Paul R. Pillar
Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2012
Three recent books on national security and the politics of intelligence assessments.
Review Essay
Mar/Apr
2008
Two new books on intelligence reform -- Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and Amy Zegart's Spying Blind -- distort the historical record. A third, by Richard Betts, rightly observes that no matter how good the spies, failures are inevitable.
Roundtable
In this special feature, James Fallows, Fawaz Gerges, Paul R. Pillar, and Jessica Stern respond to John Mueller's article "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?" from the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs and assess the state of the "war on terror" five years after 9/11.
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs eBook, "The U.S. vs. al Qaeda: A History of the War on Terror." Now available for purchase.
Essay
Mar/Apr
2006
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community's former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
