1-7 Star Rating – Page 232 – Public Intelligence Blog

Excellent Building Block,

September 10, 2006

John A. Nagl

This book is an excellent building block for those militaries that expect to be sent by their political masters into harms' way “in every clime and place.”

Blessed with a Foreword from General Peter Schoomaker, formerly Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command and today the Chief of Staff of the severely beleaguered U.S. Army, this revised edition integrates the reality check that the author received under combat in Iraq, the book's first edition having been an academic reflection. The improvements are pointed out in an author's preface, and require that this edition be the one to be studied in war colleges.

The most important point in the book for me is that organizational culture–a willingness to learn and innovate or not–is an independent relevant variable for determining success under ambiguous conditions.

The author excels at documenting two facts for the future: 1) it is civil war inside of states, rather than inter-state conflict, that will be the primary military challenge; and 2) the U.S. military is not yet ready to learn and innovate, exceptions not-with-standing.

The comparison of British and US organizational cultures on page 51 is alone worth the price of the book, and can be summed up as the British excelling at long-term presence, regimental memory, bottom-up learning, emphasis on civil solutions and a minimalist use of force. The Americans are naturally the opposite, substituting technology for thinking, quantity for quality, and “shock and awe” force for reasoned instrumentalism. More tellingly, the British will go for the very long haul built on a century worth of localized presence and individualized relationships that built trust, settling for an independent country that gives England a 51% win, while the Americans demand dominance now, and 100%.

The author notes that a major contribution to British success in Malaya was the idea of a junior policeman, to offer channels for anonymous tips. The US has implemented this in Iraq, but typically relies on cell phones that most Iraqis do not possess.

The author credits Mao with having been the logical successor to Sun Tzu, Jomeni, and Clausewitz, and I would add Ho Chi Minh and today Bin Laden. Ho Chi Minh mastered tunnels; Bin Laden has leveraged suicide as a common means that changes everything about war and peace. Interestingly, the author of FIASCO was on television as I read this book, and pointed out that Paul Bremmer single-handedly gave the Iraqi insurgency the leadership (de-Bathification), the guns and volunteers (dismissing the Iraqi army), and the financing (opening the door for Iran) that would not have existed without his incredibly arrogant and ignorant decisions. It was Paul Bremmer who created the Iraqi insurgency and gave Bin Laden enormous international prestige and an increased following. See my reviews of “Blood Money” and “Squandered Victory.”

I was interested to learn from this author that the original view of the Viet-Nam war at the national level was as a replay of Korea, with the Chinese as the actual threat. Our ignorance of Viet-Nam's independence, and our deliberate refusal to allow elections, are as shocking are the ignorance of the White House regarding the Sunni-Shiite split, and its willingness to occupy Iraq rather than liberate it, to use torture and humiliation as a tactical measure without regard to its strategic cost.

The author does a good job of focusing on the importance of “the man.” History will show that Tony Zinni had it right, and Tommy Franks had it completely wrong.

I found the author's passing discussion of how the U.S. military is increasingly being charged with being an executive agent for non-military sources of national power to be especially interesting. The U.S. Central Command has 90 foreign military liaison teams co-located at its Headquarters, and a mere handful of people representing the varied agencies and departments of the U.S. Government. Inter-agency strategy and inter-agency campaign planning today are as non-existent as inter-agency tactical cooperation.

The author points out that an organizational learning model is virtually the opposition of the bureaucratic politics/budget share model that now prevails in the Department of Defense. In combination with the importance of inter-agency operations, I can anticipate the U.S. Army both replicating diplomatic, information, and economic capabilities to make up for the deficiencies of those departments, and simultaneously creating a new breed of military officer, one with the power to persuade, to be dedicated over the course of a career to herding cats–the autonomous and largely oblivious elements of the U.S. Government that are not pulling their weight in Iraq or anywhere else.

