By Gabriel Schoenfeld

When we hear the sound of hoofbeats, should we think horses or zebras? The question is a classic problem of intelligence analysis. Too often in recent years the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security have got it wrong—most recently with the Christmas Day underwear bomber, who was able to board a U.S.-bound flight despite plenty of early warning signs. Political scientist Robert Jervis wants to know the reason for such error.

In “Why Intelligence Fails,” Mr. Jervis examines two important U.S. intelligence lapses and tries to account for what went awry. After both, the CIA hired Mr. Jervis—a longtime student of international affairs—to help the agency sort out its mistakes. He thus brings an invaluable perspective as a smart outsider with sufficient inside access to appraise the agency’s blind spots.

The first of his two cases is the CIA’s failure to grasp the weakness of the Iranian monarchy on the cusp of the Iranian revolution in 1979. “An island of stability” is what President Jimmy Carter called Iran just before the Islamic volcano erupted. No doubt the CIA estimates that Mr. Carter saw were not quite so ludicrously sanguine, but they were still dangerously inaccurate.

Mr. Jervis draws a striking portrait of an intelligence agency in disarray. He is particularly surprised by the “paucity of resources” dedicated to Iran in the late 1970s. The CIA had assigned just two analysts to assess Iranian politics and two more to study its economy, supplemented by a small, unproductive station in Tehran.

Making matters worse, the members of this tiny group were caught in a loop of circular reasoning. They were convinced that Iran’s burgeoning opposition was not a threat to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government because he had not cracked down on it. But as Mr. Jervis notes, the analysts’ key indicator of trouble—a crackdown—would occur only “if the crisis became very severe.” In the event, the crisis did become very severe—and the shah still did not crack down. The analysts relied on what turned out to be a worthless metric.

Even if the CIA’s analysts had not fallen into a logic-trap of their own devising, the agency would have faced a larger challenge. “Predicting revolutions is very hard,” Mr. Jervis aptly notes. Neither revolutionaries nor those in power know where their struggle is going. Why should outsiders have a better sense of what lies ahead? Foreign intelligence services are at a particular disadvantage: The “CIA and its counterparts are in the business of stealing secrets, but secrets are rarely at the heart of revolutions.”

Secrets did lie at the heart of Mr. Jervis’s second case: the intelligence community’s erroneous National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 declaring that Iraq was accumulating weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Jervis examines the explanations offered for the mistake—perhaps the most closely studied intelligence lapse since Pearl Harbor—and finds them wanting.

Mr. Jervis rejects the contention that the CIA’s reporting was politicized, produced to align with whatever the Bush administration wanted to hear. “This narrative,” he writes, “conforms to common sense” but was refuted by several nonpartisan investigations and, implicitly, by the “uniform surprise—indeed disbelief” of the entire intelligence community when weapons of mass destruction were not found after the war. If anything, the charge of politicization “has been a barrier to more careful thought.” A host of other problems, Mr. Jervis says, explain the fiasco.

One was George Tenet’s mismanagement as director of the CIA. In the run-up to the war, a ferocious interagency battle raged about the significance of aluminum tubes that Iraq had been importing. The CIA believed they were intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, hence part of Iraq’s supposed WMD effort. Other government entities, including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, insisted that the tubes were not well-suited to this purpose—which turned out to be the case. Although Mr. Tenet was responsible for coordinating the work of all 15 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, he was, Mr. Jervis remarks, “physically, politically, and psychologically” distant from analysts outside the CIA. He thus did not even know about the long-running dispute until the intelligence estimate was actually being drafted, just months before the U.S. went to war.

Mr. Jervis calls Mr. Tenet’s inattention a “stunning failure.” But he concludes, surprisingly, that the aluminum-tube assessment and other theoretically “correctable errors”—like the CIA’s reliance on the worthless information funneled to it by the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball”—were not at the root of the problem. We might like to think that “bad outcomes are explained by bad processes and that fixing the intelligence machinery will solve the problems,” writes Mr. Jervis, but that is not always true.

In the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the real failure lay not in the content of the National Intelligence Estimate but in the certainty—”slam dunk” was Mr. Tenet’s phrase—with which it was put forward. Such confidence gave policy makers little reason to pause. But even if they had paused—and posed hard questions—Mr. Jervis doubts that the intelligence community would have substantially revised its analysis. His conclusion is that the debacle was almost preordained by one overriding factor: The intelligence community’s interpretation of Saddam Hussein’s motives and behavior, however wrong it turned out to be, was “very plausible, much more so than the alternatives.”

