This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 9th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown. Intelligence failures are real, but fixing those failures won't necessarily fix the bad policies meant to confront threats to our safety and security.

Author Paul Pillar argues that intelligence hasn't played much of a role in many of America's big foreign policy decisions.

His new book is Intelligence in U.S. foreign policy.

He made his case at a Cato Institute Book Forum in October. The book that I wrote is about Intelligence and policy and how it really works, which is not the same as how it works in theory or how the perceived or common wisdom would hold that it works. It's not a memoir, although I would acknowledge it has

a lot of first person for an academic press book and is based on a lot of personal

experience. It's based to begin with on the idea that of all the things that go into sound

foreign and security policy of this country, surely accurate images being held of whatever situation overseas our

decision makers are dealing with is one of the more important ingredients and

that ingredient has seemingly gotten a lot of attention through the years but in a very narrow way.

That way is to talk about intelligence, whether it succeeds or fails, and if it fails, to so-called reform intelligence.

And that's a very narrow conception for a number of reasons I'm going to get to in just a moment.

It's the foundation for a national... I'm going to get to in just a moment.

It's the foundation for a national myth.

All nations have myths.

We've had other ones here in the United States.

And the myth in this case is that when things go awry overseas or foreign threats hitting us here, that's because we simply

did not understand the situation or the threat well enough.

Our decision makers were not properly informed and if we fix the problem,

which is intelligence, then in the future we won't have that It's nice to think that when bad things happen, we'll be gone wars, terrorist attacks, you

name it, that we can avoid a repetition if we find the right fix or reform. The myths based on at least partly on truth, we do have real

intelligence failures, that's for sure. But in several ways it diverges from reality.

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