So did Robert Jervis, a fact I find more compelling because Jervis has a four-decade track record of insightful, nonpartisan scholarship about intelligence. Jervis is the author of Why Intelligence Fails, which meticulously dissects both the failure of the IC to foresee the Iranian revolution in 1979—Jervis conducted a postmortem for the CIA that was classified for decades—and the false alarm on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. In the latter case, the IC’s conclusion was sincere, Jervis decided. And it was reasonable.
