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that is, no way of forcing agreement, of isolating an agency that refuses to go along. This safeguards the rights and interests of all agencies, because the agency that does not agree with the others on an issue today may not be the one that objects tomorrow. To ensure that an agency is not coerced, the interagency process emphasizes bargaining and negotiation, steering away from dictating from above or by majority rule. Bargaining has three immediate effects. First, it can require a great deal of time to arrive at positions that everyone can accept. Second, the system gives leverage to any agency that refuses to reach an agreement. In the absence of any override process, the agency that “just says ‘no’” can wield enormous power. Third, the necessity of reaching agreement generates substantial pressure in favor of lowest-common-denominator decisions.

On controversial issues, the system can suffer inertia, as agencies constantly redraft papers that never achieve consensus or that one agency refuses to support, effectively bringing the system to a halt. The only way to break such logjams is for the NSC staff or someone higher—meaning the president and senior appointees—to apply pressure. Without their intervention, the system would spin endlessly if an agency continues to hold out. Senior pressure renews the impetus to reach a conclusion or raises the prospect that officials in the holdout agency will be told to support what the president wants or to resign. But without pressure from above, holdouts suffer no penalty.

Neither the policy community nor the intelligence community is a monolith. Each has multiple players with multiple interests, which do not always coincide with one another. It is important to remember that executive departments are also not monolithic. DOD is clearly divided between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the JCS. Even though the concept of civilian control of the military is a deeply ingrained value, the two parts may not agree. As noted, in the period just before the invasion of Iraq, Army chief of staff General Shinseki held the view that the number of troops that would be needed to occupy Iraq was far larger than what Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had planned. Under the doctrine of civilian control of the military, the secretary prevailed. The State Department is famously divided between the regional bureaus and the functional bureaus, with the regional bureaus tending to dominate. A similar dichotomy can be described for virtually all other departments.

THE ROLE. OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. Policy makers accept the intelligence community as an important part of the system. But the role of intelligence varies with each administration and sometimes with each issue within an administration. The way in which an administration treats intelligence is the key determinant of the role it plays.

Everyone accepts the utility of intelligence as part of the basis on which decisions are made. Again, translating this generality into practice is the important issue. Policy makers have many reasons to find fault with or even to ignore intelligence. They do not necessarily view intelligence in the same way as those who are producing it.

Policy makers also accept that the intelligence community can be called on to carry out certain types of operations. Again, the willingness to use this capacity and the specific types of operations that are deemed acceptable vary with the political leadership. These elected or presidentially appointed leaders must make the final decisions on operations and are held accountable, in a political sense, if the operations fail. To be sure, intelligence officers can and do get their share of the blame, but policy makers perceive that their own costs are much greater. But the nature of the relationship is captured in a rueful saying among intelligence officers: “There are only policy successes and intelligence failures. There are no policy failures and intelligence successes.”

WHO WANTS WHAT?

The fact that the government is not a monolithic organization