Stupidity, Intelligence, and Egypt If you want to understand why our power to influence world events is a shambles, you need only to listen to what came out of the White House, the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence this week in response to the crisis in Egypt.
Start with a point so basic that even liberals should agree with it: if you lack timely, accurate and expertly-analyzed intelligence on other peoples and nations, the making of foreign policy is reduced to mere guesswork. American policymakers have -- roughly since Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Stansfield Turner, decided that we really don't need spies -- been reduced to guessing what the world is doing.
With President Obama in charge of the guesswork, American policy is apparently being made in disregard of what little intelligence there is. As I wrote on Egypt last week, Obama sided with the protesters, then with Mubarak and then again with the protesters who he assumed were aiming to establish a democratic government.
Throughout the crisis, Obama was content to dramatize his pretentiousness, doing his best to imply broadly that we had an influence on the outcome which we clearly do not. He assumed, without evidence, that the protesters uniformly demanded democracy and that if Mubarak fell, democracy would result. In his statement last Friday, Obama was taking credit for Mubarak's fall and urging the Egyptian military to accomplish a quick transition to democracy.
In response, the Egyptian junta suspended the nation's constitution and dissolved its parliament. It is now reportedly forcing protesters to leave Cairo's Tahrir Square.
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