Since the early 1990's several of us have been independently proposing “four forces after next” that would cut the big war force in half, while redirecting the savings to taking small war/gendarme special forces up to $75B a year (a tripling), peace forces from zero to $100B a year, and homeland security from $15B (then) or $36B (now) to $75B a year. This author not only gets it, he helps make the case for doing precisely that. Goggling for “The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate,” no. 20 (Autumn/Winter 98-99), pp. 78-84, available online, is a good way to prepare to read this book.

I liked this book so much that I am creating a list of 13 books, none having to do with Iraq, that I recommend be read by anyone who wishes to learn not only how to eat soup with a knife at the tactical level, but how to avoid being part of someone else's soup in this new world disorder. Here is that list by title–I have reviewed all of them”

See also, with reviews:
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places)

Review: Blood Money–Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, War & Face of Battle

Amazon Page

Shocking, Read with “Squandered Victory”,

September 8, 2006

T. Christian Miller

This is a definite five star piece of work that approaches our failures in Iraq from a different perspective, and hence should be read with, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. It goes beyond Squandered Victory, which creates outrage over incompetence, and actually turns one's stomach with disgust toward the end.

The book starts with a very useful timeline of events, and the opening premise that Paul Wolfowitz was wrong on virtually every promise and claim made to Congress.

The author's strategic view, threaded throughout the book, is that the U.S. effort in Iraq never had coherent “supreme commander” type leadership, that virtually all elements (U.S. Army and U.S. Marines excepted) lacked both intelligence and integrity, and that this was one of the most incompetent, ignorant occupations in the history of mankind. He does seem to avoid pointing out that Rumsfeld demanded complete military control of the country, relegated the diplomats to the back room, and did not even tell Bremer for a year that there was a diplomatic plan for nation-building. This is on Rumsfeld and Bremer. History will judge them harshly.

The author documents that the US Government knew in advance that there was no plan for the peace (the State Department efforts not-withstanding) and no way of creating an effective plan.

The author is powerful in showing that “shock and awe” warfare made the transition to peace virtually impossible. 17 out of 21 Ministry headquarters buildings were completely destroyed (and then the occupying force allowed for the looting of all offices, all museums, all universities, and all stockpiles of ammunition and explosives needed for the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) that have killed so many of our troops. The oil infrastructure was not protected, was completely looted, and this lost the chance for paying anything with oil in the early years.

Immortal quote on page 40: “…a circus, a Looney Tunes version of government, hatched on the fly, delivered at random, and operating without instruction.”

Reconstruction cost estimate: $2.4 billion. Actual cost: $30 billion and rising. Results after several years: less than 10% of the needed work. Money unaccounted for: $18 billion.

The author differs from those who supported sanctions in pointing out that the sanctions virtually destroyed Iraq's health system.

Psychologically, the author suggests that the months of lip service to freedom and reconstruction raised hopes that were then dashed. One is reminded of the Davies J-Curve from the 1970's–revolutions occur not among the oppressed, but among those who have been shown the prospect of freedom and prosperity, and then had it taken out of their grasp.

On contracting, one's stomach turns with every page. Cost plus, no incentive to save; U.S. companies doing for millions what Iraqi companies would do for tens of thousands; U.S. contractors earning $60K and more, foreign laborers imported for $3000 a year. The author specifically quotes contractors as saying they knew they could steal the process blind in the first year, which would be “open season.”

I consider this book to be the eventual final nail in the coffin of the Private Military Contractors. The author documents how the military's very unwise reliance on private contractors for combat zone logistics led to a need for private contractors to provide security, to the point that 22% of the reconstruction dollars are going toward Private Military Corporations (PMC).

My global reading program suggests that the Bush-Cheney Administration will go down in history as having pulled off the most blatant program of planned lies to the public, Congress, and the United Nations, and the most blatant slight of hand in switching the burden from a properly staffed military command to a war-profiteering mélange of PMCs. There is no question in my mind but that we need to eliminate PMCs along with Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) in the future, and we need to properly fund four forces after next: big war force, small war and gendarme force, peace force, and homeland security force. The US military today is a Cadillac built for the superhighway, when we need 10 jeeps, 100 motorcycles, and 1000 bicycles.

