(if I were the) King of the Forest

The chaos we are seeing — on the ground and in our own thinking — reflects the dissolution of the “nation” into more fluid and less tractable identities and spheres of interest. Al Quaeda is not a country, and yet in many circumstances it seems to define and control a “nation” of people who pledge it their loyalty. Iraq was not Al Quaeda, but were they really distinct — two “nations” apart — or were they part of the larger Arab — or was it Islamic? — “nation” to which both claim allegiance and from which the “clash of civilizations” is arising? Is the UAE a country allied with the United States, or is it a culture allied with Arabia or with Islam?

We routinely view the problem of illegal immigration effectively as one of importing labor. But it is a much more useful paradigm to view it as exporting work, despite the fact that the work doesn’t actually leave the country … If we view illegal immigration as an illicit export of jobs rather than as in illicit import of people, we see a different set of solutions to the problem.

In the aftermath of the Iraqi election, as the new parliament worked through the political compromises and alliances required to form a stable government, The New York Times ran a “news analysis” describing the difficulties and dangers induced by the relative split among the various political constituencies in the vote – by the lack of a clear mandate for one group to rule.

Although the analysis itself was unobjectionable and even somewhat balanced – labeling something “analysis”, even in the news section, reduces the need for a veneer of objectivity – I found it objectionable because of the way it was labeled: the headline placed on the story communicated a clear and critical bias against the notion that the election had been successful that was not supported by the report itself.

It occurs to me (and I am sure to others) that an effective approach to getting the most out of the current negotiating opportunity in the middle-east would be for the President to appoint a special envoy rather than to handle it through the Secretary of State and the State Department. That would not only leave the Secretary free to focus her attentions on the rest of the war on terror but would also give the negotiator both additional moral authority (as the personal appointment of the President and his personal representative) and less “official” baggage (as someone not actively engaged in other aspects of American foreign policy).

My nominee for the post: Bill Clinton.

Since I spent many years working within large bureaucracies – the United States Air Force and Abbot Laboratories – and participated in endless rounds of reorganization and “quality improvement” programs in vain attempts to make those bureaucracies “efficient” and “effective”, I have some insight into how such bureaucratic organizations – and our intelligence services fit that description – fail.

For that reason, and because I am outside the political fray and therefore somewhat more dispassionate than our elected representatives, I prepared a proposal for restructuring the intelligence services that I believe balances the conflicting demands we place on them. I admit I have no experience in intelligence collection or analysis, and so my thinking is based strictly on my observations of our political culture, my experience with large bureaucratic organizations, and my imagination about how intelligence works. Further, I am not arrogant enough to believe that my proposal is optimum or even very good. But it seems to me better than what I’ve heard so far coming from Washington, and I hope it might provide some useful insights to improve the other schemes that are being debated.

I listened to the debates in the 2004 presidential election hoping to hear that one of the candidates was not as pathetic as they appeared. I was disappointed.
During the “debate” on national security issues in particular not only was neither candidate personally reassuring, but there seemed to be almost no substance to the actual argument. That was particularly frustrating because the talking heads of the media, and all the news stories the following day, kept referring to the “substantive” discussion. I wondered if I’d somehow tuned in to the Cliff Notes version of the debate, or perhaps the “Debate for Dummies” channel.

At one point during the Bush/Kerry presidential campaign, well after it was clear we would not find any significant stash of chemical or biological or nuclear agents in Iraq, The Boston Globe published an editorial in which they opined that what we needed to know about John Kerry was what he would have done about Iraq “knowing what he knows now”. I thought the suggestion was rather stupid: no one ever gets to go back and redo their important decisions based on what he learns later. The question we really needed answered was how John Kerry would make decisions in the face of inevitable ambiguity, not how he would re-think those decisions in the clarity of hindsight.

In all the criticism I have heard about the analysis and use of the Iraq intelligence, and especially about the political decisions based on that intelligence, the one thing that never seems to be mentioned is the context in which that analysis and decision-making was taking place. We talk about it as if the analysis and decision-making process were a matter only of political consequence, or as if the option to do nothing implied zero cost so the only question to answer was whether doing something – that is whether going to war – would make things better or worse. But that is not the environment in which events unfolded.

When the commission investigating the events leading up to the World Trade Center attack released their interim staff report headlines across the country declared that it “contradicted” what the President had said about Iraqi involvement in the attacks – and when the President and his staff disputed that contention the story became the “dispute” between he and the commission rather than what the commission had actually found.

After looking at what the report actually said I concluded that there was not, in fact, a dispute: what the report said and what President Bush had said were consistent; the only contradiction was between what the report said and the words that the news media, against the evidence, insisted on putting into the President’s mouth. I believe that represents a kind of bias that ill-serves us. When we are debating such important matters as war and peace we need and deserve the unblemished truth.

The war in Iraq has elicited all kinds of nonsense from people on both sides of the issue, and almost every day I find myself exasperated by someone missing the point. Often missing the point requires a pointed effort of will – as with people who insist the entire war effort was about oil; if all we wanted was Iraqi oil by far our best policy by any measure would have been to lift sanctions and buy it – but sometimes underlying patterns are obscured by superficial features and are reasonably missed.