Worth reading Sunday: Richard Clarke in the New York Times:

First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.

The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.

Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers . . .

Even more important than any bureaucratic suggestions is the report's cogent discussion of who the enemy is and what strategies we need in the fight. The commission properly identified the threat not as terrorism (which is a tactic, not an enemy), but as Islamic jihadism, which must be defeated in a battle of ideas as well as in armed conflict.

The battle of ideas. I'm a bit late to note it, but I think David Brooks makes a compelling argument here on just this issue:

The commissioners don't say it, but the implication is clear. We've had an investigation into our intelligence failures; we now need a commission to analyze our intellectual failures. Simply put, the unapologetic defenders of America often lack the expertise they need. And scholars who really know the Islamic world are often blind to its pathologies. They are so obsessed with the sins of the West, they are incapable of grappling with threats to the West.

We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive. The commissioners recommend that the U.S. should be much more critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to demonstrate our principles. They suggest we set up a fund to build secondary schools across Muslim states, and admit many more students into our own. If you are a philanthropist, here is how you can contribute: We need to set up the sort of intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war, with modern equivalents of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to introduce them to Western intellectuals.

Most of all, we need to see that the landscape of reality is altered. In the past, we've fought ideological movements that took control of states. Our foreign policy apparatus is geared toward relations with states: negotiating with states, confronting states. Now we are faced with a belief system that is inimical to the state system, and aims at theological rule and the restoration of the caliphate. We'll need a new set of institutions to grapple with this reality, and a new training method to understand people who are uninterested in national self-interest, traditionally defined.

Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. He observed that we are in the fight against Islamic extremism now where we were in the fight against communism in 1980.

I firmly believe the battle of ideas is as or more important than the military campaign, but that this administration is uniquely ill equipped to wage it. Why? For one, because Bush himself is uniquely uninterested in ideas, in thinking itself, in trying to understand or engage with people who do not see the world as he does. [He's failed to bring along even a small percentage of people who see things differently from him in this country; in the Middle East, a poll discussed today on Meet the Press shows that 100% of Egyptians are hostile to America now. 100%. And this is Egypt, e.g. among those countries a certain foreign intelligence official I recently interviewed counted among the Middle East regimes that could be counted in the hunkey-dory camp as far as Israel and the US are concerned. What about the people?...] Two, Bush's national security team, the Vulcans, share the preeminent fixation on the Pentagon and military force as the vehicle for US foreign policy. America's alienation from and isolation among its allies has never been greater in my lifetime -- a consequence of the administration's striking disdain for and incompetence at persuading allies by diplomatic or other non military means. [For instance, the administration could have made a tactical decision to endorse Kyoto -- full well knowing as did Clinton the Senate was not likely to ratify it -- in order to get alliance buy-in later on for future "emergencies." Instead, they thumbed their nose at the world, they paid for that mistake, we are paying now, and Bush is likely to lose office....And the air is polluted, too.]. Three, the people who are genuinely interested in the war of ideas in the Bush camp, the neoconservatives, are so deeply discredited . . .

And talking about the war of ideas...it all starts at home, as they say. I can report that it did not come to blows.

Posted by Laura at July 25, 2004 02:04 PM