The author condemns both the U.S. Government in all its parts, and the PMCs in all their parts, for issuing frantic and confused orders and never really getting their act together. This book is the obituary for Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Paul Bremmer, among others.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: Since then war crimes of contractors have become an issue, see Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror and varied media stories.

2006/09/082009/12/04

Review: What Terrorists Want–Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (Hardcover)

4 Star, Terrorism & Jihad

Everything Bush-Cheney Refused to Listen To…,

September 8, 2006

Louise Richardson

This is without question one of a handful of books that must be read by anyone who is serious about neutralizing terrorism as a tactic, avoiding the incitement of more terrorism, and acting professionally and morally around the globe. Sadly, that does not include the neo-conservatives who substitute dogma for reality, and war profiteering for peacemaking.

Unlike Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Professor Robert Pape, which I highly recommend as a complement to this book, the author here has written a definitive history, a rational appreciation, and ends with six specific recommendations, each of which has been gleefully and ignorantly violated by the current Administration, which now declares Bin Laden to be “irrelevant” and continues to cover up the fact that Rumsfeld authorized the Pakistanis to fly 3000 Al Qaeda out of Tora Bora, and Rumsfeld refused to order a Ranger battalion in to capture Bin Laden during the four days that CIA has “eyes on” and tracked him to the border (see my reviews of Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander and First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan).

While the author gets very high marks for putting together the most current, most in-depth, and most professional review of the subject, there is little here that is new to those of us who have been focused on revolution, instability, and the TACTIC of terrorism for the past 30 years. Terrorism is a law enforcement issue, in the context of a comprehensive stabilization and reconstruction program that–as the author recommends–isolates the terrorists from complicit communities. See also Rage of the Random Actor: Disarming Catastrophic Acts And Restoring Lives by Dan Korem for the home-grown “postal” or “Columbine” counter-part to the more altruistically-motivate terrorists.

Our own summary of terrorism, which is threat number nine out of ten identified by the High-Level Threat Panel of the United Nations, reads as follows:

“The ‘war on terror' must fail because it is a self-defeating slogan. To make war on a tactic — a raid, a breakout, an asymmetric attack on civilians, the use of chemical weapons — makes no sense. These tactics have worked well throughout history and will continue to. `Terrorist” tactics were used by Americans against the British in the 1770's, by the Israelis against the British, by Algerians against the French. Progress is only possible if the problem is clearly defined … as global militant Islam. It may be political correctness that prevents that definition, or it may be that there is a genuine misunderstanding of the problem. Once confronted, the origins of global militant Islam are largely well-defined and, with sufficient cooperation by a range of nations, is a relatively simple problem to treat.”

The author could not have written a more compelling indictment of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice. They are impeachable, by this account, for blunders of global magnitude, great expense, and if not impeachable incompetence, then impeachable dereliction of duty in placing energy and financial interests above the public interest. Dick Cheney set the policy process aside (see my reviews of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill and The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11) and this set the stage for Paul Bremmer to become the most grotesquely stupid and arrogant pro-consul in the history of mankind (see my reviews of “Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq and Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq).

The notes and bibliography reflect scholarship of the highest order, and the book itself demonstrates both the author's personal experience with terrorism, and the author's intellect in studying terrorism over a lifetime. The index is better than average.

It is with a sense of sadness that I put this book down. General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, published “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990's” in the American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990), in which he clearly called for draconian increases in Third World intelligence, specifically focused on revolutionary and terrorist actors, making the most of open sources of information in all languages. The secret mandarins refused to listen. We have wasted 18 years during which we could have re-invented national intelligence and gotten it right, from 1988, when I first started demanding greater respect for open sources, the same year that Bin Laden kicked off a global campaign to spread radical military Islam, a campaign funded by the Saudi Arabian government that has bought and owns the Bush Family.

