Intelligence has two distinct definitions. It can refer to the possession of information, or the possession of the capacity to use it effectively. The two do not necessarily cohabit; most certainly, not often enough. Like the time we outsourced the liquidation of a monster in the caves of Tora Bora to locals of ambivalent motivations.
Ten years later, we have dismissed the Chairman of Al Quaida 'with prejudice'. He is presumably enjoying his exile to the hear-after among a fresh crop of virgins. Hopefully, he has access to Hair Color for Men.
Now that our intelligence has been applied to effect, we are hearing growing murmurs about withdrawal from Afghanistan, and applying the post-war 'peace dividend' toward rebuilding 'The Homeland' or maybe reducing the deficit. Such comments are understandable, but seem to be absent relevant intelligence, such as:
1) Pakistan is the problem, and Afghanistan is, if nothing else, the only platform available of us to deal with Pakistan militarily, when necessary. We are more likely to receive a nuclear WMD from Pakistan than from Iran in the forseeable future.
2) We don't know exactly who or what is setting the Middle East on fire, but we can reasonably surmise that the seemingly disparate movements across the region may have some common threads other than Twitter, like Iran.
3) Much as we might like to walk away from the Middle East and let it implode, we are not in a position to do so without suffering severe economic consequences. And there is no credible logic to support that doing so would somehow allow us to retreat, unscathed, across the Atlantic moat to treat our foreign wounds and our own domestic cancers.
4) Among our domestic cancers is the drug addiction which is fueling a violent paradigm on our southern border as despotic as Al Quida in Iraq, and much closer. How prepared are we to deal with that? Is the NRA's defense of loose gun regulation that feeds weapons to the Mexican drug gangs any less accommodating of our destruction than Pakistan's sequestering of Bin Laden?
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So much for dwelling on the Middle East. How about China? We have no better idea of what is going on there, except for what the Chinese government is inclined to tell us. Do we trust their information any more than we trust their toys, food, wallboard? With typical American naivete, we take too much of China's progress at face value without critically asking if they can really master such rapid change without severe dislocations that could have strategic consequences. Too frequently, the discussion of our bilateral future is couched in the context of fearing the consequences of China's growth. I would suggest that China's possible failure has far more fearful strategic consequences. China is right to look at the Middle East with concern. A replication of that dynamic in China could create an economic and political tsunami that would swamp Japan's by comparison. And it would reach our shores.
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Speaking of economic intelligence, there's the price of oil and other commodities, the stock market and currencies which are gyrating without apparent cause and effect, but with deep cause for suspicion. It is hard for me to understand the weakness of the dollar, recognizing all of its underlying problems; weak compared to what?
If the Republican Party is indeed the party of business, then the business community as a whole must truly be short on intelligence, for Republican policies will surely kill the middle class that is the basis for the so-called consumer economy that is still the goal of our economic resusitation. But, on further consideration, that is only reasonable; it is an extension of the self-inflicted wounds that the business community is committing individually and with collective impact through its investment and employment decisions.
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I continue to hear cries from the executive elite that Obama needs to create an energy policy that will assure the 'cheap energy' that is vital to the consumer economy. As if Obama could do that alone. Or now. Cheap energy is gone. We're still pricing it in the short term, because 'The Market' has no way or motivation to intelligently price it in a 'long term' context, and Obama does not yet have the political capital to accomplish the same thing with a carbon tax. We will ultimately be forced into that by crisis as we now are with deficit reduction. The Energy Deficit is being ignored by the self-styled business cognoscenti just as was the federal deficit by the self-styled political cognoscenti, and this dynamic of denial will ultimately lead us to the same destination.
Of course, it will be harder to measure the mileposts to that destination now that the Energy Information Agency (EIA)has announced a reduction of its data gathering and reporting as a result of federal budgetary constraints. Yet another paper cut in the slow bleeding process begun during the Bush 43 administration with environmental and other data.
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There is a sublime irony that the society which has aggressively pioneered and deployed information technology suffers from such a dearth of reliable information and the cultural capacity to use it effectively.
Onward
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