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Letters responding to Secrets and spies: can espionage ever be justified? | Financial Times

Paul A. Myers 1 day ago
A very good books essay. 

"...as the world becomes less manageable." This little phrase gets the overall context correct for the promise of mega-intelligence is that it makes the world more manageable for the leadership circle. Sometimes it does. Recently not so well.

The crucial question is how the top political leadership processes and uses intelligence. There is a huge tendency for political leaders, almost by definition ideological, to use intelligence as a tool of confirmation bias. An example: in the early 1980s French intelligence services failed on multiple fronts. President Mitterand fired the chiefs for lack of resolve at confronting challenges and then re-populated the top leadership and re-organized the services to align capabilities with threats. It was almost a textbook response to how a president should respond to intelligence failure. 

In contrast to Mitterand, after 9/11, the highly ideological top circle of the Bush administration shopped for intelligence to launch the least-well-thought-out wars in American history with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Cheney and Rumsfeld collected the biggest bunch of poodles at the top of the defense and intelligence establishments in the history of the country. The false narrative was signed off by the least curious and least critical thinking president in modern times (until the rise of the current president who apparently doesn't think at all).

The current defense secretary is re-orienting the gigantic defense department and its gargantuan budget around the concept that the US is now entering into a great-power rivalry with China and Russia. Confronting the real threat--a disintegrating Muslim world--is too hard (and doesn't demand expenditure on massively expensive conventional arms). American intelligence is partially organized to provide rationales for channeling spending to the military-industrial complex. 

But the largest single strategic threat to the US is its continued highly militaristic presence in the Muslim world which will again effectively figure out how to strike at the American homeland with some devastating terror strike (eventually). Somehow one suspects that Pakistan will be at or close to the center of the true strategic threat: unleashed weapons of mass destruction in the hands of capable terrorists.

The US, particularly its leadership class gathered around Washington DC, does not understand the contemporary Muslim world and what drives it and what is likely to drive it in the future. It is anchoring its strategies to decrepit autocracies that will in due course fail, probably catastrophically. The US will be involved in a regional-wide insurgent war beyond any chance of containment with conventional military means. America's current conventional military expeditionary posture almost guarantees future setbacks.

US intelligence in the future might be exceptionally capable and astute (I wouldn't bet it that way considering the abysmal Congressional oversight. Congressman Devin Nunes?), nevertheless US military and foreign policy initiatives in the Muslim world have a high probably of future catastrophic failure. It will not be an intelligence failure but a much broader intellectual failure. 

But the fingerprints of inadequate intelligence will be all over the failure.


last updated june 2018