The next time you hear someone blame our intelligence community for the attacks, remember how many attacks they *did* stop.
Then think about the fact that even given the best intelligence in the world, if you stop the terrorists time and time and time again and foil their plots, but never go out and eliminate them at the source, all you are doing is training them to do better next time. Eventually, they get smart enough to keep their plans hidden, to find your weaknesses and to exploit them.
Also remember that the more successful your intelligence apparatus is in foiling the early plots, the more everyone will be lulled into complacency; the intelligence apparatus will decline into internecine warfare, and the public and politicians will eviscerate your intelligence budgets, just when you need them the most. This is what has happened to us.
The primary job of intelligence is information, not killing. It’s the job of the military to eliminate threats before they become too great, too smart.
But it’s the job of our *foreign policy* to decide when to deploy the military. That’s where the blame really lies — not with intelligence, but with the leftist, touchy-feely internationalist Ivy-league State Department.
There has *never* been an atrocity committed against the U.S. that our State Department wouldn’t turn the other cheek.
For 50 years we’ve embraced a policy of abject, total appeasement towards the Middle East (and every other area of the world) and been willing to sacrifice every single interest of the United States in the pursuit of “just getting along”, in the vernacular of Rodney King.
If you want to know why terrorists and dictatorial countries everywhere are willing to attack and thumb their noses at us, don’t look at our intelligence (or military); look at State (who now continue that “proud” tradition under Colin Powell).