In short, there are limits to the ability of intelligence agencies to understand the world and keep us safe. Those pounding hoofbeats might be horses or zebras—or zebras painted to look like horses.

Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law, due out in May.

Los Angeles Times

But if so, the blame doesn’t lie wholly with government agencies charged with maintaining the lists. Some share of responsibility lies with civil libertarian extremists who have ceaselessly lambasted the entire no-fly system.

Maintaining a terrorist watch list is a highly complex task. The problem includes not only assembling a list of potential suspects but distributing the information on the list to visa offices, border checkpoints, cargo facilities and the like in a timely fashion. The correct spelling of foreign names, with all the variants arising from translation, is in itself a highly complicated endeavor. Criteria for inclusion of a subject on a watch list must be established. And then there is the difficulty of training agents, many of them with little understanding of the nuances of places such as Yemen and Nigeria, to operate the system.

News reports suggest that Abdulmutallab’s name was added to a government list of people with suspected ties to terrorism in November, after his father warned the American embassy in Lagos, Nigeria, that he had embraced Islamic extremism.

Abdulmutallab was not, however, on the far shorter no-fly list maintained by the FBI, which is why he was able to board without apparent problem the Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit. According to testimony before a Senate committee in early December by Timothy J. Healy, director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the consolidated watch list maintained by the FBI currently consists of about 400,000 names. But of these, only about 3,400 have been placed on the no-fly list. In other words, about 396,600 individuals who have a suspected link to terrorism are permitted to fly.

A Justice Department audit last spring found numerous flaws in the terrorist watch system. As new information flows into the FBI, it is required to update the lists. Yet according to the audit, in 67% of the cases it sampled, “the FBI case agent primarily assigned to the case failed to modify the watch list record when new identifying information was obtained during the course of the investigation, as required by FBI policy.”

The inevitable complexity of the watch list process guarantees significant errors. On one side lies the problem of innocent people finding themselves on the list: There have been more than a few notorious cases of error, including instances in which federal air marshals were themselves barred from flying. On the other side lies the problem of alleged terrorists like Abdulmutallab being allowed to fly.

Reducing both types of errors is obviously highly desirable. But given the nature of the dangers that the lists are designed to avert, a reasonable policy would tilt toward over-inclusiveness.

And here is where the political context becomes critical. The Bush administration was subjected to withering criticism for the way it managed the no-fly list. The American Civil Liberties Union put the system on its own list of the “Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,” asserting that “the uncontroversial contention that Osama bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft” has been exploited “to create a monster.” In one of several lawsuits the group has filed involving terrorist lists, the ACLU alleged that they “violate airline passengers’ constitutional right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and to due process of law.”

Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been one among a chorus of voices that accused the former administration of being far too sweeping, placing “infants, nuns and even members of Congress” on terrorist watch lists. The writer Naomi Wolf has called travel restrictions such as the no-fly list, “a classic part of the fascist playbook” akin to the depredations of Nazi Germany, where “families fleeing internment were traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders.” This was hysteria directed against Bush counter-terrorism mechanisms that the Obama administration has left almost entirely unchanged.

The Department of Homeland Security has indeed received a high volume of complaints about airport screening by individuals attempting to travel. Yet only a minuscule 0.7% of the complaints stemmed from issues relating to the watch lists. And of that 0.7%, about 51% of the complaints led to the conclusion that the individual in question was appropriately on the watch list. Whatever problems exist, the system is not outrageously over-inclusive. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is the case.

We will never know whether fierce criticism from the left had any direct effect on the processing of Abdulmutallab’s file, but the political environment is important to consider going forward. The officials managing the watch lists are not eager to be hauled before a congressional committee if they blunder and bar innocent people from getting on flights. But they are also acutely aware of the potential price tag of being under-inclusive.

The problem with over-inclusiveness is that innocent people will suffer major inconvenience and that counter-terrorism resources are wasted. But if the lists are under-inclusive, innocent people can die, and in large numbers. If asked to choose between over- and under-inclusiveness on the watch lists, the passengers of Northwest Flight 253 no doubt would have their preference.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law,” due out in 2010.

