The Wrong Reform
The House kills an intel plan that would have made fighting terror harder.
BY BRENDAN MINITER - WSJ.com
Tuesday, November 23, 2004 12:01 a.m.
The Founders designed the House of Representatives to be the arm of the federal government closest and most responsive to the people. This weekend, the brilliance of this design was clear when the House all but killed plans to revamp the nation's 15 intelligence agencies and create a national intelligence director. By shelving the legislation, the House broke away from the political stampede in Washington and made real reform possible in the future.
That hasn't stopped the political blame game. The Washington Post identified the "conservatives" in the House as the bad guys. Meanwhile others claim certain House members were simply doing the Pentagon's bidding. Give it a few days, and we'll likely hear that it was actually Halliburton that was behind the curtain all along. But make no mistake, this bill died in House-Senate conference over a central policy issue: whether the military should take the lead in fighting the war on terror. More than a few Beltway insiders don't see Iraq as part of that war and anyway would rather the Marines and special-ops guys take a back seat to the CIA and other clandestine services--a view reflected in the reforms pushed by the Senate.
Before we get too far into the details--and there are a lot of details that have not been widely reported but will nonetheless make you cringe--let's pause for a moment to consider the politics. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, responded to a reporter's question this way: "If there is another major terrorist attack on our soil--and sadly, there will likely be one--we will have only ourselves to blame. Congress had a chance to protect America, and Congress failed." She's hardly alone. This seems to be part of a new Democratic offensive.
This strategy is a dangerous one for America. Talking down American power and misleading our enemies into believing that an attack could damage the political party that is most vigorously pursuing the war on terror--à la Spain--invites disaster. What Osama bin Laden needs to understand is that his is a hopeless cause destined to leave him a broken and humiliated man.
This is where intelligence reform comes in. The right reforms will make America even stronger. But the 9/11 Commission suggested a complete overhaul of the intelligence community, including creating a national intelligence director to lord over the CIA and other agencies as well as control the budgets for the intelligence agencies inside the Defense Department, create a National Counter Terrorism Center and make public the intelligence budget.
The Senate picked up these recommendations--including provisions to allow the new national intelligence director to pull money and personnel away from the Pentagon's intelligence agencies. Under the Senate's plan, the National Counter Terrorism Center would also have "operational control"--meaning the new intelligence czar could order soldiers and CIA operatives, for example, to carry out missions overseas without any input from the director of the CIA or the secretary of defense.
The problems here are obvious. The intelligence czar, who was expected to occupy office space within the CIA, would likely end up draining intelligence resources away from the military to meet the needs of the CIA, FBI and other civilian spy agencies. That could leave soldiers in the field without the critical, real-time intelligence they need to fight on the modern battlefield--what House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter calls the soldiers' "lifeline." To use a current example, if this was already in place, soldiers fighting in Fallujah might not have had the satellite linkups they needed to study the changing battlefield. Money and technology aside, the military also feared the intelligence director would pull essential personnel away from military duties--something explicitly within his power under the Senate's plan.
More disturbing was the proposal to give the intelligence czar the ability to move personnel out of combat support units. Not only would that break into the military's chain of command; it's the kind of bureaucratic micromanagement that is likely to cause operations to fail and maybe get soldiers killed--a concern Mr. Hunter expressed to me. An example I heard kicked around while walking the halls of Congress last week was Operation Desert One--Jimmy Carter's failed covert mission to rescue Americans held hostages in Iran in which eight American servicemen were killed in a helicopter crash.
These and other points were deal breakers for Republican House members because what the Senate's bill reflects is not a war fighting mentality. Rather it's a call for managing terrorism with small-scale and perhaps covert operations by taking the Pentagon out of the decision-making process and leaving the task of going after terrorists largely in the hands of the intelligence czar. In other words, treating terrorism more like a law-enforcement matter than a real war in which a large number of soldiers openly do battle with the enemy.
John Kerry just ran a national campaign pushing that very agenda, and he lost. For Congress then to have enshrined that thinking into law with these intelligence reforms would have been to ignore the election's results. When it comes to defending this country, it's not the American people we have to worry about, but rather the political class all to willing to stampede through the latest "reform."
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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