Jeremy wrote:
] The sad fact is that US intelligence was not up to par. There
] are many reasons for that failure, but the most obvious one is
] the absence of an effective human clandestine intelligence
] service.

Hrm... I'm sceptical here. Was this really a failure of the U.S. intelligence community? The UN weapons inspectors were opposed to the idea. There was a lot of push and pull between the administration and the intel community. The politicians floated a document that was an edited version of some grad student's research paper. It was quite clear that there were quarters of the intel community who were saying that there probably weren't WMD, or that we didn't know, and that information was not brought to the forefront because the administration didn't want to hear that. Bush wasn't asking the CIA whats going on in Iraq, Bush was asking the CIA to "prove" conclusions he had already made. It seems to me that to go back and nail the CIA for "getting it wrong" is ridiculous. They were not allowed to "get it right" in the first place. The administration was operating on its own version of reality and we were all aware of that.

This issue gets deeper still. I really strikes at a fundamental problem with our democracy. Presumably, the people control the government. The government cannot go to war without people's approval. The geopolitical strategic reasons for the war were available and discussed here. However, the television watching public doesn't have the attention span to handle complex explanations for complex decisions. So, things end up getting simplified for them. The WMD justification was the simplification they ended up running with. It was a poor choice because they weren't sure it was even true. But people bought it. And now the television watching public is trying to grapple with the fact that this explanation was weak, and Bush is offering other equally simplified explanations in response. It seems like a really futile dialog.

How can people govern if they aren't willing to study? Did Bush lie to the public? Yes! Could he have run an honest explanation for what he was doing? Would we have supported it? Its not clear. Should he have?

These are the important questions, but we're not discussing them. We're busy freaking out because the simplification we got didn't hold. The administration should have seen this coming. They should have known that they might be wrong and they should have had a game plan in place to handle that possibility. Maybe this is it. Its called an independent commission, AKA, pin the tail on the CIA. This isn't the first time during this administraion that the CIA will take a political bullet for them, and as in the past, there will be no consequences. No heads will roll because its all bullshit anyway. The public will be made to feel like everything is ok.

But, everything is really really not ok. This isn't a democracy. This is a highly evolved system of consentual manipulation. And that is not an anti-bushism. Clinton played the same games all the time. And its not clear that we CAN be a democracy. We're not ready.

RE: Restoring Trust in America