Amid the campaign debates, there's been a heated debate in Congress over a plan to centralize control of all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies, with a combined budget of $40 billion a year, under a new "national intelligence director." Backers of the measure, which is based on the recommendation of the September 11 commission, hope to gain final passage soon.
Undoubtedly America's intelligence system is broken. It failed to see terrorist threats before 9-11 that should have been evident, and then, after 9-11, saw threats coming from Iraq that didn't exist.
But as any good CEO knows, you rarely fix a problem by rearranging boxes on the organizational chart. The real lesson is that when U.S. foreign policy is based mainly on what our spy agencies say, we run huge risks of getting it wrong. The lesson is not new. The CIA was notoriously wrong when it told John F. Kennedy that its plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs "could not fail." And the spy agency never understand the split between China and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Had it done so, we might have avoided the disaster of Vietnam, which was based on the so-called "Domino theory." In the 1980s, the CIA wildly exaggerated Soviet defense strength, leading America to spend hundreds of billions of dollars unnecessarily on new weapons systems.
By all means, let's have better intelligence. But better intelligence is no substitute for better policy. This is especially true when the threat comes from terrorism. There's no finite number of terrorists in the world. At any given time, their number depends on how many people are driven by anger and hate to join their ranks. So imprisoning or killing terrorists based on information from our spy agencies can't be the primary means of preventing future attacks. More important is dealing with the anger and hate. This means, among other things, restarting the Middle East peace process, and shoring up the economies in the region.
Equally fatuous is the notion that we are well protected against nations our spy agencies identify as likely enemies. Terrorists recruit and train all over unstable parts of the world, and move easily. America alone can't police the entire globe. We have to depend on strong alliances, especially to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands. The administration's go-it-alone militarism takes us precisely in the opposite direction.
That the United States suffers from a failure of intelligence is indisputable. But the calamitous state of our spy agencies is only one part of that failure. And creating an intelligence czar won't necessarily make American foreign policy more intelligent.
Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect.
