>I know your background so am not surprised you want us to give the spooks more free reign.

<g> Actually, I'm not so much for free reign as I am for the idea that rather than have a bunch of peasants conscripted to kill each other it would be nice if leaders had the courage to use professionals to very surgically kill some people who dearly need killing.

Ten targeted killings in Germany in 1934 would have saved probably 20 million lives. One more in Russia would have saved another 35 million. Throw in one in China and you've got the hat trick. Pretty small price to pay for a whole different 20th century.

After 9/11 I sincerely hope somebody was giving serious thought to how we could help half the Saudi royal family kill the other half.

500 pound bombs of course can also be a beautiful thing ( today being a very good example ) if they land in the right place and intelligence is all about figuring out where to put them... and when.

I don't think 9/11 was so much an intelligence failure - we knew about Al Queida and Bin Ladan - as lack of will. The Sudan offered us Bin Laden in 1997 and Clinton declined. I think Janet Reno told him we really couldn't convict him of anything. They thought of it as a legal problem. Disgraceful, but I am sure an approach which would meet with approval in cocktail parties on the Upper West Side.

Until the Towers fell.

We don't know what the intelligence was pre-War. We don't know what the intelligence has been since. That is not how it works. I am not privy to anything other than knowing how some people think, but I can tell you that if somebody like Cofer Black knew where there was a cache of Sarin or VX in Iraq or if he knew stuff had been moved to the Bekaa, he sure as hell wouldn't be holding a press conference no matter how many children danced in the street shouting "NO WMDs - BUSH LIED!" Knowledge is different from PR.

And do consider this - we also don't know what the Israelis shared and what they were planning to do. The most dangerous thing that could happen right now is for the Israelis to think Iran almost has a bomb. They will not allow that to happen. Some of our options - just as they were in 2003 - have to be constrained by those realities. Doesn't matter if Saddam was making a bomb. Thanks to the French and the Russians he had money - lots of it - and plenty of backchannels to move things into and out of Iraq. The N Koreans have a bomb and they need money very badly. Had Mossad decided at some point that there was a deal in the works Baghdad wouldn't look like Mogadishu - it would have looked like the surface of the moon and glowed in the dark.


>It might be a tough sell politically, though, given how they have been have been doing lately. Intelligence failures were part of the cause of the two U.S. catastrophes in recent years, 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Now you're probably going to say they weren't really intelligence failures, the administration has just spun them that way to cover their own butts.
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>What did you think about the operation against Mr. al-Zarqawi today? Is this the type of thing you are prescribing? FWIW I am applauding.
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