John Derbyshire's March Diary on National Review Online

Derbyshire:

As he often does, today John Derbyshire closes his column with a brainteaser:

Augustus De Morgan, the 19th-century English mathematician (whose name, as Martin Gardner pointed out, is an anagram of "O Gus, tug a mean surd!"), noticed that he was x years old in the year x2. Which year was he born in?

The answer appears to be 1806. If he was born in 1806, he would be 43 in 1849, which is the square of 43.

I'm pleased to have gotten this much of it correct, considering how little use I've ever had for mathematics. Beyond a deep and moving study of probability theory, gambling being the only use I've ever had for math, I admit to a remarkable ignorance on the topic.

spectator.co.uk

Aidan Hartley:

A too-rare treat, Aidan Hartley has a piece in this week's London Spectator. He's writing on sacrifices, accidental and intentional, such as are made in pursuit of a great goal:

While suffering nicotine cold turkey, I tried to hunt down some fag butts in the rubbish bin, only to find the farm workers had beaten me to it. I also discovered a bottle of cooking sherry in the kitchen cupboard last night. Not even I will sink that low.

And the reason I'm undergoing these little trials is to feed my one big indulgence. At last we have secured our own small patch of Laikipia's wilderness. It's cost everything we have and a lot more besides.

If you're looking for a good book, let me suggest Hartley's The Zanzibar Chest. It's the finest book I've read on Africa in a very long time. It's an extraordinary look into Africa, from the colonialism of his father's day to the blood of Rwanda. It's also just a fine read, well written and enthralling.

bloodletting.blog-city.com

Nailing it Down:

As one of you pointed out to me in email, Doc Russia nails it. I spend a lot of time talking in reasoned tones to people, trying hard to be fair to both sides of arguments, when I often wonder why we're arguing at all. I think he's got why:

I will never forget the feeling of the cold air inside the hull of the aircraft flowing out past my feet, as the hot and humid air of Cuba swarmed into my face. It was January, and the warmth of the air was alien itself. I stepped out of that craft, and onto a different planet. It was the beginnning of a dark Odyssey, 357 days which would change me, my life, and the way I looked at the world forever.

Over the course of the following year, I was exposed to an alternate reality. Day after day, I stood watch on the fenceline, and peered into it. I stood at the edge of a communist regime, and I saw what it produced. It was real. It was reality. In this reality, the evil in man had triumphed. Years before I was born, a corrupt idea was propogated, descended on this isle, and took root. It deceived the willingly gullible, and the naive. It propelled the vicious to power. It has condemned those under it's authority. So much suffereing, so many lives consumed.

I lived for a time in the People's Republic of China, and I had the same experience as Doc except from the inside. I saw what it was like for decent people, who were trying to get along, laugh, and do right by their families. It was brutal in a way I've never managed to put into words, and all people could tell me was how much better things were than they'd been ten years since. I met North Koreans there, who could only show me how happy they were to enjoy this lesser, easier tyranny.

Aristotle wrote that you can't even discuss ethics with people who lack certain basic experiences. Like us, the Greeks learned by standing on the wall--or, in the phalanx, by being the wall for a while. That's what we still ask some young men to volunteer to do. It's what we volunteered to do, not understanding what it is we were agreeing to become.

Tomorrow, in the nations capitol, many "men of importance" will put on expensive suits over expensive shoes, and straighten their very fashionable ties. They will accuse, insinuate, and feign moral repulsion. They will elocute and posture before cameras and a national audience about what who knew, what who said, and what they think it means.

Tomorrow, west of Baghdad, young men in patterns designed by computers will not accuse or insinuate. They will not feign moral repulsion, and there will be no cameras around to record them. They will not elocute or posture.

They will tie their boots on tight, check their weapons, and carry on.

I sometimes wonder if you even can explain it. I carry on trying, because it's so important that people understand. There is a sense in so many Americans that the Republic is eternal and unbreakable. There is a sense that the world is safe, if we could just control a few criminals, the way that an American state or city can be safe, if you just police it a bit better. They see the darkness but not the depths. It's like peering into the night sky, which is so deep that it looks flat; and you can't feel just how far you could fall into it and not find another garden.

