Discussion for article #223282
Mike Rogers can go jump in a lake.
Barack Obama increased counter-terror operations more than tenfold over the level of George Bush, who was too busy on his Great Mesopotamian Adventure That Couldn’t Possibly Go Wrong, and who closed the bin Laden unit at the CIA.
Now, in response to the success of those efforts, Obama is scaling back counterterrorism operations to a level that’s “only,” say, five times or 8 times greater than those under George Bush.
And yet, was Mike Rogers denouncing George Bush in public for insufficient activity on counter-terrorism?
Republicans just don’t take al Qaeda seriously, and they never have. It’s nothing but a tool for domestic politics - ginning up support for an Iraq war, denouncing Obama, whatever. Actual counter-terrorism is just not something they care about.
The drone program in Somalia has all but ended, too.
The problem with having a covert operations capability is that Presidents are irresistibly tempted to used it. Read Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, and you’ll probably come to the conclusion that covert ops fall almost entirely into two categories: utter failures or wildly counter-productive (see “The Law of Unintended Consequences”).
The same book will also lead you to conclude that consistenly bad intelligence is actually worse than no intelligence at all. Over the decades, the CIA has either missed the major developments (like the collapse of the Soviet Union), or has gotten its information horribly wrong.
In short, we’d have been better served by having no CIA at all.