To end on a positive note, I cannot imagine our inert disengaged public awakening from its coma, in the absence of high crimes and misdemeanors such as we have witnessed under these six years of agonizingly ignorant and indeed treasonous governance. Sometimes the pain is necessary. This would appear to be such a time.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: 100 million American voters who opted out of partisan politics are rearing their heads. Books like Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency have certainly helped.

2006/09/082009/08/03

2006 State of the Future

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Intelligence (Public), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment

Clear Map of the Future and What We Do Wrong Now,

September 8, 2006

Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon

I have been much taken with the integrity and wisdom of the Honorable David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, who has been telling Congress that they are not providing for the future and that today's budget is inconsistent with sustainable national security and enduring national prosperity. He is right. This is the book he should buy and give to every Senator and every Representative, along with E. O. Wilson's “The Future of Life” and J. F. Richard's “HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.”

The book is actually in two pieces. 129 black and white pages that is comprised of an Executive Summary, a section on Global Challenges, a State of the Future Index, 40 pages on four global energy scenarios, a separate chapter on emerging environmental security issues (see my review of Max Manwaring's “Environmental Security and Global Stability”), and a final chapter on reflections as the project achieves its tenth anniversary.

The printed book also includes a table of contents for the CD-ROM of 5,400 pages with color graphics and global maps that are quite good, and the publishers are to be complemented for providing the CD material in both PDF form and Document form, the latter for ease of extraction of pictures and text for repurposing.

As I get ready to publish a book by Thomas J. Buckholtz entitled “INFORMATION METRICS: The GIST (Gain Impact, Save Time) of Successful Intelligence,” I cannot help but admire the manner in which the authors have leveraged the measurement of political, social, economic, and other indicators of quality and sustainability, a process that was first pioneered by Professors Banks and Textor in the 1970's.

The day will come when this book and the CD are available in a Serious Game that is both receiving near-real-time information feeds from all open sources in all languages, AND is connected to the real-world budgets of all governments and non-governmental organizations and private sector parties so that any individual can type in their zip code and their issue, and see the color-coded “threat condition” corresponding to whether or not their level of government or their organization is spending wisely, what I call “reality-based budgeting.”

The authors have done a superb job of documenting reality, and as I went through the book, I could not help but feel that we need a second book that evaluated national-level budgets in detail, to publicize the erroneous trade-offs that are being made without the public's real understanding or approval–too much money for a heavy-metal military and corporate tax loopholes, not enough for a global educational Marshall Plan and free telecommunications for the five billion poor (easily affordable for the half trillion the USA has wasted on the elective invasion and sustained heavy-handed occupation of Iraq).

In brief, this book, the CD, this project, are a *cornerstone* for building our future. Worth every penny, and worth several hours of a good read and reflection.

2006/09/082009/12/04

Review: How Bush Rules–Chronicles of a Radical Regime

4 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason

Opens with Summary, Good Series, Underestimates Cheney,

September 8, 2006

Sidney Blumenthal

By virtue of being an organized series of past short columns, most two pages to three pages in length, this book may be off-putting to the average reader, but for either insiders or those who care deeply about moral legitimate governance, this is a real page turner.

The author renders a valuable service in providing an original 23 page “tour of the horizon” that captures many but not all of the impeachable offenses of the Bush-Cheney team. In Florida, for example, his emphasis is on Bushophiles stopping the recount, not on the fact that Greg Pabst broke the story BEFORE the election that 35,000 people of color had been disenfranchised by Jeb Bush in a calculated plan to cheat the American public out of an honest election.

As someone who has read most but not all of the books covering this era (it merits comment that in its radical being, the Bush-Cheney Administration has inspired more books of the moment than any other previous President, as best I can tell), I found the collection of essays logical, reasoned, relevant, and depressing. This is a litany of high crimes and misdemeanors that demands the question: why hasn't this pair been impeached? The obvious answer is because they own Congress, which has abdicated its roles at the first (Article 1) branch of government, the less obvious answer is because the public has become both ignorant and inert, the worst nightmare of Thomas Jefferson and Justice Branstein combined.

