ParaPundit on Clarke

On Clarke:

ParaPundit has a good post up examining the Clarke claims. My own sense is that they're probably mostly fair. Certainly the impulse to stovepipe--that is, to hear only those parts of the intel picture that support the world view you brought to the table--is one of the biggest challenges in intelligence work. It takes years to get good at this, and an administration lasts only a short four, or eight on the outside. On this topic, I wrote elsewhere:

[T]he administration has several known intel sources, all of which are large corporate bodies of professional men who are devoted to improving their product.

Intel failures are nothing new (see Soviet Union, Unexpected Collapse of the), and in fact, they're part of the game. Still, when you've got several structures in competition (CIA/DIA, for example), with internal procedures to try and filter and improve information, you've got something a bit better than what Ijaz is drawing upon. It's still going to have some glowing failures, intel being intel.

I hope that the civilians in the Bush administration have been learning from their mistakes, of which there have been some several. I'm not sure the situation can be improved by introducing a new crowd of people with a similar ideological bent, who will have to relearn all those lessons about stovepiping... the very ones Clarke is complaining about. But of course, one never knows--it could be that Bush administrators don't learn, or that Kerry could put together a team that would be too wise to make those mistakes.

Human nature being what it is, I doubt either proposition is entirely true. Still, this kind of stovepiping will happen given the amateur nature of our leadership (a four- or even eight- year administration is just really getting good at things by the time it has to vacate office); as a consequence, the best we can do is try to pick people who will tend to stovepipe in the least harmful ways.

For myself, I'd rather have a president at this juncture whose instinct is to go for the throat when it isn't warranted, than one whose instinct is to hang back until a threat is proven beyond a doubt. Others may prefer the one who will insist on proof, and indeed, they may even be right. When the topic is terrorism, I suppose I am distracted by visions of what form that proof might take.

All that said, we as free citizens who love the Republic must be honest and admit that there have been some stiff intel failures. Clarke's claims may be a bit overblown, but they are probably accurate at base: some stovepiping probably did go on with Bush and his close advisors. We can hope they've learned, but like all nature, human nature: Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. That is, "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she always comes back in." The only defense--and it is an especially poor one--is to try to make sure the people who are doing the stovepiping are bringing the right instincts to the table.