There is a more subtle but much more sinister reason not to vote for Bush.
Voting for Bush means voting for the status quo dismal intelligence that allows Al Queda to thrive.
What remains inexplicable to me is why the Bush administration would believe that the attacks did not prove the need for an urgent overhaul of U.S. intelligence, but that business as usual would suffice? Whatever one thinks of Bush on other subjects, this decision remains unexplained and undefended.
Bush, in his most inexplicable action as president, has made no substantial changes in either the structure of the intelligence community or in its personnel...yet the pro Bush advocates wants us to believe by voting for him, we are voting for a stronger antiterrorism defensive front.
Let me explain:
The CIA, the NSA and the vast apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community were created in the late 1940s with one purpose: to combat the Soviet Union.
The end of the Cold War should have led to a rethinking of both mission and organization. There has been some the former, but hardly any of the latter
Soviet intelligence, and thus ours, made certain fundamental assumptions about how intelligence operations should be carried out:
1. The primary purpose of soviet or american intelligence was to penetrate the decision-making layers of opponent states and to transmit information to a central authority. The primary means for achieving this was to plant agents inside the CIA of KGB; the secondary means was technical intelligence.
2. The secondary purpose of our countries' intelligence agencey was to use these agents to obscure intelligence activities . In other words, agents were also were also used to falsify intelligence.
We became much more heavily dependent on technical means of intelligence-gathering than did the Soviets. Where the Soviets would try to recruit well-placed Americans to extract information, we would try to tap into Soviet systems of communication to gather the same information. The Soviets were obsessed with protecting their assets, we with protecting our technical capabilities.
For the United States, the terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s were not seen as independent actors, but as entities designed or at least guided by the KGB toward psychological and political ends. On the whole, this was not a bad way to view the world. The KGB used these groups -- particularly Palestinian groups -- to create political environments that were conducive to Soviet ends. The Soviets maintained a program designed to seduce, manipulate and manage the leadership of these terrorist groups. The United States understood that the best way to defeat these groups was by disrupting their relations with the Soviets. Both sides were quite realistic for a while..
By the time of Desert Storm, the Soviets were no longer key enablers of terrorism. The problem is that our CIA has lost the prism through which it viewed organizations that were using terrorism as a weapon. To be more precise, where the United States previously had viewed the Arab world through the prism of the CIA-KGB competition, the end of the rivalry did not bring with it a new prism. The CIA knew that the Soviets were no longer managing the situation, but they did not develop a new way of thinking about that situation.
Al Qaeda has been designed to be different from predecessor groups that used terrorism.
First, there is no dependency on a single intelligence agency. Al Qaeda used relations with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, among others, but did not depend on them. Second, the group understood how the Soviets and Americans had used intelligence during the Cold War, and created an organization that was not easily penetrated by either human or technical means. They don't run cables that submarines could tap into or chatter on car phones, so the NSA has limited opportunities to intercept.
The CIA, institutionally, does not seem to have the frame of reference for al Qaeda. This agency was organized for penetrating the upper circles and lines of communication of a nation-state or a state-sponsored group. It was built to deal with the KGB and its creations.
What had been built to be congruent with Soviet intelligence is now left standing alone, congruent with nothing.
He believes profoundly and completely that the same organizational structure and people that took down the KGB would eventually take down al Qaeda -- no wholesale changes required. It is understandable that people who had won once would think that they could win again using the same tools. It is inexplicable that the president and his advisers would believe them. Simple common sense should tell U.S. leaders that it is simply fantastic to believe that a force built to defeat the Soviet Union can serve to defeat al Qaeda.
However, I'm not sure Kerry is going to make this a priority agenda either. At least, not a voting agenda.
That's a mirror I'm showing you Ivan. Some of those assertions in your opening post are positive, some are negative. The point is you are trying to shift the burden-of-proof. For example:
