Iraqi threat.
Huh?
Posted by: bobo brooks | Apr 2, 2005 2:23:19 PM
Right, the "Saddam is evil therefore he has nuclear weapons" school of intelligence would have aced this one, Mr. Brooks.
Posted by: praktike | Apr 2, 2005 2:48:29 PM
ispivey- I believe that both forms of analysis already take place. Excluding either would be a mistake, which, if I read Brooks correctly, he seems to theink is the 'thinking man's' way to go.
While I am no expert on the intelligence community, I am personally aware of two history PhD's working in the intel circles, one military and one XXXX. If a schmuck like me who doesn't even live in DC can know a couple by name .... I am sure that dozens, or even hundreds, of such 'thinkers' *already* exist within each agency.
Posted by: def | Apr 2, 2005 2:51:52 PM
What Brooks knows about old-school intelligence he learned by watching Three Days of the Condor. Not by reading the book, mind you. That would be too many days for his intellect to handle.
Posted by: Libby Sosume | Apr 2, 2005 3:32:14 PM
The so-called 'intelligence community' is nothing but a bunch of political hacks; they will underestimate what they are told to underestimate and overestimate what they are told to overestimate. This is all nonsense. Spies is not the answer, sane foreign policy is.
Posted by: abb1 | Apr 2, 2005 3:34:48 PM
Similarly, a certain type of ruling pol publicly feigns trust in voters, while at the same time successfully bamboozling them at every turn, thus confirming a private disdain for actual democracy.
Posted by: yesh | Apr 2, 2005 5:55:19 PM
It was pretty easy to see that Iraq had no nuclear program. It would have had to be invisible, since none of our national technical means ever detected anything. By 'national technical means" I mean spy satellites and other stuff: sniffers that detect the characteristic noble gases that inevitable leak from a fission reactor or a plutonium reprocessing plant.
It would have had to have been done with next to no money: essentially all of the Iraqi budget came from oil, and a reasonable guess (made by me in 2002, and which has since been abundantly confirmed) was that the Baathist government had about 1-1.5 billion per year of foreign currency in its hands - a little ripped off from oil for food, most from truck-smuggled oil exports to neighboring countries. With that amount, they had to pay and maintain an army, secret police, palaces - is this getting through? Not exactly enough left over for a major military-technical development project, particularly when you remember that Iraq is backward country, whose per-capita GDP, discounting oil, is pitiful: less than Haiti.
They're incompetent.
A reactor we would have detected, a gaseous diffusuon plant we would hve seen, laser isotope separation is far too technically hard, and even hoppe-style centrifuge separation requires a major feat of engineering, which Iraq is not capable of on its own. And you need thousands of centrifuges to get enough fissile material for a single bomb, and to avoid needing tens of thousands, you need midly exotic high-stength materials like maraging steel or carbon-carbon. And then you need plants to make uranium hexafluoride gas, and so on.
All of this has to be completely invisible to the best detection instruments in the world,and, almost entirely, made locally. This froma country that can't make a saleable cuckoo clock.
Given 15 billion a year of uncommitted money and lots of high-tech imports, it would have been another story. Sanctions worked.
The centrifug designerse at Oak Ridge must have been reading their Thucydides: they never believed in the 'aluminum tubes' story - they were cursed by knowing what they're talking about, evidently a rare thing these days. Maybe they looked up the review article on hoppe-style centrifuge separation in Reviews of Modern Physics. Of course, if you'd asked the IAEA, they could have dismissed it in seconds - literally seconds. Later, one experienced nuclear inspector simply picked up one of the famous tubes, hefted it, and said 'nope, too heavy: the wall was too thick, which would cause the rotor to fail from centrifugal stresses - rather like the Roche limit.
The CIA doesn't have anyone (not one single person) who knows this stuff: although I personally know at least five or sixc people who do, mostly from school days. Shit, my brother-in-law knows this. The DOE employs loads of people who know, but the government decided to disbelieve everyone who knew their shit. The press, except for Knight-Ridder, fumbled the ball completely. Congress continually proves that the Know-Nothings won the last election.
Posted by: gcochran | Apr 2, 2005 6:21:47 PM
Brooks based this article on a paper by a Yale undergraduate. Huh!? Is he going to be quoting high school term papers next?
Posted by: bigsteveno | Apr 2, 2005 10:00:01 PM
I myself have previously blogged on the neocons' tendency to blame their fish tales on the very people who doubted them.
Jack Kelly (or "Hack Kelly," as I call him) actually blames the CIA for Chalabi!!!!!
C'mon Matt, there needs to be another anti-Jack Kelly blogger out there!
Posted by: Glaivester | Apr 3, 2005 1:05:45 AM
Bobo, I don't understand your confusion--are you denying that Richard Perle (or Doug Feith, or whoever) is a behind?
Posted by: Matt Weiner | Apr 3, 2005 4:41:08 PM
I worked in the intelligence community for two years, thirty years ago when I first got out of graduate school.
I quickly realized the situation was as abb1 just described. The Intelligence Community was, and has continued to be, a bunch of political hacks.
The CIA is actually loaded with PhDs who are incredibly bright who capable of the thoughtful, culture and history based research that Brooks described. And no one pays attention to what they say and no one cares.
I remember looking at Intelligence "raw" data in the 70s. What I saw of the "threat" of the Soviet Union was a country that had serious economic problems. They had problems in eastern europe. The economic system could not provide basics for its people. The military technology was crude - yes they had powerful missiles but they were lucky if they landed somewhere in the general vicinity they intended to hit. Their military had trouble performing their exercises because they followed orders too literally. Their population was bubbling with dissent below the surface. It seemed obvious to me that we were seriously overestimating the "threat" and that the final, "official" estimates often reached conclusions that were the opposite of the evidence. It was also obvious that if I wanted a career in foreign policy or intelligence I was going to have to pretend, like everyone around me, that the emperor was wearing clothes.
In my case I decided to go to law school and abandon any involvement with, or hope for a career in foreign policy. I was pretty sure it was never going to change, and sure enough it hasn't.
We aren't really suffering from failures of intelligence. We are suffering from failures in foreign policy.
Posted by: Katysax | Apr 3, 2005 11:52:35 PM
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