Go listen to the Doc. He says it better.

InstaPundit.Com

Oof!:

Via The Sage of Knoxville, we have this from David Frum:

This administration came into office to discover that al Qaeda had been allowed to grow into a full-blown menace. It lost six precious weeks to the Florida recount--and then weeks after Inauguration Day to the go-slow confirmation procedures of a 50-50 Senate. As late as the summer of 2001, pitifully few of Bush's own people had taken their jobs at State, Defense, and the NSC. Then it was hit by 9/11. And now, now the same people who allowed al Qaeda to grow up, who delayed the staffing of the administration, who did nothing when it was their turn to act, who said nothing when they could have spoken in advance of the attack--these same people accuse George Bush of doing too little? There's a long answer to give folks like that--and also a short one. And the short one is: How dare you?

That looks wholly fair to me, including the wrath. I have said that I find Clarke's charges to be credible, even if the man is not: they match a lot of what we see in other sources. This reply is equally honest, and damning.

AnAmericanSoldier

Fitness Tips:

A few days back I linked to An American Soldier. The blog is down for the next few days, but even so, you might go read through some of the back entries for fitness tips.

The entry on pushups is a good one. I normally do 150 pushups a day as part of the USMC "Daily 16." Drill Sergeant Rob suggests doing pyramids as a change. If you take the time to add 5+6+7+8...20, and then step down 20+19+18...5, you get 400 pushups. Yet, since you're never doing more than 20 at a time, it's managable. I've tried it the last three sessions. The first time, I was barely pushing out the last "six" and "five," but by today, I combined the 9-5s on the way down (for a total of 35 pushups) to speed up the drill. I can feel a difference in a short time.

Plus, it's kind of cool to do that many pushups. It's been years since I have done hundreds of pushups a day; makes me feel like a kid again.

For that cause, I'm adding the Sarge to the blogroll down and right. Keep up the good work.

The Liberal Conspiracy - Satire, Informed Commentary and 9-11 Research

Uzbek Bombings:

Sovay has been following the reports on today's Uzbek suicide bombers. She thinks the fault may lie with the brutality of the dictator:

By supporting a repressive dictator, while claiming to champion freedom and democracy, the U.S. proves once again to the Muslim world that its rhetoric is empty, which deals a blow to our credibility. Karimov's repression has also fueled the radicalization of Muslims in the country....

The attacks that have so far killed 19 people may be aimed more at a repressive government than at an ally of the United States. It'll also be interesting to see who exactly was behind these bombings: a reconstituted Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Hizb-ut-Tahrir or another group.

I'll go out on a limb here and wager that it wasn't Hizb-ut-Tahrir. For one thing, HuT relies upon a stance that avoids militism in order to maintain its havens in the West, such as London, from whence it publishes Khilafah magazine bi-monthly. It's linked to terrorist groups from Uzbekistan to Algeria, and is a terrorist-supporting organization, but it provides moral rather than physical support. In this way they are able to provide legally untouchable propaganda outfits and act as funnels for recruitment without risking being shut down or deported. I'd be at least mildly surprised to discover that they had suddenly abandoned this strategy at this late date. As they themselves said in reference to charges by the gov't of Uzbekistan:

The world knows that Hizb ut-Tahrir is a political party based on Islam and advocates change through intellectual and political activity. It has never used violence since its establishment in Jerusalem in 1953, despite the severe torture, oppression and murder that its members have faced by the corrupt rulers of the Muslim countries.

More to the point, there's no indication in their literature that they've been building up toward such a major shift. You can read their documents online in a number of countries; Google will take you to most of them, but don't miss 1924, which isn't as obviously an outlet of theirs. If the Party of Liberation was going to turn that sharply, I'd have expected some statements that would be used as justification for the policy shift. I haven't seen anything like that.

UPDATE: The Argus has a post on topic. Hat tip: The Agonist, who has some analysis of his own.

UPDATE: Turns out Doc Russia has family ties to Uzbekistan. He thinks the President-is-a-tyrant line doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

The Texas Mercury

Rules Repost:

Just because I haven't done it in a while, allow me to repost the rules for the comments section. I take these in whole body from The Texas Mercury's editorial policy:

As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.

