- The US is struggling against a world-wide Islamic insurgency.
- The US is currently fighting a wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- The notoriously irascible Israelis have finally had it with Hamas rocket attacks, and are renovating Gaza with bombs and tank shells.
- The Russians are proving that they really dislike the US, by celebrating every anti-American kook then can dig up, or by sending troops to counter NATO deployments in Europe. (We probably asked for that one)
- The (nuclear-armed) Indians and the Pakistanis are even more pissed at each other than normal, thanks to the recent Mumbai attacks. Did I mention they are both religious fanatics with nukes?
I don't think so.
I'm sure Leon Panetta is a lovely man (for a California Democrat) and I hear he's a real efficient manager and great at running meetings. Getting the Clinton White House to function more smoothly was a great achievement, but I don't think its much preparation for running the CIA.
In MeatAxe World, Panetta's job is running meetings for the REAL head of the CIA, a vicious schemer who wants nothing more than to wage blood-soaked campaigns of epic violence against those who wish us harm.
Maybe the new DNI, Admiral Dennis Blair, will be that man. I sure hope so.
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He is as qualified to run CIA as Obama is to be President. And maybe under Panetta's gentle stewardship, the CIA can become an organization that is more dedicated to helping people and healing the world's oceans than it is to painting targeting reticles on the foreheads of world scumbags.
Which actually might work out well, because as an intel agency the CIA hasn't exactly shined in the last 20 years. So having it monitor whales humping is probably playing to its only strengths.
You mean missing the collapse of Communism, the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall and only a few short years later the 9/11 attacks didn't impress you?
I'd gladly trade in the whole lot for a roomful of dweebs who thumb through the last 30 years of techno-Clancy-Bond-Brown thrillers and do internet searches ad phone-taps for "hints of that stuff in chapter 32", a hundred field agents, and a grizzled old boss with an eye patch and cane.
Tell me we wouldn't have had a better track record.
Ill take that, but I want more field agents. And I'd like a lot of them to speak Chinese, Persian, Farsi,Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic, Russian and whatever dialects they happen to use in North Korea. And if some of them could blend into a crowd in the countries where they speak those languages, even better.
Sure thing. I'm just the idea quarrying guy, I pay Patchy the Cane guy to forge the details.
more field agents won't do anything until we have a president who actually trusts the CIA's intel and is prepared to literally pull the trigger when we have acquired targets.
this means better leadership in the CIA (your point), better generals who comprise the joint chiefs and a president who doesn't carry on the tradition of distrusting, ignoring or otherwise minimizing his non-civilian personnel, a grand presidential tradition, starting with Kennedy and reaching peaks of disaster with Clinton and Bush.
It's failure of leadership on all fronts, all you'll get is pissed off field agents who make recommendations that get ignored, who will then go try to get lucrative security positions in the private sector.
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