The Quixote Solution

This is the first truly collaborative effort submitted on the GH. Don’t know if that’s good, bad or indifferent. But it most likely will not be the last…Mb

I forced myself to go back and read Solution #238 three times already. I didn’t understand it the first time I read it. Now, I think I do understand but then again …

My pal, Senor de la Mancha, escaped the forest of the Leviathan a long time ago and now makes his way in a place that, to me, looks like a jungle of petrified concrete and steel. Although now outside, he has grown tired of all the moaning and gnashing of teeth he hears coming from the inside. He’s fed up to here with complaints and he wants some action now.

The Don is a smart, charming man, a superb artist in his own right and a brilliant businessman. He knows what it takes and now I understand his predicament.

Curiously, he and I often reach similar conclusions although we follow different roads to get to the end. In this case, on the question of the failures of the US Intelligence Community (IC), we came to an astonishingly rapid agreement.

When we speak of the IC, for those of you who may be confused, we speak of the now 16 different major federal agencies, and their many sub-offices, involved with collecting, analyzing and reporting intelligence information to our nation’s decision makers. It is called a community because it is more like a network of neighbors, all working with similar rules and goals in mind, rather than a solitary unit, organization or company.

This is the complaint we face. The IC regularly fails in one way or another to do its intended function. While that function may be debatable, these failures are many and are well documented. I won’t list that all out here; you can read about that somewhere else just in case if you’ve been sleeping soundly the last five years or so. Here is a well supported explanation from Tom Englehardt:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=87452

Suffice it to say, as I told The Don in our letters, if we were to spin a globe and stop it at any unexpected point on this earth, we would most likely find an area or one just across the river where our IC infamously missed the mark at some point in time.

Numerous attempts to reform this beast have been enacted. Most recently, the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) among other neat things. The Don and I have noted in our correspondence that few if any experts really expect this reform to be “good”. You may read that many think it just adds another layer of bureaucracy to a monster that is already horribly diseased by that very same characteristic.

Ever since Truman, our Presidents have relied on the IC to tell them what’s what around the world. As noted, the IC often fails to deliver. Meanwhile, the IC gathers more money, more power and more influence with each new administration but never, ever seems to learn from its mistakes.

After a quick review of the larger points, The Don feels that a comprehensive education program pointed squarely at the repeated mistakes of the IC would go farther to eliminate those mistakes than any previously accepted reform. Thus, falling from this uneven dust he sees a desperate need for an independent National Intelligence College or Institute of some sort.

It makes sense to me and I agree with him. As The Don says, that’s precisely the style of “repair” that many major industries accomplish all the time and do so with excellent results.

Once that marvelously over-simplified agreement is stated, this is where our paths, only momentarily merged, immediately separate and take different trajectories.

On the whole, it’s hard to even discuss or describe the IC (as you, uh, probably figured out). There’s so much that is left unsaid. Every time the subject comes up, each shoulder must be overlooked twice to ensure sources and methods remain hidden. There is such a humongous amount of crap we don’t know about and probably don’t want to know about.

Based on my experience, I immediately began to worry who would be in charge of such a College. Would it be outsourced? Would the academics be managed by the same fools who screwed up the real-world stuff? Whoa, I would expect a huge political battle over money and control of The Institute!

Add to this messy situation, I gotta tell ya, I have no great expectation of seeing the IC’s problems resolved in my lifetime. Maybe like The Don says I am being the self-defeatist, maybe I’m numb to it, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being an overt realist, noting that no previous administration has ever laid any accountability at the IC’s doorstep. This is the President’s baby and he rarely does what I want him to do with it

I do believe my original intent on bringing this crap up with him was to better define the word “failure” in IC terms. I sensed some confusion among the ingnorant masses on that often-used word. I wanted to really drive the point home that failure in the IC world is often relative and misleading. Sometimes, for example, I know negative and empty reports are expected.

I’m sorta good at weaving endless mind tapestries about that junk. It’s the exactly kind of nerdy semantics and self-defeatist stuff that I am accustomed to dealing with.

But trying to make some honest sense of it while staying away from the “collection” area, I noted that federal policies and the IC product are often closely related in terms of analysis and dissemination.

To help prove this, I relayed Powell’s quote on what he always asked of his intelligence advisors. I thought Powell’s words would, with little revision, make a great outline for a paper.

