Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In this important book, Robert Jervis reveals his solid credentials as an intelligence insider. For him, this is not a conflict in roles. He is a social scientist, first, who hopes that the U.S. intelligence community (IC) will learn from its mistakes by adhering to sound social scientific practices. Jervis offers striking comparisons between the IC's failure to predict the overthrow of the Shah of Iran with the events of 1978-79--which the author assessed in a declassified internal review for the Central Intelligence Agency--and the erroneous judgment that Iraq had stockpiled biological and chemical weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program, which the Bush administration used to justify the 2003 Iraq war. Drawing predominantly from these cases, Jervis argues that critical deficiencies in intelligence result because analysts fail to articulate their assumptions, subject these arguments to appropriate scrutiny, consider rival hypotheses that fit the evidence, test arguments by offering predictions, consider negative and positive evidence when evaluating assertions, and seek information that might disconfirm their existing point of view.
Put differently, Jervis addresses the large number of scholars, policymakers, and policy analysts who take intelligence for granted. They think they know why intelligence succeeds or fails--typically, a lack of useful information, deceptive information, and the ignoring or woeful misreading of facts. In the Iraq case, the frequent answer is also politically charged: Bush administration officials misused intelligence information and pressured the IC to help make the case for war. For Jervis, these answers are superficial and fail to do justice to the inherent challenges of intelligence. In his view, we would be far less impressed with alleged intelligence successes if their assumptions, logic, and evidentiary grounding were subject to scrutiny. As he concludes on Iraq (pp. 2-3), "it is harder to say whether it was a failure in terms of what is usual." All predictions come with a range of uncertainty, all evidence is consistent with alternative explanations, and the best explanation--in hindsight--might have the least evidentiary support.
Thus, Jervis's sobering conclusion--his "dismal" judgment (p. 145)--is that better intelligence practices would have increased uncertainty around the prediction that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction (WMD); it would not have changed the prediction. After all, Iraq had sought to...