If President Obama's "60 Minutes" chat with Steve Kroft was meant to inspire confidence in the path ahead as envisioned by our superspook masters of universal knowingness, it failed. In fact, it only drove home the chilling ineptitude of the U.S. intelligence community--that bedlam of "slam dunks" and Oops, we never noticed that the scary, all-powerful Soviet Bear was imploding.
"Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that ... they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," conceded the president, while having to admit as well that the "community" overestimated the ability of our multibillion-dollar desertion force--known generously as the Iraqi Army--to fight ISIS.
It was this sprawling community's failure to predict and prevent 9/11 that created Clapper's job--an overall directorship of national intelligence--which in the future would guard against a lack of intelligence clarity, crossed communications, miscommunications, gross underestimations and even grosser overestimations. Last night was the product: a humiliated POTUS confessing to the world, There they go again.
Which of the intelligence community's most recent errors was more egregious--the underestimation of ISIS or the overestimation of the, ahem, Iraqi Army? This morning's NYT story on the latter's afflictions--which range from abject poltroonery to a dismaying indifference ("Most of those interviewed said they were joining primarily because they badly needed the pay, not out of any sense of loyalty or desire to fight")--would seem to answer that question. Had we known, say, a year ago that our principal ally was little more than a martial house of canards, perhaps we could have done more to professionalize it ... before ISIS laid waste to a such a good chunk of the country.