From Tapped, some invaluable background perspective on the David Brooks piece I critiqued yesterday. The Brooks argument is a rehash of a 1999 article by Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky, entitled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)." That article's not available online, but there's an excellent precis of it by Laura Rozen in the Washington Monthly from a few months back.
[Schmitt and Shulsky] argue that [Leo] Strauss would have attacked the prevailing trend in U.S. intelligence analysis known as the "social-scientific method," an approach advanced by Sherman Kent, a former Yale history professor and member of the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the C.I.A.). Kent's method, say the authors, urged U.S. intelligence analysts to operate more like social scientists, conducting systematic research and analysis to predict the future behavior of adversaries. But, according to the authors, this method assumes that those foes act according to universal principles. ... Shulsky and Schmitt argue that such a belief system foolishly disregards the most important lesson from Strauss's teachings: that the nature of the regime or government under analysis means everything in trying to predict its intentions. Rogue regimes and dictatorships, they argue, operate under totally different value systems and principles than do democracies like the United States.
The nut of Rozen's article is this question: "Were the neocons fooling themselves? Or were they aware of the thinness of the evidence but willing to use it deceitfully to convince the public--and perhaps the president himself--to support the invasion?" You have to wonder which it is. You also have to wonder if it even matters. It's fascinating, though, to see these conservatives applying relativistic, even postmodern, methodologies to intelligence -- something they rail against in every other field of inquiry. If the shoe fits, wear it, I guess. Another classic instance of the tendency to intellectual whoring that characterizes so much of the right wing these days.