Opinion Mark Steyn: What if you threw an Intelligence Reform Bill signing-party and nobody came? That's what happened to President Bush the other day. For weeks, the media and the Democrats and the "9/11 families" have been badgering him that he needs to lean on Congress to pass the intelligence reforms recommended by the 9/11 Commission but blocked by hardline Republicans, who thought it was a lot of bureaucratic window-dressing and a big waste of time, if not actively harmful.
So he leaned on them and they passed the Bill and he signed it and the dial-a-quote Dems, who'd been agitating noisily for it, barely said a word. If Bush's signing ceremony had been a CIA clandestine operation, it would have got more publicity. And now we can all forget about intelligence reform until the next thing US intel gets disastrously wrong.
I don't know anyone from the savvier end of the intelligence community who thinks the intel reform Bill will reform intel in any meaningful way - i.e. by reforming what has been the near 100 per cent failure rate of recent years down to, oh, 93, maybe 86 per cent.
By the way, I like that expression "intelligence community" - it makes them sound like the gay community or the Hispanic community, a nice close-knit identity group celebrating their distinctive cultural traditions by tapping phones and making clandestine drops all day long. Perhaps one day they'll get some kind of Federal subsidy to stage re-enactments of these rituals for the benefit of tourists. That seems as likely as any other "reform" to emerge from this new Bill.
But, of course, the Dems were in favour of it because reshuffling the bureaucracy is their preferred way of demonstrating that they're not soft on national security. Mass redundancies and a sell-off of the office furniture would have been more helpful. I don't think US intelligence can be reformed effectively without abolishing the principal agencies and creating entirely new structures with none of the baggage. Like their fellow intelligence operative, Austin Powers, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the CIA seems to have lost its mojo, and giving the executive pen-pushers new acronyms is unlikely to help get it back.
I always like the bit in Ian Fleming's novels where Bond moans about having to do some dreary civil service paperwork for M. The movies wisely junked the in-triplicate memo-filling to focus on livelier 007 activities like abseiling into Blofeld's compound and nailing Tiffany Case and Pussy Galore. The CIA, by contrast, have spent the last quarter-century eschewing the abseiling and concentrating on the paperwork. (I can't speak for the hot-sheet action, though I'd be surprised if Jill St John or Britt Ekland would put out for overpaid clerical staff.) This amazing transformation of the agency from assassins and coup-fomenters into obstructionist desk-jockeys doesn't seem to be much use to America, but it's been dandy for the Dems.
Consider, for example, how many of Bush's election-year difficulties derived, one way or another, from CIA HQ at Langley - from WMD, Saddam's lack thereof, to uranium from Niger, Saddam's acquisition thereof. Take the CIA-derived material out of the Democrat Bush-bashing talking points of the last two years and there wouldn't be a lot left. Such circumstantial evidence as there is for the basic paranoid-leftie characterisation of the president - a liar who knew about 9/11 in advance - comes mainly from what the agency said or didn't say, advised or didn't advise, leaked or got leaked on. The old left were paranoid about the CIA. The new left have cheerfully let the CIA make them paranoid about the president. They've finally found a CIA they can love.
A few weeks before 9/11, in the Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht quoted a young CIA man explaining the problem: "Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen." Not when there's a nice air-conditioned office in Virginia in which you can monitor e-mails by satellite all day long. How ya gonna keep 'em out in the field after they've seen Langlee? As was made plain shortly after Gerecht's article appeared, for the next few years much of the intelligence action will be in Diarrhoea Central - from Niger to Indonesia.
In their defence, the "intelligence community" say, well, the British and French missed most of this stuff, too. But the difference is they got things wrong for a lot less money. The famous "Presidential Daily Brief" of August 6th 2001 that Bush got hammered a year ago for not "acting on" gives the game away. The most lavishly-funded intelligence agency in the western world led off its analysis with a piece of "classified" intelligence, summarising four-year-old TV interviews Bin Laden had given, followed by a couple of tidbits from foreign intelligence agencies, one lone piece of CIA-generated "intelligence" which turned out to be wrong, and a bland assurance that the FBI was conducting 70 Bin Laden-related "full field investigations", which also proved to be false.
Even if you accept that the neutered CIA of the last 30 years are perforce desk-bound bureaucrats, they could at least be better at it. If they're going to sit around the office all decade, maybe an analyst or two could have spotted some of the long-term trends - the Wahhabi funding of radical madrassahs in Yemen, Pakistan the Balkans and, gosh, Virginia too. No diarrhoea involved there. But no: the Central Intelligence Agency grew so centralised that it had no room for the intelligence - just monitoring e-mails from outer space, day in, day out. Meet the new secret agent, licensed to kill time. If this was a Bond movie, it would be You Barely Live Once. And nothing in the Bill the Dems and the media spent a month making a song and dance about is likely to change that.
September 11th revealed something extraordinary: in the most powerful nation on Earth, the culture of intelligence has simply died.