Like starving rats, the far right is gnawing at the President’s foreign policy, much as they have at Obamacare. Their favorite target is, of course, Benghazi. The only problem is that it wasn’t Obama’s disaster and anyone who has done even minimal research knows that. Not that the truth ever had even the remotest correlation to anything the GOP was selling.
Those who have done their homework know that Benghazi was a CIA operation. They also know that its lack of defense started with the Republican House’s refusal to appropriate more funds for the defense of all our Middle Eastern operations. It was the CIA’s lack of foresight that led to that garrison being under defended and led to the deaths there. The State department had nothing to do with the operation and the White House had no idea what was going on until it was far too late to do anything about it. Why didn’t Obama know what was going on? Because the CIA takes their secret operations very seriously, and who knows, the President might be a Kenyan spy. The President’s big mistake was in not ignoring the situation as soon as it came up. He didn’t run the operation and had little knowledge of how it was mismanaged as it is several levels below his pay grade, so he should never have gotten himself or Susan Rice involved at all. His mistake was political not strategic.
It really blows my mind, how the right can keep ranting about Obama’s foreign policy when it has worked as well as it has, in a region that has, for centuries, been a dark hole of chaos. Obama’s foreign policy, especially when it is compared to the eight years of GOP foreign policy that preceded it, looks like the work of genius. If Bush or Cheney were in charge of the country now, we would have already lost another ten thousand of our own kids and probably would have killed close to a million, Libyans, Syrians and Iranians, to say nothing about leaving three countries in ruins and, oh yes, costing this country another couple of trillion bucks. That was, after all, the way the Bush/Cheney administration operated; see a problem, start a war.
What, you don’t believe me? Just listen to Dirty Dick Cheney vomiting his poison all over the airways every weekend. This war criminal; that should, but for the charity of Barak Obama, be in jail today, doesn’t have a clue that he should just shut up and be glad he is still breathing free air. All you have to do is hear him announce, to anyone that will listen, that every decision he made was right, and you will understand that the man is a sociopath and given the opportunity would have us ass deep in Middle Eastern dead bodies, all over again.
Obama on the other hand has kept us out of fights that we cannot win, and I don’t mean militarily, and have no business being involved in. Sure Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would love us to be trying to solve all the region’s problems but maybe they should be trying to do that themselves. After all, they live there, not us. The Saudi’s and Turkey might think of committing some of their troops to Syria, not to fight on the side of the rebels but as peacekeepers, and Israel could try to cut down their real estate development business on the West Bank.
For too long American foreign policy has been to get into everyone’s business, and that’s mostly because it has been dictated by corporations and our intelligence community.
The intelligence community’s sudden rise to the surface in public recognition seems to be a surprise to many Americans but that’s only due to their inability to read and their lack of interest in history. If they made the effort they would discover that spying goes all the way back to the beginnings of history and was intimately involved in the creation of our own country. We have always had an intelligence system in this country but it really blossomed during WWII, led by the charismatic preppie, Wild Bill Donovan and his Ivy League staffed OSS supported by a cadre of world class press agents.
It was during the cold war that intelligence really ballooned in this country as the CIA replaced the OSS and the scope of activity spread all across the world. The battle between Communism and Democracy was responsible for so many insane decisions and horrifying actions that the explosion of the intelligence industry hardly seems important but it actually unleashed the monster that we live with today.
The basis of an intelligence service like any other government or corporate entity is power, the accumulation and the concentration of it. The bureaucratic monster that is any government agency, feeds on power and its main function is to protect that power and enlarge on it. It does this to the exclusion of all other factors. Our government agencies may swear allegiance to the United States but their first allegiance is always to the agency itself, its growth and the protection of its resources and that’s exactly the problem.
The whole NSA mess is a direct result of that agency expanding exponentially simply for the sake of expansion. Sure, there is intelligence to be gathered on the home front but in the equation created by the amount of intelligence actually needed versus the cost of accumulation plus the amount of privacy lost, what they are currently doing appears to be ludicrous. Edward Snowden’s revelation of their actions was merely the act of a man who could see the whole picture and realize that he was working for an agency that had completely run amok. Their retaliation against him is a classic example of the same kind of overkill that they had been exhibiting in their pursuit of every phone call and email that was made in this country.
This is not to say that there are no terrorists operating in the US but that with knowledge of their activities, the emphasis should be on apprehension of particular operatives not the accumulation of useless facts on everyone who exists on the planet. It’s about selectivity and the need to practice it
It’s also about the intelligence work going on involving our allies, all one can say is that, yes, it has been going on forever on all sides, one would only wish that we were better and more selective at it.
Ever since the cold war our intelligence services have acquired a mantle of secrecy that is all but counter productive. First it was an attempt to prevent counter intelligence agents from infiltrating our ranks. That led to congress passing a law that forbade the intelligence services from recruiting any foreign nationals, criminals, etc. Where the hell did congress think the best spies came from? Who better than a disaffected Russian to spy on the Soviet Union? But we were without those assets and so things like the Berlin wall coming down without our knowledge became regular events in our intelligence services. That’s why when the Middle East heated up we found that we jad almost zero intelligence capability to deal with it because we had no one who spoke any of the Middle Eastern languages working for us.
The record of major international occurrences that seem to have escaped our intelligence services has grown to staggering proportions. I’m sure that the intelligence agencies have made many discoveries that have gone unpublicized but their failures are too many and too important to ignore. They range from the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the failure to discover the absence of WMDs in Iraq that led to that war, India’s 1999 nuclear tests, Iranian revolutions in 1979 and 1998 and worst of all, 9/11 itself. It took them 10 years to find Osama bin Laden a 6’4” Arab carrying a dialysis machine around in the desert and they recently missed the boat on the Boston bombers. This shabby record of failure wouldn’t be so awful if we weren’t spending billions a year to maintain it.
One of the biggest problems with functionality ion the intelligence services is rivalry. They just don’t work and play well together, partly out of jealousy but mostly out of overzealous competition.
No one is saying that we don’t need intelligence services but like the defense department and the military we must scale them down and make them far more efficient. They are stealing our economic growth and taking needed services away from our citizens and what they are gaining just doesn’t balance out. The repetition of tasking in the intelligence community is mindboggling and is just the tip of the waste iceberg.
But this cutback will never happen as long as the men who currently head the various agencies are kept in place. Individually and as a group they are too vested in maintaining the current order. Paring down and cutting back are anathema to the maintenance of power and the men who head these agencies are all about power. That means that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, Director of NSA, John O. Brennan, Director of the CIA and a host of others must be replaced.
Of course, the question becomes; who do you replace them with? Anyone who has the knowledge and background to head up these highly specialized agencies has to already be tainted by the stain of power. The nature of any organization is that it will have its share of talent and non-talent, moral and immoral, functional and dysfunctional among its ranks. The right people are there. It’s the job of the President and the congress to dig them out and for the first time in the past 60 years it appears that a hint of the will to do so is surfacing in Washington.
Let’s hope that the small ripple caused by the hubris of the leaders of our intelligence community will become a groundswell that will lead to a complete reformation of those services, culminating in a sleeker, more efficient intelligence community, more success by them and an increase in our national ability to be out front of the international issues that we have been dragging behind since Wild Bill Donovan rode off into the sunset.