Read:
Legacy of Ashes
Fascinating read for those of you who believe, as I do, that this nation absolutely
positively must have the best intelligence services in the world.
Of course, the argument can be made (but the outcomes in the world don't support that argument) that we do have an excellent INTEL community, which is why people like me THINK we don't.
But I think, the Berlin Crises, Cuba Crises, and more recently 9-11 put that argument to rest. IN fact I think that the fact that so mucf of the world hates our guts is a direct result of our intelligence failures, as much as our bully behavior.
For you smug propellorheads out there, the ones who imagine that society should only foster and reward the hard sciences because nothing else really matters?
These tragic failures of our national intelligence to anticipate the enemy, or be able to inflitrate with HUMIT assets, are a damned fine example of how completely wrong you are about the value of the social sciences and humanities to this nation.
Perhaps if the only threat this nation faced were these guys:
You'd be totally right, of course.
But sadly...the world is still run by flesh and blood people whose societies are not just like ours, and whose value systems are not just like ours, either.
So unless our nation can understand the world, it's people, other cultures, their values, their economies, and so forth, and unless our INTEL can speak their languages fluently enough to really understand what is going on behind the scenes in those nations?
Well then, our foreign policies are often going to be more REactive, rather than PROactive, aren't they?
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