FLAWED BY DESIGN: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC.

• Author: Ratnesar, Romesh
• Position: Review

FLAWED BY DESIGN: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC

by Amy Zegart Stanford University Press, $45.00

ON MARCH 24 OF THIS YEAR, one day into the NATO bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, Bill Clinton announced to the nation that he had ruled out one possibility: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo," he said.

That vow was at least in part the consequence of assurances from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who believed Milosevic would cave in quickly once air strikes began. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary William Cohen and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also opposed an invasion. But as the campaign wore on with no end in sight, pressure began to build on the president to authorize the use of ground forces. Soon the consensus among the president's advisers broke down. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger seized control of the inner war council from Albright, convening a meeting with foreign-policy experts critical of the administration, signaling to them that the President was prepared to shift his position. On June 2, Berger and members of the National Security Council met to discuss ground-invasion options. The next day, Clinton was to meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presumably to exact their consent to send in troops, but by then Milosevic had signed an agreement to leave Kosovo. "The president ... was prepared to send ground forces into Kosovo to assure a NATO victory," one former NSC official told The New York Times. "But why did he and his advisers arrive at this conclusion so late in the war?"

The answer can be found, in part, in Amy Zegart's incisive and revealing new book, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC. Though a case can be made that Clintons vacillation on ground troops had a lot to do with his own uncertainty about how to execute a war, Clinton also had to contend with institutional defects which have frustrated every U.S. president since Harry Truman. Though most citizens (and theorists) assume that decisions of foreign policy are made with only the national interest in mind, Zegart argues that is often not the case: While the modern president is the supreme steward of foreign policy, he still receives advice from a multitude of bureaucracies, each behaving according to its self-interest. Indeed, such self-interest is woven into the very design of the NSC, JCS, and CIA. "In an absolute sense, American national security agencies are not...