Foregone conclusions: vested interests and intelligence analysis.

• Author: Freeman, Chas W., Jr.
• Position: Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. - Speech

Editor's Note: Ambassador Chas Freeman was recently in the national spotlight because of his nomination to become Director of the National Intelligence Council and the subsequent storm of criticism that led him to decline the job. In this June 12 speech to DACOR (Diplomatic and Consular Officers Retired) in Washington, he talks about the importance of intelligence analysis to sound statecraft and how it must be dispassionate, non-polemic, objective, and divorced from political pressures--the critical assessor, not the designated cheerleader, of policy results. He examines in particular the influence of the "Likud Lobby" and the shaky assumptions that he believes underlie U.S. policy in Afghanistan.--Ed.

Not so long ago--before I was sprayed by political skunks and had to excuse myself to avoid subjecting others to the stench of political vilification--I had occasion to spend some time thinking about intelligence, in the sense of the analysis of information relevant to statecraft. This is an important topic under any circumstance. It is all the more so in the wake of the string of disasters that persistent inattentiveness to foreign trends and events, occasional analytical misjudgments, and frequent policy miscalculations have brought us in recent years.

In broad terms, the intelligence community provides the sensory apparatus of the state, without which the inner reaches of our government are blind, deaf, numb, and heedless of threats and opportunities alike. Intelligence agencies assure situational awareness and alertness to trends. Our executive branch relies on the analytical product of the intelligence community--how it understands and communicates the information it notices--to ensure that policymaking is on sound factual and psychological ground. Once in a great while, Congress does the same. At its best, analysis can correct the conventional wisdom and the preconceptions by which we misconstrue, misperceive, or fail to notice foreign trends and events of import. At its worst, it can fortify national denial and complacency, perpetuate blind spots, attribute our own hopes, fears, and motivations to foreigners who do not share them, or reinforce ill-founded self-congratulation. It can alert us to the dangers and opportunities change brings or it can sedate us with comforting affirmations that assume the durability of the status quo. It can protect us from harm and enable us to position ourselves to national advantage or it can make us vulnerable and prone to policy pratfalls.

Intelligence analysis, of which diplomatic analysis is a subset and to which some here have contributed much, is, in short, central to our republic's formulation and conduct of successful policy. In my experience, the analysts in our intelligence community are, by and large, exceptionally able people who are dedicated to providing us with essential insights into foreign realities and capable of doing so. But, for our leaders to be able correctly to judge what we should do and how they should adjust those moral compasses and approaches they inherit from predecessors, our best informed and most free-thinking analysts must be free to reach considered judgments without censorship and without compulsion. The analytical process must strive to understand and portray reality as dispassionate examination finds it to be, not as ideology or interested parties stipulate it should or must be. It matters greatly whether our executive branch and Congress demand analysts' honest inferences or insist that they be told only what they or powerful constituencies in our body politic want to hear.

Pressures of Political Correctness

As the fate of the Department of State's China hands in the middle of the twentieth century famously attests, sustaining objectivity against the pressures of political correctness has never been easy. The China hands have been far from alone; others with unwelcome expertise and insight into foreign events have met similar punishment and ostracism. To be right when what you say is politically wrong is to invite punishment from the guardians of political correctness. No surprise there. But the very notion that analysis should be wertfrei--value-free--has come under strong attack in recent years. Three months ago, for example, an op-ed in the now mostly neo-con editorial pages of the Washington Post charged me with the epistemological sin of "realism," arguing that my lack of a passionate attachment to Israel rendered me incapable of correctly assessing the impact of its policies on U.S. interests. It is clear that, in the view of some, selective apology or denunciation of foreign behavior, not the prediction of it or its effects on our country and its interests, are what intelligence work should be all about.

For such polemicists, politically correct delusion is preferable to a realistic view of the external world as the basis of policy. The splendid results of the approach they have advocated are visible around the globe but nowhere more than in the stable, secular democracy that has emerged in Iraq, the shriveling of Islamic extremism our invasion and occupation of...