A few highlights along the trail:

Intelligence wars, with Cheney first trying to intimidate the CIA, then ignoring it.

Cheney killing the policy process, ruling by dogma.

Rice negligent & incompetent, as well as disloyal to Scowcroft, subversive of Powell, and ultimately the “butterfly of the State Department.”

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence betraying the people's trust and its responsibility, the majority concealing and delaying accountability.

Bush leveraging religions, creating the first major violation of the Founding Fathers' insistence on a secular state with tolerance of all religions.

Government in crisis, Bush-Cheney at war with the professionals.

Iran, not US, winning in Iraq.

Bolton as a “neo-primitive” (for the cognoscenti, the author renders gifted turns of phrase at every turn).

Catholic Church as a neo-fascist extreme right element more in harmony with the Bush regime than any protestant might imagine.

The invisible shrinking president seeking to uphold a doctrine of presidential infallibility.

The summary at the beginning of the book is alone worth the price of the book, and takes this collection of insightful and well-sequenced essays from four to five stars.

My one thought in putting the book down was that the author may have been unduly kind to Cheney. If one reads the The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 it is clear Cheney has mounted an internal coup d'etat and is NOT briefing Bush, is actively WITHHOLDING from Bush critical information, and appears to be deliberately REVERSING decisions by Bush made in Cabinet sessions and the over-turned in the dark. The full story on Cheney's machinations remains to be told.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: We now know that Dick Cheney is a nakely amoral person and has committed 25 documents acts of commission or omission that in my judgement demand that he be impeached. See, in addition to One Percent Doctrine, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. My review there items 23 act, the other two are in One Percent Doctrine.

The book has an index, mostly of names.

2006/09/052009/12/04

Review: The Real State Of The Union–From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books) (Paperback)

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation)

Amazon Page

First Class Thinking, Morally Sound, Offer Hope,

September 5, 2006

Ted Halstead

The contributing editors, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, again shine as “hubs” for blending diverse thinkers, including James Pinkerton of the right, and I believe they are completely correct when they say that the State of the Union address has become shallow, partisan, and trivialized. More substantively, they might have offered a piece on the ten reasons to impeach Bush-Cheney, and another on the failure of Congress, which has struck out with the American people: strike one is incumbents shaking down lobbyists for cash; strike two is the extremist leaderships (Democratic as well as Republican) forcing “party line” votes that are totally against the Constitutional intent of having Representatives represent their CONSTITUENCIES; and strike three is the extremist Republicans serving as foot soldiers to a mendacious White House, instead of, as the Constitution intended with Article 1, being the FIRST branch of government. The extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican) are nothing less than Constitutional perverts, and I use the term advisedly. (See my reviews on books about these two topics in last two months).

The book is ably summed up in the Preface, which states that neither party has proven capable of offering a coherent, honest, or forward-looking agenda to guide America. Peter Peterson, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It would certainly agree, as do I. It is my hope that this group might coalesce around someone like Senator Collins (R-MA) running with Governor Warner (D-VA), and announcing a coalition cabinet and one commitment: to electoral reform. Karl Rove knows how to steal close elections, the only way to beat him is to field a multi-party TEAM that can win by a LANDSLIDE. America is ready for that, and the ideas in this book are all implement able by such a team approach to what might be called “networked governance.”

While I have six pages of notes on this excellent volume, still relevant to the future, I will touch on just a few highlights:

1) Mass middle class is vital, and Washington has destroyed that base for democracy.

2) American people are not as polarized as their extremist political leaders

3) Our humans are productive but our processes are not. I am reminded of the book in the 1980's on “Human Scale.” The federal government has indeed become dysfunctional, running at 3-5 mph while the rest of us are going 100 mph.

4) Need a new social contract. Authors identify the first one as building a nation, the second as healing from the civil war, and the third as building a middle class. We need to re-build the middle class with governance that again represents the citizens and their communities rather than predatory corporations.