Carry on.

Politics

Politics:

I've begun a "Politics 2004" links section, which will be around until the election. For now it has just two links--the link to the Honorable Zell Miller's website, and the link to "Democrats for Bush," an organization for "moderate/conservative Democrats" who endorse the President's reelection. This is the weblog of a Southern Democrat, which puts me in that group somewhere.

As we move along toward the election, I may endorse other candidates. So far, I haven't.

USSOCOM in Sahara

SOCOM in the Sahara:

This is a particularly interesting piece about the efforts of US Special Forces in West Africa. The Reuters bias is present as usual--the piece is entitled "Nomads fear U.S. forces draw bandits to Sahara," and focuses on that topic, mentioning only in passing that the "bandits" are actually an Algerian terrorist group that has designs to topple the governments in Algeria and Mauritania. Nevertheless, it makes a good read:

Lying in the sand, their AK-47s trained on some scrap metal and cardboard cut-outs, the Malian platoon held their fire as three donkeys stumbled into the kill zone.

"There are burros in my line of vision," an American voice crackled over the radio. "We don't want to kill nobody's livestock."

The elite U.S. Special Forces who have been teaching Timbuktu's 512th Motorised Infantry Company to destroy enemy camps like to be thought of as "warrior diplomats", culturally sensitive and a cut above the rest of the military.

In the inhospitable terrain of the Sahara Desert, bouncing across the dunes in a Land Rover chasing stubborn donkeys out of danger is the least they can do for the local economy.

This is one of the more interesting fronts in the GWOT, and one about which you hear little.

Stryker

Stryker:

Reports are coming in that a Stryker unit has been hit by guerrillas in Mosul:

Insurgents have fired two rocket-propelled grenades at a U.S. military vehicle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, setting it on fire, witnesses have said.

More blasts shook the wheeled Stryker armoured vehicle, apparently as its ammunition exploded. There was no immediate word on casualties in the attack in the west of the city.

A passer-by, Mahmoud Ibrahim, 40, said he had seen three attackers in a car fire an RPG at the Stryker as it went down a side street in a western district of Mosul on Sunday. Another RPG was fired at the U.S. vehicle moments later.

"I saw the Stryker burning," he said. "I saw nobody getting out of the vehicle."

Why was the Stryker a good idea again? RPGs roll off the heavies, and thanks to the USSR, there are enough RPGs hanging around that we'll probably never fight anywhere we don't encounter them. If this report is true, and you can take a Stryker out with nothing better than this, it sounds like a pretty sorry fighting vehicle. The idea is to bring mobility and firepower to the enemy, not to get our people killed by putting them in a great big, lightly armored target.

UPDATE: The official US military report on this says it was just a fuel can that caught fire, causing the Stryker to burn. The crew escaped. That's a much more managable problem than an RPG penetrating to the ammuntion.

UPDATE: Eric, in the comments, points to Strykernews, which--thanks to Todd--is run by civilians associated with the Stryker Brigade by friendship or family ties.

From AFP:

Iraqi Booksellers:

This is an AFP report that--as I don't see it available in English on the web right now--I'm going to post in whole body:

Baghdadis turn to political, religious books once banned under Saddam

BAGHDAD, March 28 (AFP) - Iraqis are buying political and religious
books and snapping up satellite dishes once banned under the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, to quench a thirst for information they were once denied.

On the famed Mutanabi Street book market of Baghdad, shopkeepers and
vendors who work right off the pavement shrug off any concern about the
sky-rocketing sales of satellite dishes since the end of the US-led war
to oust Saddam a year ago.

'People are buying more books since the end of the war,' said Mohammed
al-Yawi, who owns Al-Naktha, one of the oldest bookshops in Baghdad.

'Foreign languages are top sellers, particularly English manuals, and
religious and political books are in much demand because they were
banned by Saddam,' said Yawi, who serves clients from across Baghdad.

Ayssar al-Kobaissi specialises in the sale of legal books.

He said business has been brisk since the US-led coalition brought down
Saddam's regime and that book sales are often influenced by what the
Iraqis see on television thanks to the satellite dishes they now own.

'The day after religious programmes are shown on television, clients
come in here to buy books' he said.

