Intelligence Pros Can’t Understand U.S. Policy on Ukraine

Philip Giraldi finds U.S. policy on Ukraine close to “incomprehensible”. Not only that he writes

“I know of no former or current intelligence official who believes that the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe was a good idea, that toppling Bashar al-Assad would bring anything but chaos, or that bombing ISIS will actually accomplish anything. Given the current national security environment, I think I can state with some certainty that a solid majority of lower and mid-level employees would regard the administration responses to the ongoing series of crises, including both Ukraine and ISIS, as poorly conceived and executed. In the case of Ukraine the judgment would be somewhat stronger than that, bordering on perceptions that what we are experiencing is an abuse of the intelligence process to serve a political agenda, that the Cold War-style tension is both unnecessary and contrived. Many regard the dubious intelligence that has been produced to implicate Moscow in Crimean developments as both cherry picked and unreliable.”

These criticisms and others like them apply to Bush’s anti-terror and interventionist policies. I’m pleased to see a group of intelligence pros who know enough to criticize the Bush-Obama policies, and I hope they come around to criticizing similar policies that go back to 1948.

But what I really wish is in another field altogether. I wish that there was a group of standard economists who would stand up and say that the federal government’s economic policies were likewise incomprehensible, poorly conceived and designed to further a political agenda. It would be even better if all these experts would say that the government achieves results that are the very opposite of those it claims to seek.

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11:09 am on September 7, 2014