A less right-wing, insular regime could have avoided the Gaza war. Benjamin Netanyahu’s intelligence failure has parallels to those of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
More than a year before Hamas killed some 1,200 residents of Israel and kidnapped more than 200, Israeli intelligence officers reportedly learned about plans for the attack in extraordinary detail but couldn’t convince their leaders to take preventative action. How could a world-class security apparatus so badly underestimate one of its most dedicated adversaries?
As leaders become more insular and closed-minded, the quality of their information and decisions deteriorates. When security is on the line, the results can be tragic.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s secretive, ideologically rigid leadership style in that way helped undermine Israel’s security and imperil his people. He isn’t the first such world leader whose miscalculations led to such a disaster.
George W. Bush’s administration was another infamous example. His cadre of top advisors on national security, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed the country’s priority was to counter threatening nation-states, by force if necessary. Although intelligence officials repeatedly briefed them and the president on the terrorist threats from a band of Islamic extremists known as Al Qaeda, the danger didn’t match their idea of a top national security concern. Bush therefore failed to order expanded intelligence sharing among agencies or take other steps that experts believe could have helped prevent 9/11.
The administration persisted in this misdirection even after the attack, which Cheney and other advisors treated as an opportunity to pursue their predetermined priorities. The vice president famously shuttled to Langley, Va., to strong-arm CIA analysts into producing reports that could suggest links between Al Qaeda and the troublesome regime in Iraq, leading to the disastrous invasion of that country.
When I joined the CIA in 2010, instructors stressed to my class of new analysts that we must collect differing views before finalizing analytic decisions.