The Weekly Standard

Back to the Future: British anti-Semitism returns-with a vengeance.

by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Like cancer, ideas can metastasize. In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt — the former a professor at the University of Chicago, the latter at Harvard — came out with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. A “situation [that] has no equal in American history” had arisen, they wrote in the book (and in a paper bearing the same title posted on Harvard’s website). A domestic pressure-lobby–a body mostly comprising “American Jews making a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests” — had accumulated “unmatched power” and was using it to “skew” the American political system for its own narrow ends. Among other things, the Jewish lobby had used its “stranglehold” on Congress and “manipulation” of the mass media to propel the United States into war in Iraq.

Mearsheimer and Walt provoked a raging controversy, but apart from a few pockets in the universities and on the far left and right (the white supremacist David Duke was among their most enthusiastic endorsers), the book was mostly given short shrift. Reviewing The Israel Lobby in the New York Times, Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed dismay at the “puzzlingly shoddy scholarship” that led Mearsheimer and Walt to “fuel, inadvertently, .  .  . the fires of anti-Semitism.”

But if the respectable center dismissed the book in the United States, matters stand quite differently abroad. Before their book was published, Mearsheimer and Walt tried to peddle a shorter version, but found no takers. The article wound up appearing in the London Review of Books in 2006. The locale was not an accident. The soil in Great Britain was fertile for their thesis. Today, three years later, we can see some of its fruits.

An official inquest is now under way in London into the decisions that led Tony Blair’s government to join with the United States in going to war in Iraq. On the five-member board of inquiry sit Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman, both distinguished historians and students of warfare. But their scholarly credentials are not what is today garnering attention.

Writing in the Independent, Oliver Miles, Great Britain’s former ambassador to Libya, has unearthed “facts” about the two men that he says are “not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media”: Both, he writes, “are Jewish.” This detail of their background, says Miles, threatens to undercut the credibility of the inquest: “Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.”

In the same newspaper, the columnist Richard Ingrams called Miles’s comments “helpful.” The Iraq war, after all, was “initiated .  .  . by a group of influential American neocons .  .  . nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists.” Given the panel’s composition, the question arises of whether it will “investigate or even refer to the U.S. neocons and their links to Israel?” In other words, can Jews be trusted to investigate themselves?

Anti-Semitism has deep roots in England. In the 12th century, many of the country’s Jews were put to the sword in a wave of massacres. The 13th century began with the introduction of the yellow badge, the mandatory marking that Jews were compelled to wear, and ended with the mass expulsion of the Jews.

Fast forward to the 20th century. In its first half, anti-Semitism was rampant among the upper classes. It also thrived in the gutter. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists — the “blackshirts” — drew fully a quarter of the vote in London’s 1937 municipal elections.

Today, Britain is awash with hatred of Jews carried in by followers of radical Islam who have found a congenial home in which to preach their genocidal doctrines. British soccer fans — where so many of the country’s violent dregs are concentrated — have never been shy about giving voice to neo-Nazi slogans. Anti-Semitic incidents in the first six months of 2009 alone — vandalism, hate mail, and direct violent attacks on Jews — already exceeded the entire number for 2008 and reached a level not seen since such statistics began to be compiled in 1984.

Both the soccer hooligans, the Muslim fanatics, and the perpetrators of violence are situated on the fringe. In the post-World War II era, the British establishment was resistant to the most blatant forms of a prejudice severely discredited by the scope of German atrocities committed in its name. To the extent it remained visible, it typically took the form of phantasmagorical demonization of the state of Israel.

In the direct assault on Gilbert and Freedman a corner has been turned. The old prewar brand of British anti-Semitism has reared its head. It is in this climate that Britain’s Channel 4 broadcast a documentary “investigation” of Britain’s own “pro-Israel Lobby.” This exposé examines what is said to be the extraordinary power of organized Jewry: “who they are, how they are funded, how they work and what influence they have, from the key groups to the wealthy individuals who help bankroll the lobbying.” With shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shades of Mearsheimer-Walt, the program conveyed a picture of a nefarious conspiracy to plunge Britain into war in Iraq.

