More on the Intelligence Community

On the heels of Saffires article on the triumphs of the CIA comes an article by David Brooks suggesting that the CIA problem is in how they conduct their business. He calls it scientism.

"This was at a time, just after the war, when economists, urban planners and social engineers believed that human affairs could be understood scientifically, and that the social sciences could come to resemble hard sciences like physics.

If you read C.I.A. literature today, you can still see scientism in full bloom. The tone is cold, formal, depersonalized and laden with jargon. You can sense how the technocratic process has factored out all those insights that may be the product of an individual's intuition and imagination, and emphasized instead the sort of data that can be processed by an organization.

This false scientism was bad enough during the cold war, when the intelligence community failed to anticipate seemingly nonrational events like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it is terrible now in the age of terror, because terror is largely nonrational."

All well and good, and there is a grain of truth to Brooks words. But the accusation is contextless. The reason that the CIA is in trouble is that the Bush Administration would like to blame them for the failure of intelligence that led us into Iraq. Brooks, presumably, believes that even though we haven't found any Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor have we proven any connection between Iraq and Al-Queada, President Bush still made the right call in invading. That this decision, which came from President Bush's "heart," should trump all the "scientism" of the CIA.

"Individuals can use intuition, experience and a feel for the landscape of reality. When you read an individual's essay, you know you're reading one person's best guess, not a falsely authoritative scientific finding."

Yeah but which individual should we trust, Mr. Brooks? Many people's intuition before the war suggested that we had successfully contained Saddam. Should those people have been trusted? Or is it strictly President Bush's intuition we should trust?