Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times writes an excellent summary  of the institutional conflict between the Pentagon and the CIA.  Since Porter Goss began to clean—up the troubled agency this past week, more and more Americans have are become aware of the of the CIA's opposition to the President's policies, and its decades—old incompetence in providing any intelligence of use to the executive branch or the military.

Most importantly, the article confirms that high—level military commanders during the 90s were forced to adopt a Clinton foreign policy device called 'engagement' in order to gain much needed information on our potential adversaries.  A critic of the CIA said,

"We were unable to recruit agents in the Middle East, so we had to rely on other countries' agencies," said the former Pentagon official who read the intelligence take.  "We ought to rely on our own people, not just the intelligence of other countries.  You don't really have a picture of where it's coming from."

This mirrors the comments in my article discussing the difficulties that Gen. Tommy Frank's had in planning for Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom:

So the most powerful nation on Earth, which had already sustained terrorist attacks on its forces overseas and against its citizens at home, had only a rudimentary understanding of the threat in the most unstable AOR on the planet.  The policy of engagement was supposed to substitute for this lack of intelligence.  This meant being buddies with leaders who the next day might turn around and slit our throat, both literally and figuratively.

Scarborough's piece also notes that the situation at the CIA was so bad, that Rumsfeld had to 'transfer scores of active duty special operations personnel to the CIA to fill out the [paramilitary] army' to help defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

As Clarice Feldman notes in today's AT, this infighting and back—stabbing directly influences our perceptions of the nature of our enemies, and could possibly result in developing military operational plans that are inherently flawed from the get—go.  The rise of the so—called 'soldier—diplomat' and the policy of engagement in the 90s was simply a cover by the Clinton Administration for its unwillingness to rebuild our intelligence capabilities, all the while gutting our military during the drawdown.  And, let's not forget the CIA's defeat in 1996 during their aborted coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, not to mention that Clinton deserted our Kurdish allies when they needed us most.

The CIA higher—ups and operatives who resigned recently are lucky; at least they don't have to bear the fruits of their lies and incompetence on the battlefield like our service members do now, and the Kurds did in 1996.

Doug Hanson    11—17—04