INTELLIGENCE FOLLIES….David Ignatius:
You would have thought it was impossible to make our intelligence problems even worse, but the Bush administration has accomplished that. This is a dangerous situation for the country, and it needs to be fixed, now.
George Bush certainly deserves his usual share of blame for this, and Ignatius ably explains why: bad appointments, poor oversight, and senseless vendettas have weakened our intelligence apparatus instead of strengthening it. (And he could have added an unwillingness to stand up to Donald Rumsfeld to that list too.)
Unfortunately, though, there are plenty of others who share responsibility: the Kean Commission that recommended a bureaucratic solution to our intelligence problems in the first place, a Republican congress that fiddled around and made things even worse, and a craven Democratic caucus that almost unanimously voted for a bad bill for fear of being called weak on terror. The bottom line is that this has been a mess all around, and there’s no sign that anyone has the spine to go back and try to fix it. Hooray.
