Connecting The Dots Ain't That Easy

In the never ending and totally predictable political sports of Pointing The Finger and Passing The Blame as well as Cover Your Posterior, the expectable has happened. The President of the United States has moved to exonerate Janet Napolitano and her Heimatsicherheitsamt while shifting the onus to "systemic failure" in general and CIA in particular. His flunkies (unidentified but termed "senior") opined that the dots were all there but no one connected them properly until after Christmas Day.

Yup, the dots were all there. No doubt about it. The Underwear Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was surrounded by dots. The National Security Council intercepts referred to "the Nigerian" and, famously, Abudulmutallab's father warned the US embassy personnel in Nigeria of his fears regarding his son's "radicalization." All these occurred in a context which gave Yemen pride of place as the new center of Islamist jihadi terrorism.

Lots of dots.

The problem is not that there were too few dots. Rather the difficulty which confronts every intelligence agency analyst (beyond too many layers of "coordination" and "review") is simply that their universe is comprised of nothing but dots. Lots of dots. Oodles and gobs of dots. Often the dots are smudgy, hazy or flatly contradictory. The venue of an intelligence analyst is rather like one of those French pointillist paintings viewed from close up.

Dots on top of dots. Dots of different sizes. Dots of different colors. Nothing but dots. It is enough to drive one dotty on the best of days. And, the best of days are few and very far between.

It is simple, attractive, and a species of cheap shot for some "senior" administration official or other political hack to tie the tail of blame to the cat of intelligence. It is also, in the longer run, not constructive. As the record shows from the Vietnam War period, unjustified criticism like rejecting intelligence appreciations which do not match political or personal expectations leads to a weakening of the intelligence process and a pollution of the intelligence product.

This does not mean that room for improvement does not exist. It always does. New and more effective ways to see significant patterns in the blizzard of dots as well the distribution of product to all consumer agencies are always both necessary and under development. (Not that most of these mean the view from the worm's eye level of the analyst becomes necessarily more prescient, more precise, or more rapid since the production of dots always exceeds the development of new "dot management" techniques.)

There is little, if any, utility in more presidential or congressional reviews or investigations. All these do (if history is the reliable guide it normally is) will be the manufacture of new, redundant, and typically encumbering levels of "review" and "coordination."

In the case of the Underwear Bomber like that of the Shoe Bomber eight years ago, the combination of inept bomb manufacture and passengers possessed of a healthy instinct for self-preservation and quick reflexes made up for deficiencies in "dot management." The realities of life indicate that the same sort of terminal protection will have to suffice in the future as it has in the past.

This gloomy view is not predicated upon any lack of respect for the always developing capacity of the intelligence community or a similar absence of faith in new security technology, but rather in the historically rooted contention that the bad guys, the Islamst jihadist terrorists, have the initiative. Fortunately, the most recent example of al-Qaeda skill shows that while the initiative is there and is powerfully reinforced by the processes of ideological radicalization, the skill level is low--at least in the critical area of explosive detonation. The extent to which this fortunate low ability level is the consequence of the American and other countries' efforts to disrupt and destroy terrorist entities is arguable.

The Underware Bomber is behind us. But the problem of connecting dots is not. This reality is equally present in countering the ongoing threats of terror and formulating a policy regarding Iran and its regime.

The one year deadline set by President Obama is about up. Certainly, the Iranians have made no move toward compliance with the relevant UN Security Council demands. If President Obama is to be taken at his word, push-comes-to-shove time will be upon us long before the first birds of Spring--even here in the Southwest.

Connecting the dots on Iran is even more difficult than identifying the right "Nigerian" and pointing at the correct Christmas Attack chattered about on numerous al-Qaeda oriented websites. It is also (pace those on board NW 253) far more important to the future of the US and the world generally.

Complicating the problem of connecting the massively differing and contradictory dots from within Iran is the twin difficulty of connecting the dots which might indicate the direction which will be taken by both Russia and China without whose cooperation more sanctions will be as much of a waste as their predecessors have proven to be. The questions of just what the Men of the Kremlin and the Gnomes of Beijing are up to equals in importance the questions regarding the stability and desperation of the Mullahs in Tehran.

While a fair amount of public speculation has occurred regarding the relations of sanctions, the opposition, and the mullahocracy, there has been no duplication of that with respect to the latest Russian gambit and the ever more in-your-face attitude of the Chinese government. Yet the stances of both Russia and China are central to connecting the dots on the matter of Iranian political will in the face of domestic opposition which is not fading away and the seemingly resolute rhetoric emanating from the Obama White House.

One factor that cannot be in doubt is the evident belief on the part of both Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leadership alike holding that President Obama is fundamentally weak of both mind and will.

In his effort to hold the pending Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty hostage, Vladimir Putin is betting that the airhead Obama vision of a nuclear weapons free world is so compelling to the president that further concessions can be wrested from the American side. This cynical but far from unrealistic opinion is reinforced by the strong US need for full Russian compliance with any new sanction regime imposed upon Iran. Given the continued asymmetry between American and Russian nuclear capacities, the gambit is well worth the gamble.

If anything the Chinese are playing a stronger hand that the Russians. Their cooperation is utterly essential. Considering that China dictated the course of play in Copenhagen earlier this month and came away victorious and giving proper thought to the amount of US debt held by Beijing, their diplomats play a very strong hand. Further militating against any genuine cooperation with the US on the Iran question is both their investments in the country and their disapproval of internal opposition (to say nothing of external support for such opposition).

Right now, some very unfortunate analysts are trying to connect the dots on the questions of "Probable Russian (Chinese) Courses of Action In Response to An American Course of Action." As neither country is transparent, the dots will be notable in both their density and contradictory nature. In that the success or failure of Obama administration policy regarding Iran hangs on the final pattern discerned (or imposed) by the analysts, this task is more difficult and far more critical than was that of identifying the Underwear Bomber before he boarded the flight to Detroit.

Now, unfortunately, the assorted analytical prognosticators are laboring under the added pressure of investigations and reviews--and damnation from the All Highest. Their efforts and our future would have been far better served if Mr Obama had stuck to improving his golf game rather than attacking those whose efforts are so critical to his policies.