In his memoir, Michael Morell, a veteran CIA officer who spent part of the 1990s serving in the unit tasked with monitoring al-Qaeda, describes his experience of America’s war on terror. In his review, Gabriel Schoenfeld describes the book as both compelling and informative, but suggests that it does not hold the agency to sufficient scrutiny:

Neither the twin embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 nor the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 prompted [the then-CIA director George] Tenet to return to the problem [of the threat of al-Qaeda]. Only after 9/11 did the CIA issue a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on terrorism. Tenet was not exactly shaking the trees on this critical subject. . . .

But beyond [the frequent] superficiality [of CIA analysis that Morell himself admits], there was the long and familiar record of CIA analytical and collection failures. Among other things, the agency missed the first Soviet atomic-bomb test in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the first Soviet H-bomb in 1953, the outbreak of the Suez war in 1956, the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Egyptian attack that started the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the Iranian revolution that same year. Understanding secretive adversaries is a very difficult challenge, and even the best spy agencies in the world regularly get even the most important questions wrong. In the wake of the 9/11 lapse and all previous lapses, President George W. Bush and his men would have been irresponsible if they did not look at CIA judgments sideways and upside down.

While casting aspersions on agency outsiders, Morell conspicuously elides those episodes where insiders themselves appear to politicize intelligence. The most notorious recent example is the declaration in the unclassified summary of the 2007 NIE that “we judge with high confidence that, in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear-weapons program.” This startling finding was reached, as a footnote reveals, by excluding from consideration “Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.” In other words, relying on a preposterously narrow definition of a “nuclear-weapons program,” the NIE injected a profoundly misleading assertion into the bloodstream of national debate, thereby altering the direction of American policy.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.