Arab Spring & A U.S. Intelligence Failure: Putting the Pieces Together
When Arab Spring began and continued to spread to various Middle Eastern countries, the U.S. intelligence community was caught off guard. By looking at various news sources, there are pieces to the puzzle as to why the intelligence community failed to predict the Arab Spring. In July 2012, the LA Times reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency’s deputy director David Shedd acknowledged a failure within the IC to properly report on a broader range of subjects in the region.
Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also called for the increased analysis of data available through OSINT. At the same time, she criticized the IC for supplying information that was publicly available through news sources. However, she also called for more human intelligence (also known as HUMINT) sources to be positioned in the Middle East.
By expanding its focus to include people within the population as a source for intelligence and by utilizing open source intelligence (OSINT), the intelligence community will be able to better grasp public sentiment. Otherwise, the intelligence community may experience more errors in perception by a limited perspective much like the one they had during the Arab Spring. Arab Spring revealed the intelligence community cannot afford to ignore public sentiment.
The Analyst in the Intelligence Community
To better understand why analysts failed to predict the Arab Spring, it is useful to compare the tasks of an analyst with that of a scholar in connecting the “real world” with the intelligence.
In “Unrest in the Arab World: Four Questions,” Professor Jung Dietrich looks for a reason why the Arab Spring was not predicted because analysts within academics and the intelligence community should have predicted the Arab Spring. According to Jung, a scholar’s “task [is] to observe the “real world” and to analyze how it comes into play.”
Jung points out important facts indicating the U.S. intelligence community should have predicted Arab Spring. With intelligence suggesting such unrest, Jung exposes that U.S. policymakers knew of potential unrest in Iraq and the suspected breakup of Islamic organizations that actually occurred in Egypt. Jung also revealed the availability of intelligence from Middle East scholars which was more adequate than one may have initially thought. At the same time, it was perhaps the analysis, not the data that was inadequate. The intelligence community could have utilized their data in conducting their own analysis.
According to Steven M. Stigall in A Strategy Framework for the Intelligence Analyst, an analyst should incorporate context within their analysis to form a better understanding of a subject; there are no limitations on context as it can concern a time in the past, present, or future or it may concern a variety of other variables—people, politics, economics, etc. As Arab Spring revealed public sentiment can no longer be ignored, intelligence analysts focusing on the Middle East needed to concentrate more on a well-rounded set of contexts.
In The Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East, Peter Berkowitz provides insight into how economics and the lack of education contributed in part to the Arab Spring while other scholars claimed it was the desire for democracy and for advancing Islamic values. According to Harris, Arab Spring is a display of wanting a better life in terms of “economic growth, employment and good governance.” By putting Arab Spring into context, the U.S. intelligence community will possibly be better able to secure future U.S. interests by providing resources like education to the people in the Middle East.
There are times when considering context can prove a situation is beneficial rather than harmful to the U.S. security interests. While the Arab Spring may have raises threats of terrorism against U.S. interests in many Middle Eastern countries, Alistair Harris revealed there was room to believe the Arab Spring may help eliminate threats in Yemen from Al Qa’ida by showing change can happen in the absence of violence.
In the words of Steven Stigall, “all states and actors…are fairly ignorant of the future.” Just like context, time can also be an analyst’s enemy when gathering intelligence. Intelligence failures may simply be inevitable, because of an analyst’s inability to predict the future with certainty. Just as their role was integral as the events unfolded, the intelligence analyst still plays a vital role in putting together the puzzle pieces surrounding this intelligence failure as a preventive measure. The intelligence community can still examine such failures by looking at the connection between the intelligence it had and the event it failed to predict—here, Arab Spring.
Photo by Simon Matzinger on Unsplash