Those words go like this:

“Tell me what you know; tell me what you don’t know; and, then, based on that tell me what you think is most likely to happen.”

Right on queue, The Don quoted the stark words of Admiral Stansfield Turner and protested as soon as I injected any undesirable confusion. Policy, as The Don knows it, should not influence an honest, credible intelligence product. That is his reality and this Powell fluff was not in line with the common goal.

The Don misunderstood my take on Powell’s words but that’s not the point.

Sensing he might really be serious, I started telling him off-color war stories, loudly pondering pointless questions and making high sounding suggestions that maybe the ODNI should really be a Cabinet post. And why wasn’t it, I asked needlessly? Perhaps, I meandered, if the IC were more like the State Department then maybe something, err-umm, nice and, uh, happy might happen.

In an attempt to get me back on track, he lured me with dreams of presenting our findings in a stealthy but acknowledged way. He suggested we contact a respected team of experts and urge them to jointly reach our common-sense finding.

In a moment of passion, caught up with The Don’s enticing description of a promising future where people openly act on their convictions, I even humored him by penning a syrupy letter to a prominent editor, begging for sponsorship of our grand undertaking, a letter that The Don knew damn well I never had any intention of sending.

Playing his part, he even red-inked this non-letter, suggesting we should each include a short bio, so that the editor would have “some idea that we are not Bob and Bubba who came up with some half-cocked idea down at the local watering hole."

Oh, The Don is a wily opponent! He can see through my smoke. He always could.

No matter how well I might have tried to hide it, The Don could tell I was beginning to slowly dance around in a fast moving river, muddying and swirling the waters, merely pushing the common objective further from our reach. And, I expect, he was laughing to himself the whole time.

He probably knows as well as I do that, even with our best intentions, somehow we had descended into a version of the tired old game. Without even trying, we were engaged in exactly the same game that’s been played in the silent halls of the IC ever since Give ‘Em Hell was boss.

For the first time in public (at least to my knowledge) I will describe to you how this game goes:

Person A meets Person B in the hallway. Person A utters something stupid and Person B mildly agrees but feigns ignorance, which in this case is really ignorance. That leaves the door open for Person A to defend his stupid remark with the attack, “Oh! You didn’t know that?” in a particularly snide tone, to which Person B nervously replies, “Of course, I was just joking! I helped write the CONOP for that. Let’s do lunch!” Then both persons walk down the hall in the direction they just came from, each wondering what the hell they were just talking about and how did the other person know so much about it.

It happens every day, my friends.

“Come on! Focus! Focus!” the Don kept telling me.

Finally, in one particular fit of momentary sobriety, I read his words and thought to myself, he wants me to focus … focus … focus on what?

Aha! Suddenly I got it. I was focused on the wrong thing. I didn’t realize that The Don wasn’t about to simply restate the obvious, paint fantastic word pictures of giant beasts with multiple heads or even ruminate endlessly on the philosophic concept of failure. He actually wanted to do something about this problem!

Unlike me, the cynical pessimist who is perfectly willing to let this antique dragon choke on its own fire and spit, The Don really wants to slay it!

I guess I forgot to tell The Don that I’m like a modern day Dutton Peabody, founder, owner, publisher and editor of the Shinbone Star. I should have admitted, like Peabody did on his political nomination, “…I beg of you; I'm your conscience, the small voice crying out in the wilderness, I, I'm your father confessor! I. I'm; what else am I?”

And if Tom Doniphon was around for me, he’d still answer, “Town drunk?”

But my friend, The Don, is a rare and obsessive advocate of Solution #238, a sly reference to his “stop the bitchin’, start the fixin’” slogan. He is convinced that if we clear the field for anything, whether it’s a National Intelligence Institute or a statuesque monument to federal failure, then it will be built. If we just sit around and complain about it, then nothing will ever get done.

He’s not dumb. He knows the limits but he also knows bitching alone won’t do any good.

At some point, people must listen to what The Don is saying. I have no doubt that The Institute may one day be a reality, thanks solely to him. His positive attitude is in part why he is so damn charming and successful. That’s why I listen to him, that’s why I admire him and that’s why I salute him. I wish I could be more like him.

But, as I’ve been repeatedly reminded, I can’t be something I’m not.

Many thanks to The Don for a wonderful lesson on that subject.

Cheers,
Mb