Ever since the weekend attacks on Israel, media interviewers ask whether this was an intelligence failure. Almost universally, those interviewed have responded it was too early to talk about that. Fair enough, but in the case of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 post mortems began almost immediately.

On the face of it, this was a colossal intelligence failure. How could so many parts of a complex operation come together that one of the world’s best intelligence agencies totally blew it. In the case of 911, for example, a lot fewer people were involved and the operation was heavily compartmented even among followers of al Qa’ida. The invasion had a lot more moving parts, so really, there was no clue? Maybe the postmortem will reveal a couple of missing clues that were ignored by analysts.

May I offer another hypothesis? There are policy failures that the leaders often blame on the intelligence agencies as an intelligence failure. This has happened in our country numerous times Policymakers and Congress of both parties use their access to the media to cast blame on intelligence, and the intelligence organizations are not allowed to object to that characterization. I have seen numerous instances of this in my decades in intelligence. Or sometimes, the intelligence leader gets too close to policymakers that he loses objectivity, such as the was with Iraq and George “Slam Dunk” Tenet.

It is easy to assume intelligence failure given the magnitude of the surprise in Israel, but one must look at the policy performance. Did the right wing Israeli government make policies and resource decisions that set up the intelligence agencies for failure? That will require an honest post mortem.