TCS Daily - An Intelligent Reading of the NIE
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James Joyner | Friday, September 29, 2006 |
My latest for TCS Daily, “An Intelligent Reading of the National Intelligence Estimate,” is up.
It takes a look at the Key Findings from the controversial National Intelligence Estimate released earlier this week and finds a very mixed bag.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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“An Intelligent Reading of the National Intelligence Estimate,” is up.
It takes a look at the Key Findings from the controversial National Intelligence Estimate released earlier this week and finds a very mixed bag.
Do you have a leaked copy of the NIE or are you basing your "intelligent reading" on Bush's selected excerpts?
Bush didn't release "selected excerpts," in the sense of carefully chosen bits and pieces, but rather the "Key Findings" section. That, as both my one-sentence description and your quoting of it make clear, is what the article addresses.
The NIE is good as far as I can see - but what it doesn't do is characterize the level of threats. I'm persuaded by James Fallows' Atlantic Monthlyarticle from September. The danger from terrorism is more that an attack can provoke us into a self-destructive response. It is like the Spanish flu: it wasn't the flu that killed, it was the immune response. At this point the terrorists are not even close to mounting a vital threat, much less a survival threat such as we saw during the cold war.
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