Iraqis, he said, are spurred into buying books for both political and
economic reasons.

'The price of books is down because there are no sales taxes,' he said,
about import tariffs that have been suspended since the fall of the
regime.

'People also can buy whatever their hearts desire. There are no police
controls,' he said.

Religious books, once a forbidden fruit, are also back on the shelves.

Copies of the Koran, Islam's holy book, particularly bilingual
Arabic-English editions, sell like hot cakes on Mutanabi Street,
particularly for US troops occupying Baghdad who shop there with their
interpreters.

At the Shahbandar cafe, a favourite haunt of bookworms, academics and
artists, Amir al-Mosuli believes firmly that Iraq's older generation
will never stop reading.

'We are addicted to books,' said Mosuli, who translates English
literature classics into Arabic.

'Yes, people do watch television more than before because they now have
access to all the (once banned) channels but that does not keep them
from reading,' he said.

Mosuli believes that many Iraqis have turned to religious books 'to seek
solace from the crisis facing our society'.

'People can come to this coffee shop to get away from their families,
read and forget the situation,' he said.

Many Iraqis seek their escape in periodicals that are piled up high on
dusty plastic sheets dottin the sidewalk on Mutanabi Street: faded
copies of French fashion magazines, bodybuilding publications from the
United States and even an old edition of the German weekly Der Spiegel
with a picture of the late actress Marlene Dietrich on the cover.

One sidewalk vendor offers pre-war schoolbooks rife with pictures of the
ousted dictator side by side with Saddam-free school manuals that were
printed after the end of the war last April.

Partisans of political parties outlawed under Saddam also have their say
now on Mutanabi Street, where communist literature is among that on
offer.

There is literally something for everyone, from a discourse on military
strategy by an ex-Soviet army officer to books on wanted terrorist
mastermind Osama bin Laden, the memoirs of a former Saddam advisor,
biographies of Iran's late spiritual guide Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
and the latest manuals on information technology.

It's hard to think of a more hopeful sign than this.

bloodletting.blog-city.com

Doc Russia:

Doc's going to get a big head, but I'm going to cite him twice in one night. Off at Bloodletting, he has determined that the 9/11 hearings are a waste of time:

The key to our struggle for survival, and the survival of civilization lies ahead of us, beyond the dark horizon, in the boots of the United States Marines, and not behind us in the rubble of two towers, or the Congressional chambers discussing it.

My own disinterest in the hearings is rooted in this instinct. The question now is finding and destroying the enemy. Every moment spent trying to assign blame for 9/11 is a moment not spent doing that. Praise God, as we used to say, and pass the ammunition.

European and Pacific Stars & Stripes

That Spring Offensive Is Real:

Now we know that the rumored Spring Offensive is for real:

Following the lead elements of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, which arrived last week, 2,200 more troops are heading into the region from their Navy expeditionary strike group in the Persian Gulf to help fight against al-Qaida and other anti-coalition forces, according to military officials.

That's the 22nd MEU (SOC) to you, thanks aye. If you don't know what a "Mew-sock" is, here's what I wrote about it back during "major combat operations":

Marine Corps MEU (SOC): MEU stands for "Marine Expeditionary Unit," and (SOC) stands for "Special Operations Capable." The MEU is one of several MAGTFs (Marine Corps Air/Ground Task Forces). A MAGTF is a grouping of no set size, consisting of a group of Marine Corps infantry, possibly with attached armor or other mechanized assets, linked to a group of Marine Corps Air. The largest of these MAGTFs is the Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF), which is at least a reinforced division of Marines coupled with a full wing of Marine Air. The MEU is smaller than the MEF. SOC means that the entire MEU, every last member down to the cooks and postal workers, are trained in special operations procedures, and tested according to standards even more rigorous than USMC standard--which is, it ought to be remarked, a standard already far higher than the Army's. An MEU (SOC) is really an army that can be deployed anywhere, at any time, instantly: and, having arrived wherever it wants to be, is possessed of sufficient firepower to hold off whatever forces may be directed against it until such time as it can be relieved. They aren't commandos, and they aren't intended for sabotage missions. They are, themselves, a second front, to be opened anywhere the President wants them.

