Permit me to throw you a bit of a curve. I was reading an article in the Jan 8th New Yorker and it seemed to me that it could be applied to the situation the US is in right now. The article was by Malcom Gladwell ({i]Blink, The Tipping Point and, as with all his analytical articles, turns on looking at things through a different lens from the common wisdom. His article was, nominally, about Enron and how and why that company collapsed. The gist of the article though is about how the great problem of our age is not solving puzzles, which Gladwell says involved getting the right pieces of information and the getting them to fit together, but dealing with mysteries which involve huge amounts of information that we can't decipher because it's too much to deal with.
There was a paragraph in the article that made me think of Sen. Kerry and his approach to our troubles in the Middle East and to our Foreign Policy in general.
With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, Treverton and others have argued that the situation facing the intelligence community has turned upside down. Now most of the world is open, not closed. Intelligence officers aren’t dependent on scraps from spies. They are inundated with information. Solving puzzles remains critical: we still want to know precisely where Osama bin Laden is hiding, where North Korea’s nuclear-weapons facilities are situated. But mysteries increasingly take center stage. The stable and predictable divisions of East and West have been shattered. Now the task of the intelligence analyst is to help policymakers navigate the disorder. Several years ago, Admiral Bobby R. Inman was asked by a congressional commission what changes he thought would strengthen America’s intelligence system. Inman used to head the National Security Agency, the nation’s premier puzzle-solving authority, and was once the deputy director of the C.I.A. He was the embodiment of the Cold War intelligence structure. His answer: revive the State Department, the one part of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment that isn’t considered to be in the intelligence business at all. In a post-Cold War world of “openly available information,” Inman said, “what you need are observers with language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they’re observing.” Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070108fa_fact That sounds like Kerry's approach to me. The puzzle solvers sound like the current Admin. The Bushies posit finding all the pieces and putting them together and then we will have
solved the Middle East. Kerry deals with it as a mystery and understands that it requires people who can deal with insight and who can interpret various mounds of data to come out with conclusions. There is a world of difference here.
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