Why, in recent years, has the CIA been wrong on big issues, while Pentagon intelligence has called the shots correctly?
Read Mark Riebling’s critical analysis on the City Journal website of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner.
Mr. Riebling concludes his review with an provocative contrast between the CIA and the Pentagon intelligence branch. He writes:
[Author Tim Weiner] concludes that “the Pentagon had crushed the CIA, just as it vowed to do sixty years before,” though he neglects to explain why the Pentagon’s intelligence value to policymakers has grown.
The simple answer: the Pentagon’s judgments about the world have generally proved sounder than the CIA’s…
Why have the soldiers so often got it right where the spooks have got it wrong? Fifty years ago, political scientist Samuel Huntington offered a clue. In The Soldier and the State, Huntington argued that America’s open society needed a professional military establishment, “steeped in conservative realism.” Generals could not be liberals. To keep the peace, they must prepare for war. They must make the best case for the worst case. They must assume the “irrationality, weakness, and evil in human nature.” Liberals were good at reform, Huntington thought, but not at national security. “Magnificently varied and creative when limited to domestic issues,” he wrote (an assertion we might dispute today), “liberalism faltered when applied to foreign policy and defense.”
The CIA has long been a liberal institution. “There are two kinds of people I never met in the CIA,” quipped retired spy David Atlee Phillips. “One was an assassin, and the other was a Republican.” On the day that the last of the 9/11 hijackers entered the United States, many of the CIA’s officers weren’t at their desks, because they were putting together a quilt to celebrate “Diversity Awareness Day.”
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