The deployment of a MEU (SOC) is always an event to mark on your calendar. Change follows.

Sharp Knife

Link Day:

Since this seems to be link day, let me point you to Sharp Knife. This goes with the "Ten Years On" post, below. This is what I look for in a President, before and above absolutely everything else: courage, and the imagination to see a freer world and the road there.

UPDATE: I see that I am belatedly noticing Mark Steyn's column on topic.

bloodletting.blog-city.com

Ooh-Rah!

Bloodletting is the site for to-the-minute analysis on USMC ops in Fallujah. Our occasional commentor, JarHeadDad, is there to provide on-site views from the "Grunt," as he proudly puts it. I don't have anything Doc Russia hasn't got, so for now at least, I'll leave it to him.

The U.S. and the Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Information, Intelligence and the U.S. Response

Ten Years On:

The Rwanda genocide took place ten years ago. George Washington University has released a new study, which includes access to newly declassified documents and previously unavailable insights. The study can be read here.

Its conclusions are mixed. The analysts were greatly impressed by the intelligence resources available to the Clinton Administration.

[C]onsiderable U.S. resources-diplomatic, intelligence and military-and sizable bureaucracies of the U.S. government-were trained on Rwanda. This system collected and analyzed information and sent it up to decision-makers so that all options could be properly considered and 'on the table'..... Despite Rwanda's low ranking in importance to U.S. interests, Clinton Administration officials had tremendous capacity to be informed--and were informed--about the slaughter there; as noted author Samantha Power writes "any failure to fully appreciate the genocide stemmed from political, moral, and imaginative weaknesses, not informational ones."

From the conclusion:

In sum, the routine-let alone crisis-performance of diplomats, intelligence officers and systems, and military and defense personnel yielded enough information for policy recommendations and decisions. That the Clinton Administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda.

Why, then, did they choose not to act? Was it because they were "internationalists," and other countries had no interest in or will for intervention? The report does suggest this is part of the answer:

While some countries argued early for action, few actually ever brought any means to bear-the "lack of resources and political commitment" was "a failure by the United Nations system as a whole" as the Independent Inquiry on the UN noted. The U.S. did not encourage a UN response because it saw two potential outcomes: the authorization of a new UN force and a new mandate without the means to implement either; and worse, the very real possibility of the U.S. having to bail out a failed UN mission. For the recently-burned Clinton Administration, this looked like Somalia redux.

Finally, though, the blame falls on:

[T]he structure and personalities of U.S. decision-making during that late spring of 1994 when hundreds of thousands were killed as the U.S. and other nations stood by.

There are lessons here for the future. Intelligence is only part of the answer to any problem: "political, moral, and imaginative weakness" can undo even the best our Intelligence service careerists can provide. The Rwandan genocide is almost a mirror image of the Iraq invasion: the intelligence was spot on, and correctly interpreted and analyzed by the Administration. However, due to a lack of moral and political courage, as well as an inability to understand and use military force, the US (non)response allowed hundreds of thousands to die.

In Iraq, the intelligence was murky; the parts of the intelligence that were strongest were ignored by the Administration in favor of the parts that fit their own picture best; but their moral and political courage, and ability both to imagine a better future and the military means to bring it about, these things were unmatched in recent history. As a consequence, Rwanda ended in the worst genocide of recent decades; Iraq, though it is too soon to say it has ended, has emerged from war with the first chance at liberty and human freedom it has known.

There are those among you--Deuddersun, I recall, asked the question directly--who wonder how I can support George W. Bush in spite of his many mistakes and flaws. This is why.

KeepMedia | Esquire:Hired Guns

Life in the Mercenary Service:

Thanks to Doc Russia, I read this article from Esquire, entitled "Hired Guns."

The pay was good--up to almost $155,000 a year, most of it tax free, plus full expenses--but Iraq is a dangerous place to live. So dangerous that DynCorp also had to hire security contractors, many of them veterans of elite special-operations units in the U. S. military, to keep the cops from getting killed once they got there....