Voices in the Jewish community have expressed outrage at the documentary. The Times of London has denounced Ambassador Miles’s remarks about Gilbert and Freedman as “extraordinary and disgraceful.” But the Times‘s editorial declined to call the comments anti-Semitic, labeling them instead a “snide attack and irrelevant innuendo.” On the heels of this episode comes an astonishing ruling from Great Britain’s newly created high court holding that an Orthodox Jewish school is guilty of “discrimination” for insisting that matrilineal descent — a core precept of Judaism — determines who is a Jew and eligible to enroll. This not only tells Jews, laments the columnist Melanie Phillips in the Spectator, “that the state will not accept their own decision about who is or is not a member of their own community but uniquely stigmatises them for doing so.” Anti-Semitism is playing offense in Great Britain and those alarmed by it are in a crouch.

Writing not long after World War II, George Orwell noted that “prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England,” but the depredations of Hitler had caused a lull in public expression of such sentiments. During the war, many came to realize that “this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews.” But even though a taboo had set in, this hardly altered underlying sentiments: “Many people who would perish rather than admit to anti-Semitic feelings,” wrote Orwell, are nonetheless “secretly prone to them.”

Times have changed. Mearsheimer and Walt’s poison is doing its work, and the secret feelings are no longer so secret. Indeed, when it comes to Great Britain’s small Jewish community — some 300,000 souls in a country of 61 million — the soccer hooligans and the intellectual and media elite are increasingly united in their loutishness.

Gabriel Schoenfeld is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute. His Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law is due out next year.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda

By John Mueller (Oxford, 319 pages, $27.95)

Reviewed by Gabriel Schoenfeld

In the years since the first nuclear bomb was tested in 1945, the world’s major powers have acquired vast arsenals of the devastating weapons. Minor powers have been working feverishly to follow suit. Some unstable and menacing ones, like Pakistan and North Korea, have been successful. Among those seeking to join the club, Iran is leading the pack. More than a half-century since the birth of the atomic age, nuclear weapons remain the polestar around which geopolitics revolve.

Is all the worry about them misplaced? John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, certainly thinks so. In “Atomic Obsession,” he argues that nuclear weapons are far less important both as threats and as deterrents than almost anyone assumes. The weapons have always been nearly superfluous, he says; they remain so today.

In World War II, Mr. Mueller claims, it was not the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that prompted Tokyo to capitulate; it was the Soviet declaration of war on Japan. In the Cold War, it was not the nuclear “balance of terror” that kept the peace between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; it was each country’s broad mutual interest in avoiding war. In the post-Cold War era, with the superpower rivalry gone, the weapons remain “useless.” They are dangerous in only an inadvertent way: Efforts to check their spread have led to policies “that have been unwise, wasteful, and destructive-sometimes even more destructive than the bombs themselves.”

Mr. Mueller’s analysis is not a mere academic exercise. He is attempting to answer a question that is especially pressing at the moment: what to do about the nuclear aspirations of Iran and North Korea. His counsel, in both cases, is laissez-faire. If these countries want the bomb so badly, we should “let them have it.”

North Korea’s only interest in nuclear weapons, Mr. Mueller explains, is “to stoke its nationalist ego” and, by North Korean logic, “to deter an attack.” To deal with Pyongyang’s nuclear status, we need “a calm-that is to say, non-hysterical-policy discussion,” one that recognizes that even if North Korea refuses to give up its small arsenal, like earlier entrants into the nuclear club it is likely “to find the weapons to be useless.”

The menace of Iran is also one of our own “extravagant imaginings,” Mr. Mueller says. Among other things, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, “has forcefully proclaimed that ‘We do not need these weapons.’ ” But even if Mr. Khamenei turns out to be lying and Iran does develop an arsenal, the Islamic republic, according to Mr. Mueller, will discover “that the bombs are essentially useless and a very considerable waste of money and effort.”

Mr. Mueller’s thesis rests on an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, he repeatedly asserts the uselessness of nuclear weapons. He notes that they have not been used since 1945, even though all the nuclear powers have been in plenty of wars. He also asserts that possessing such weapons invites far more trouble than they are worth. For the big powers, it is the expense. For the little ones, it is the expense along with the ire of their neighbors, which can lead to sanctions, conflict and invasion.

On the other hand, as Mr. Mueller readily concedes, many countries want nuclear weapons. Indeed, many countries-democracies and tyrannies alike-have already made enormous expenditures and taken considerable risks to acquire them. So Mr. Mueller must claim the existence of an “atomic obsession.” World leaders somehow cannot see, as he does, that nuclear weapons have no value. But have so many leaders really been deluded on this point over the past 65 years? Or is Mr. Mueller-someone responsible for running only a college classroom, not a country-the one suffering from a delusion?

