Analysis-itis

Walter Pincus reported yesterday about Prof. Kenneth Lieberthal’s new Brookings study on presidential decision-making and the intelligence community. The study concludes that President Bush’s love for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) created problems in the analytical community because intelligence analysts spent too much time trying to craft the type of sexed up missives that might make the PDB and thus land on the Big Kahuna’s desk.

As the study puts it, “President George W. Bush elevated the PDB to an unprecedented level of importance, which had the unintended effect of skewing intelligence production away from deeper research and arms-length analysis to being driven by the latest, attention-grabbing clandestine reports from the field.”

This bias toward breathless provocation, of course, does not just exist within the government. One of my favorite methodological hobby horses, North Korea, offers a perfect example.

Anybody claiming to interpret Pyongyang’s behavior as part of this or that North Korean grand strategy should face the most spirited skepticism the foreign policy community can muster. It is impossible, even for the most astute scrutinizers, to know exactly what North Korea’s motives and future plans are.

It is for precisely this reason, however, that North Korea is the gift that never stops giving. The Hermit Kingdom has everything: public (and thus high-level governmental) attention, nuclear weapons, easily-caricatured leaders, regional significance, and more. But since there is so little information available about the regime, you can come up with whatever interpretation of Pyongyang’s behavior you want and you’ll never be wrong.

North Korea’s recent belligerence is an attempt by Kim Jong Il to retain control over the military and ensure a smooth transition to his son? F*** yeah, why not! Pump out 700 words and send it to the Washington Post. Boom. Done.

Even the most beautifully stitched analyses of North Korea (and, for that matter, any other policy issue) consist of political forecasts and guesswork. The perspectives provided by analysts, while often though-provoking, may be nothing more than an artificial ordering of disorder and uncertainty.

Caveat emptor.