Intelligence Failure Is More Than “Policy Oversell”

Abstract

Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence. By Joshua Rovner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 280 pp., $33.25 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-44829-4). Joshua Rovner's Fixing the Facts focuses on the delicate relationship between intelligence officials and the elite decision maker or policymaker. He explores “intelligence failures” from the point of view of the “customer”—the policymaker. Rovner hypothesizes that the intelligence-policy-making relationship can fall into one of three “pathologies”: neglect, excessive harmony , or politicization . Neglect occurs when the policymaker uses intelligence incorrectly or ignores it. Existing research on this problem focuses on “noise in the system” and the difficulty of communicating intelligence to the policymaker. The second pathology, excessive harmony, arises when intelligence professionals do not challenge policy beliefs, and policymakers do not criticize intelligence conclusions. The cause for intelligence failure in this case is based on proximity—the intelligence professional and policymaker are too cozy to challenge each other. Rovner simply points out that the basic remedy is to keep one's distance personally and to insulate and protect organizations from undue political meddling. Rovner develops a novel characterization of intelligence politicization, which he labels policy oversell . However, instead of looking at the everyday individual- or organization-level factors at work in the first two “pathologies,” Rovner bases his theory of politicization on extraordinary “domestic” politics. Rovner argues that domestic political pressures cause politicians to manipulate intelligence to mobilize a critical constituency to support the politicians' controversial decisions. Rovner believes that, if a politician is willing to manipulate intelligence, rather than just ignore it if it does not comply with his or her previously held views, then the cause …