The argument of Mr. Mueller’s book reaches self-parody when he argues that “massive exaggerations of the physical effects of nuclear weapons have been very much the rule” throughout the nuclear age. The public is therefore ill-informed, he says, left to believe that a nuclear war would extinguish civilization and primed to worry about the nuclear danger far more than is warranted.

Setting us straight on this score, Mr. Mueller explains that the effects of a nuclear blast are not as bad as we imagine. A suitcase-size nuclear bomb that is detonated “in the middle of Central Park would not be able to destroy any buildings on the park’s periphery.” No doubt that is good news (if true) for those New Yorkers with a view of the park, but it somehow fails to bring much comfort.

Mr. Mueller also offers a thinly sourced disquisition on the health effects of radioactive fallout. Exposure to low doses of radiation, he says, might actually be “beneficial by activating natural coping mechanisms in the body.” Again, it is hard to feel comforted by such a claim.

At a moment when the spread of nuclear weapons is bringing us palpably closer to the day when they might again be used in anger, “Atomic Obsession” deserves serious attention, not for the light it casts on its subject but for the powerful way it illuminates the impulse, in the face of danger, to bury one’s head in the sand.

Another Obama Test on Israel

J-street is a new Washington, DC-based Jewish lobbying group that is seeking a place at the table alongside more venerable organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Started only a year ago with generous “seed money” from the financier George Soros, its first national conference begins this Sunday. The keynote speaker — if he shows up — will be National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones.

The “if” is an important question, for there is a chance, if the White House pays attention to the controversy it would be stepping into, that Jones won’t show. Among the growing list of notables who’ve already dropped off the program’s “honorary host committee” are New York’s two senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. The reason for such distancing isn’t difficult to fathom. J-Street has been engaged in a bit of pretense. It bills itself as “pro-peace” yet is anything but — except, perhaps, if its policy recommendations were ever followed, the peace of the grave.

Consider the Goldstone report, recently approved by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which denounces Israel for committing “crimes against humanity” when it acted decisively in Gaza last winter to defend itself against Hamas rockets being lobbed daily into its territory. J-Street has issued two statements on Goldstone. Neither contains an iota of criticism of a report that even The Economist, not exactly friendly toward Israel, calls a “thimbleful of poison” and the product of “willful blindness.” Instead of condemning this UN travesty, J-Street has treated it with respect, calling upon Israel “to credibly address [its] full range of charges and findings.”

Then there’s the Iranian effort to acquire nuclear weapons, where J-Street has staked out a position to the left of the left. Last year, it launched a petition drive against a congressional resolution calling for tougher inspections of air and sea cargo heading for Iran, calling it “provocative” and “saber rattling.”

More recently, J-Street has applauded the administration policy of “engagement” with the mullahs. There’s nothing especially controversial about that. But J-Street has also adamantly opposed setting what it calls “artificial deadlines” in the talks now under way. Even the administration, as it goes the extra mile in diplomacy to probe Iran’s intentions, is aware that time is an important factor in facing up to the Iranian bomb program. Indeed, the administration has set just such an “artificial deadline” in case Iran is using the negotiations to run out the clock.

J-Street calls itself “pro-Israel,” but on one issue after the next — from the administration’s call for a total freeze on “natural growth” in settlements to its advocacy of direct Israeli talks with Hamas — it embraces positions overwhelmingly rejected by the Israeli public. It even has endorsed staging the play “Seven Jewish Children,” by the British playwright Caryll Churchill, which draws a “direct line” as The New Republic’s James Kirchick has observed, connecting “Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Jews to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

It is difficult to see how the term “pro-Israel” applies. A better term might be “pro-squeezing Israel.” J-Street favors a US policy that would force Israel to take steps long favored by the American and Israeli left that Israel’s democratically elected government has considered time and again and deemed severely wanting.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama spoke of how the US alliance with Israel is based on shared interests and shared values. “Those who threaten Israel,” he said, “threaten us.” Israel, he continued, “has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.”

Yet as president, Obama has been sending more than a few mixed signals and creating doubts about where he really stands. Jones has thus far kept a low profile as Obama’s national-security adviser. Giving a keynote address to the phony “pro-peace” and “pro-Israel” J-Street convocation, if it proceeds, will be a revealing test of the administration’s true intentions.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a Hudson Institute senior fellow, is a resident scholar at the Witherspoon Institute.