Managing Iraq for the Election Cycle

Ledeen gets right to the point:

As I have repeated to the point of monotony, we are particularly weak on Iran, and have been since the late 1970s. At the time of Khomeini's seizure of power, there was no full-time Farsi-speaking Iran expert on the crisis team at CIA. A few years later, when Oliver North and Robert McFarlane went to Tehran, they had to drag a man out of retirement to serve as interpreter. And even a year or two ago the agency was still claiming that Sunnis and Shiites don't work together, and denying that there was any link between Tehran and Osama bin Laden. By now we are reduced to begging for information on the numerous al Qaeda terrorists in Iran.

Second is the interplay between policy and intelligence. Over the years, the intelligence people have learned not to bring forward information that policymakers do not want to hear. At the moment, the top policy people do not want to take on another terror master, whether in Damascus, Tehran, Tripoli, or Jeddah. So the intel guys oblige by not looking very hard at the remaining state sponsors of the terror network. It's clear that the (domestic, electoral) political imperative is now paramount, and our leaders want to "manage" Iraq until the president is reelected. Then they'll see. [Emphasis added.]

WELL WORTH THE READ. De-nihilism is not owned solely by the left -- it's likely infesting the president's closest advisors if not George himself. Or things may not always be as they seem? OK, here comes...