"Intelligence reform" is, as they used to say of the Moral Majority, neither. The intelligence-reform bill that has at least temporarily been scuttled on Capitol Hill despite its endorsement by all the great and good of Washington — from Democratic congressional leaders to President Bush — is neither intelligent nor is it real reform. It is a meaningless, and perhaps even counterproductive, bureaucratic reshuffling that has garnered such across-the-board praise exactly because it is such an empty gesture.
The idea behind the reform bill — pushed primarily by the 9/11 Commission — is that what ails U.S. intelligence can be fixed by the creation of a national intelligence director, centralizing vast powers over the intelligence community's budgets, policies and procedures. This is supposedly a bureaucratic magic bullet. Of course, if the bill passes and if — God forbid — there's another major terror attack a few years hence, the complaint will immediately go up that U.S. intelligence is "too centralized."
The fact is that measures to make us safer usually aren't uncontroversial — for instance, taking the fight to the enemy overseas as aggressively as possible, or offending the civil-liberties lobby by implementing the Patriot Act. Since many Democrats don't endorse these steps (in fact, routinely howl about them), they are always looking to get onboard window-dressing tough-on-terror measures, which is what makes the intelligence-reform bill a perfect cause for them. |