The Weakness

Belmont Club states clearly what I've recently suspected: that the problem at CIA will not be solved. More, that the problem will not be solved because of a cultural distaste towards what the CIA is for:

America needs spies. American spies. It is, of course the last thing either the CIA will do or Congressional oversight will demand. The Standard article goes on at great length to describe how the metrics of intelligence success have been politicized to the point that the issues being debated bear no resemblance to the requirements of the service.

There is, I sense, a squeamishness behind the Left's opposition to our current security strategy and their past opposition to such strategies. Those that have opposed our entries into Afghanistan and Iraq do not, in most circumstances, demonstrate a favorable attitude towards our enemies, but rather an unwillingness to shed blood on behalf of our ideals. I had a long conversation/debate with an old college friend last year, before Abu Ghraib or the CIA's idiocy had surfaced. We both studied International Relations at St. Joe's, and have long been able to argue with each other and enjoy the experience. And the problem she had with the Iraq war above all other objections was that we were imposing our system (democracy) upon them by force.


Perhaps others who opposed the war from the Left would not word it quite that way, but I do feel that such a view is representative. Liberals and Democrats believe that the true moral use of government power is to repair injustices, and that social defense should only be practiced when the threat is obvious and the enemy is utterly intractable, and even then, there will always be plenty who would prefer to earn superiority points by damning the society around them, the enemy they know. Obviously, to criticize someone else's society or government is a sin against tolerance that a leftist would never commit, and certainly not when a Republican is in the White House.


It is difficult not to characterize this obstinance, this refusal to percieve enemies abroad, this insistence on tiny, surgical, diplo-economic counterattacks, this horror of casualties and the inevitable blunders of conflict, to the point of calling for retreat at the first sign of either, as the very weakness that Osama suspects of us. Of late, I have been taking to view the upcoming election as the true test of whether he is right. Can we, knowing the errors in intelligence, in discipline, knowing the costs in blood and treasure it has and will require to kill our enemies, have the courage to see it through by re-electing the man who has led us so far? Or are we too nauseated by the President's on-cameria clumsiness, his Texan accent, his born-again Christianity? Are we so wrapped in our superficial pop existence that we'll elect any boring, gutless plutocrat so long as he gives us nice, happy babble about health care and making the world "like us again"? Can we not grasp that the current occupant of the White House is the enemy of those who wish our destruction, the enemy of our enemies? Can we not see the jungle for the Bushes?


If we can't, I fear for us.