Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor, makes an interesting point about our intelligence community’s track record, even when extremists within the government do NOT manipulate the facts.
More often than not, we get it all wrong.
But here's the only thing we know for sure: When the collection of politicians and pundits we call "Washington" makes predictions about countries in which the U.S. has "vital interests" (and especially about countries with which we have had bad relations), the predictions — even when they contradict one another! — are almost always wrong.
He goes on:
Consider the record. Washington didn't predict the fall of the shah in Iran, or the end of the Cold War, or the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nor did our pundits (whether left, right or center) predict the war between Vietnam and China after the U.S. lost more than 50,000 service members in the region to prevent the spread of monolithic communism, or, for that matter, China's turn toward becoming a capitalistic and trading giant. There are innumerable other examples in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
There is a large narrative that somehow Reagan defeated the entire Soviet Union, what he termed an Evil Empire, and we did it guess how?....go on....guess...It’s by doing something that Bush cronies LOVE to do and want us to continue to do: outspend other countries in an arms race!!! So you see, when education is like 1% of our GDP and weapons are 40% of our GDP that means we are beating evil empires. This was authored by Peggy Noonan and carried by AM radio stations around the country. But like the rest of the revisionism that the Noise Machine survives on, it is simply untrue.
The Soviet Union fell because their economy fell of its own corruption, and the wall came down because people wanted freedom.
Reagan had little to do with it. The Republicans would claim that the sun rose and set because a Republican was in office at the time.
Keep in mind the Republicans are out of power for the same lack of predictive abilities. They never guessed that people would tire of their corruption, or that people want their freedoms back. They never predicted the pariah we would become, nor did they predict the backlash at their own tagline machine: Shock and Awe, Stay the Course, Slow Bleed, go ahead...add your own.
But the arrogance born of the Bush cronies and appointees gets worse, not because of arrogance, but from plain old incompetence and inexperience. Even though they have a miserable track record in predicting events across the world, this does nothing to ameliorate their confidence in their policies.
The U.S. foolishly isolates hostile countries when it should pressure them to open up to our visitors, executives, students and diplomats. Congress should pressure the administration to open embassies in Tehran, Pyongyang and Havana and staff them in part with native speakers. David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, which searched for weapons of mass destruction in that country after the U.S. invasion, found that Iraqi officials had been lying to Hussein and had not been carrying out his decisions in many cases. Perhaps if we'd been more engaged in that country, rather than keeping our distance, we would've been able to find that out before the invasion rather than after.
Uh....really? Do I have to quote another article noting that Al Quaeda is on the rise again?
(Link here: http://www.latimes.com/... )
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Well, OK.
"As recently as 2005, American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of al-Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks. But more recent intelligence describes the organization’s hierarchy as intact and strengthening," the Times wrote.
( Link here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/...
Now let’s go back to Bruce Hoffman’s article:
'AL QAEDA," President Bush declared confidently in October, "is on the run." The extremists, he said, had "played their hand." The masterminds of the organization had been "brought to justice."
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And you have to ask why the MSM doesn’t challenge this assertion we heard on Actually-Elected President’s Day.
Bush compared "George Washington’s long struggle for freedom" with his own military adventures. "Today, we’re fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life," Bush said.
(Link here: http://www.progressive.org/...
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Is the war in Iraq a civil war? Sectarian violence? Or are we actually somehow protecting our way of life? Is there anyone in the world who believes any of this other than the asshats at Redstate or the "scholars" at the American Enterprise Institute?
Go back to the title of this diary.
Given this administrations track record - which is worse than our previous track record, you have to wonder what is coming next that we can’t predict?
All I can say is that this community of bloggers predicted that Iraq would be kicking a hornet’s nest. We were right, and they were wrong. We predicted creeping fascism in America and that was right too. It's sad when part time bloggers have a better track record than the government. But a new look at the reality of our own history may one day ehlp us from making the same mistakes over and over again because we just believe in our own infallability.