5) Private sector, not just government, needs reform.

6) Health care can shift from business to government, and in the process we can find $60 billion a year in savings by using information to create metrics to reduce waste and over-treatment. The author discussing this suggests that 20-30% of what we spend on health care is waste. They do not discuss medical tourism, which I find quite interesting as a trend.

7) We need a nation-wide industrial policy that restores the relationship between business, community, and family, while also restricting the mobility of capital unless it restores the social contract with labor.

8) Radical tax reform could yield $200 billion a year (the author's say this is a low estimate, I agree, import-export tax fraud alone is $50 billion a year, I think the number is closer to $500 billion a year).

9) Take back the airwaves in the public interest.

10) James Pinkerton is brilliant in explaining the three eras of education as agricultural (nine-month school year), industrial (rote learning) and experimental (nostrums at expense of basics). See also Derek Bok's piece on “Reinventing Education at Forbes.com. James missed the opportunity to discuss how free universal access to all knowledge, and using serious games to educate on a just enough, just in time basis, in all languages, could reconfigure education world-wide.

11) Matthew Miller (see my review of his superb book, The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love) outlines what $30 billion could buy in terms of moving teachers up the food chain. Just in passing, if we cut our grotesquely ineffective intelligence community back from $60 billion a year to $30 billion a year, we can create a truly smart nation (see my book coming out on 11 September, THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest and in passing get better secret intelligence in the context of a national Open Source (Intelligence) Network that feeds not only the spies and diplomats, but also the schoolhouses, statehouses, and social clubs.

12) A thread that I found interesting throughout the book is how we lack the information needed to make smart choices. We lack statistical information on medical treatments and results that might allow “evidence-based medicine.” As I have pointed out elsewhere (Google for <ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers>), the U.S. Government is remarkably ignorant and uninformed across all these areas.

13) The rest of the book on aging productively, incentivizing exercise and penalizing fast food, on rebuilding the heartland with information infrastructure, on mixed races where third generations inter-marry at a 55% rate, on conflicted Muslims, on “opportunity lost” in foreign affairs and national security, all top notch.

The book ends brilliantly, as it began, with a commentary on the dysfunctional duopology of the extremist Republicans where dogma trumps honesty, and the divided Democrats trapped in the past. As the founder of a small non-rival party blog, Citizens-Party.org, I consider this book, and the New America Foundation, to be the people's voice at a time when the Congress and the White House most certainly are not.

2006/09/032009/12/04

Review: Intelligence Failure–How Clinton’s National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11 (Hardcover)

3 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq

Amazon Page

Half Truth, Half Distorted, Largely Uninformed About Reality,

September 3, 2006

David N. Bossie

1) The book is worth buying for the half that is truthful. Yes, Clinton was responsible for nurturing not only Al Qaeda, but an incompetent intelligence community as well. Woolsey could not get in to see him, Deutch was a raving ego-maniac disdainful of security, and Tenet was first a pandering sychophant and later (under Bush) a world-class intelligence prostitute. Madeline Albright and Tony Lake, however, bear most of the blame–the Department of State has long abdicated its respopnsibility for being the *primary* collector, evaluator, translator, and disseminator of real-world unclassified information in all languages bearing on our national security and foreign policy. On Madeline Albright's watch, not only did State not pay attention to reality, they also actively repressed classified reports from the intelligence community on terrorism emergent. Tony Lake is something else–a well-intentioned individual with no clue about the complexities of the real world (Google for our “ten threats, twelves policies, and eight challengers”)–it was only as he was leaving office that he “discovered” the “six fears.”