A moment later, we made our pit stop for guns. I was busy scribbling in my notebook when one of Kelly McCann's men, a former marine sniper named Shane Schmidt, walked over with an AK-47. Do you know how this works? he asked. I nodded. The week before, Kelly had shown me the basics on his firing range. (Designed by the Soviets to be effective in the hands of teenaged peasants, the Kalashnikov is not a complicated weapon.) Schmidt handed the gun to me. "Take care of it," he said. "If we get hit, don't panic. Collect your thoughts and shoot back."

He stepped back a foot and narrowed his eyes, sizing me up to see if I was the sort of person who might start pulling the trigger indiscriminately once trouble started. "Select your fire. You've got sixty rounds of Iraqi-made ammunition. That's it. Make each one count." I said I would, then racked a cartridge into the chamber, pushed the selector to safe, and got in the car.

It's not all guns and glory. Lots of contractors are back Stateside, where the taxes are outrageous and the guns are frequently banned by various levels of government. Still, there's work to be had if you've got the right skills. In addition to DynCorp, MPRI is a good opportunity if you're looking for this kind of work. There are some British outfits, too, including Sandline.

Tactical Information Operations

Tactical Information Operations:

Captain Daniel Morgan writes for Army Times on "lessons learned" in Iraq. He writes on everything, top to bottom, but the part that interests me most is how IO (Information Operations) play out at the company level.

Information operations are simple at the company level. IO has two purposes. First, you must distribute information to the people. Uninformed citizens in a country we just subjugated in war have the potential to demonstrate and possibly riot. You must inform them of your goals and actions. Second, IO involves not only passing out information, it requires the collection of information. The development of an informed populace and involvement of community leaders by a commander leads to information about hostile threats and benevolent projects.

The first step in CMO/IO [Civil-Military Operations / Information Operations] is to identify in priority areas to be funded for CMO. Simultaneously, commanders need situational understanding of the mindset of the sector. There are many TTPs that help in accomplishing this assessment. First, commanders need to determine who can help them. I broke my focal groups into business, education, political, and religious. Since we were the first forces into Mosul, Iraq, my soldiers and I had to get out into the streets and meet people. We developed a "list of influence" and began developing relationships.

On 13 September 2003, one of my platoons was ambushed, wounding three of my soldiers. The platoon was ambushed in a congested urban area with narrow alleys. After linking up with the platoon and conducting an aerial medical evacuation, a member of an Iraqi political party called me and said he saw the ambush and knew the attackers. The attackers were not home, but these men watched the houses of the attackers for 48 hours. They called me at 0200 to inform me they were home. The brigade commander gave us approval to conduct a cordon and search. We infiltrated the neighborhood, linked up with our "informants," and grabbed the attacker. This ambush cost the leg of one of my soldiers and through relationships we caught the culprit.

Leaders must understand the environment prior to committing blindly to some CMO plan. I had no true understanding of the mindset of the citizens in my sector. In addition, there were no performance measures of effectiveness to determine any success we were having in our efforts. Consequently, I developed a survey of attitudes and needs in Arabic that was common across all my sub-sectors. My soldiers hated this at first, but in the end we saw where we needed to be and what we needed to do. This situational understanding is vital to CMO/IO.

I imagine most bloggers think of IO as being propaganda and disinformation, played at the wide strategic level. It's that too, of course, but it is integrated into US military competency all the way to the ground.

Hat tip: Chapomatic.

Grim's Hall

Send the Texas Rangers!

The Sage of Knoxville has a post up excoriating MSNBC for a fairly pathetic mistake:

BUSH CAN'T GET A BREAK: Now he's being blamed for not invading Afghanistan in 1998! Here's the relevant passage from MSNBC:

The report revealed that in a previously undisclosed secret diplomatic mission, Saudi Arabia won a commitment from the Taliban to expel bin Laden in 1998. But a clash between the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and Saudi officials scuttled the arrangement, and Bush did not follow up.

Damn him -- governing Texas while Rome burned! Why didn't he send the Texas Rangers to finish off Bin Laden? ("One mullah, one Ranger!")

This seems like a good time to point out that I've been arguing for using The Texas Rangers in Afghanistan for quite a while. I think they're an excellent model for the challenges faced in that particular part of the world (see also this piece). Those articles were from August, but in the months since, the challenges haven't changed.

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.