Intelligence Reform: Steamroller Out of Steam

WILLIAM SAFIRE has his take on the back and forth over intel reform. Maybe cooler heads will prevail. We need intel reform, just not this bill.//JW sends.

The principled refusal of two House committee chairmen to be steamrollered into hasty passage of a pre-election-driven bill has flipped the previous bashing of the supposedly domineering Bush 180 degrees.

Now the party line is: "Whatsamatter, W., you can't whip these right-wingers of yours into line? The Establishment has decreed that our intelligence operations will be reorganized now, quick, before the new Congress takes the oath and holds further hearings. Why can't you force your generals and your saluting solons to get with the program? Where's Tom (the Hammer) DeLay when we need him?"

That's quite a flip-flop. As for me, I prefer the original complaint: a president needs close-in, loyalist dissent. I resist the steamroller, whether by a president who demands lockstep obedience or by a brilliant P.R. campaign financed by six foundations yet to reveal their names (except for Carnegie Corporation, on its Web site, down for $200,000).

Hero of the steamroller stoppage is Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of House Armed Services, whose committee heard testimony from each of the four service chiefs about a letter from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers. These officers made clear their worry about what some of us consider an unnecessary bureaucratic layer between highly perishable military intelligence and troops in the field.

Their testimony was derided by horrified editorialists and senators who look with disdain on the House as merely a desire to protect budgetary "turf." Might it not be possible that these decorated officers were not puppets being manipulated by nefarious neocons, but stand-up guys who actually believed what they said - and were duty-bound to give Congress their best advice about the way postmodern war must be waged?