2) The book is also half distortions and mis-representations. This is a hatchet job in advance of the 2006 elections. I am a moderate Republican (and the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction). The dirty little secret of the Bush Administration is that Dick Cheney was given both the terrorism and the intelligence portfolios from day one, and in his arrogance chose to ignore them both despite the fact that the Clinton Administration “woke up” at the end of its term and issues strong warnings. George Bush is also arrogant and ignorant–CIA tried desperately to warn him in person on 6 August 2001 and he dismissed them with a cavalier “OK, you've covered your ass now.” Between a mendacious Vice President and an ignorant little bully of a President, America was completely unprotected in the months when intelligence actually had good cause for alarm and tried desperately–as did Richard Clark–to sound the alarm. Cheney chose instead to focus on secret meetings with Enron and Exxon, and to plan the invasion of Iraq, for which he welcomed a terrorism attack as a “pretext for war”.

The reality is that the truth can be known, but one needs to search for it. There is no better way to scan the literature than to spend a couple of hours with all my reviews (sadly, Amazon allows us to make lists, but not to sort our reviews, so either use the lists or be patient in going through my reviews. They cover information society, intelligence, emerging threats, strategy and force structure, anti-Americanism, and the negative impact on national security of domestic U.S. politcs).

A few specifics:

1) any book endorsed by Woolsey and Novak, for divergent reasons, cannot be trusted to be objective.

2) The author is oblivious to the many books on intelligence from Allen, Baeur, Berkowitz, Codevilla, Gentry, Goodman, Gerecht, Fialka, Godson, Johnson, Levine, Odom, Riebling, Steele, Treverton, Wiebes, Zegart and more. This is a hatchet job with some nuggets, not a balanced piece of research with a historical perspective. Not a single one of these authors is in the bibliography.

3) The author's most grevious error is to confuse reduced presidential attention with incompetence. Clinton was very competent, it was the U.S. Intelligence Community, like the lightbulb in the psychologists joke (“how many to change a bulb? Irrelevant, the bulb has to want to change”), that chose to ignore General Al Gray, myself, and many others who from 1988 were agitating for improved coverage of terrorism and instability, and improved attention to open sources of information.

4) The author makes the usual mistake of failing to note that CIA and FBI failures were not from lack of funding, but from internal myopia and mis-direction. FBI, for example, redirected money appropriated by Congress for information technology, to pay for more travel by chiefs; CIA cut back on its clandestine service, and relied more heavily of foreign liaison lies, and completely failed to heed the 1999 NIMA Commission Report that demanded attention to sense-making and analytic desktop toolkits.

5) The author provides an unbalanced but useful review of the embassy bombings, Khobar Towers (which was sponsored by Iran), and the USS Cole, but in his epilogue, he appears brain-dead in thinking that Bush-Cheney's redirection of the military from Afghanistan to Iraq was brilliant. It was not. It was the most expensive catastrophic, corrupt, ignorant, and mendacious abuse of presidential power in modern history.

This leads to my final general comment: as unethical and incompetent as some individuals might have been in both the Clinton and the Bush Administrations, it is the “system” not the individuals that is broken. Congress is out of the game–incumbents shake down lobbyists for cash, not the other way around; both parties demand “party line” votes instead of conscience votes on behalf of specific constituencies; and the extremist Republican leadership of the House and Senate have abdicated their Constitutional responsibility to be the FIRST (Article 1) Branch of government, and instead chosen to serve as foot-soldiers for the President. This is treason and impeachable mis-behavior. The Executive is no better–Dick Cheney has swept aside the policy process, and it is now documented (see my review of “One Percent Doctrine”) that he has experimented with isolating the President since President Ford, and under Bush, directed policies that were neither cleared by the bureaucracy, nor reported to and approved by the President. Cheney, not necessarily Bush, is clearly impeachable.

So buy and read this book, but do not stop there. We the People now have a digital memory, and we are being aroused from our slumber. Justice will be done, eventually. Both Administrations failed America, but only because the public failed to stem the corporate take-over of Washington, D.C., and failed to exercise its ultimate right to hold everyone accountable day to day, not just on election day.

Category: 1-7 Star Rating

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2006 State of the Future

Review: How Bush Rules–Chronicles of a Radical Regime

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Review: Intelligence Failure–How Clinton’s National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11 (Hardcover)