PANETTA AND THE INTELLIGENCE GAP

The problem with “intelligence” did not begin with the current Bush administration. The problem with intelligence is not the systems in place to gain information or make analysis. The problem is the intelligence of the people who manage the information and analysis.

I would recommend the reading of James Carroll’s book, The House of War, the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, in which this son of the first and only director of the Defense Intelligence Agency describes how Presidents from Truman through Bush basically have gotten it wrong with disastrous results not because of lack of information and analysis (intelligence) but due to lack of “intelligence” by those who managed the system.

When he describes President Reagan’s visit, after the fall of the wall in Berlin, with Russian President Gorbachov in Moscow, which he once called the capital of the Evil Empire and lauded the Russian people and their culture, Carroll writes: “Reagan did not seem to know, even then that he and all the others like him had been simply wrong. Wrong from the Long Telegram and “X” artcle forward. Wrong on the Truman Doctrine, NSC-68, and the Gaither Report. Wrong when Stalin died. Wrong on Vietnam. Wrong on Nicaragua. Wrong on almost every assessment of Soviet intentions and capabilities across fifty years. Wrong, most fundamentally about those human beings of the far side of the iron divide.”

Carroll explains the lack of “intelligence” leading to the US getting it wrong, time after time after time, by the paranoia of James Forrestal, the first SEcretary of Defense, that eventually morphed into the arrogance of the neo-cons, all with the same basic view of the world and the same commitment to US dominance by military prowess. All of the Bush team – Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, Nitze, Cheney,Perle, Colin Powell, and Rice come from this school of thought and action. This is the “intelligence” that has led the nation into a war (cold or hot)mentality for the last sixty years.

So, to say, as some critics do, that Leon Panetta, President-elect Obama’s choice to be CIA Director has no “intelligence” experience is to hold out hope that this administration might get it right. It is at least encouraging to know that Panetta disagrees with torture, fought for civil rights as part of the Nixon administration (having to resign from the Civil Rights office as a result) and has history of legislation related to hunger issues, the need for Americans to know foreign language and to be involved in international studies. It means that we might really have, finally, what has been touted as our real weakness in the war on terror – human intelligence – which in this case is not to have spies on the ground, but to have intelligence informed by concern for the human community and its integrity.
The problem, of course, is that the lack of “intelligence” that has marked our past mistakes is deeply imbedded, not only in many of the existing political leaders on both sides of the aisle as well as in the CIA and the other intelligence agencies, but also, after sixty years of being educated by leaders who almost always got it wrong, the American public. Godspeed to Leon Panetta. May his tenure at Intelligence not rob him of his human intelligence.