Old Spooks for Bush

Somewhere in my book, The Game of Nations, I say, “You can hardly win a game if you don’t even know you are in one.” General Eisenhower put it less colloquially when he said, “If you can correctly define a problem you are already half-way towards its solution.” The lack of a clear, unambiguous definition of our main problem on the international gameboard was the root cause of Irangate. We will have many more such messes until we have a clear understanding of how we stand vis-à-vis those who would destroy the American way of life.

It happens that we have had, in the attics and basements of our governmental intelligence apparatus, a number of analysts who have defined the problem and who understand it very well. With the cool, judicial mien of Dr. Kissinger’s “intelligent, dispassionate visitor from another planet,” they have disregarded both those utterances that the Soviets make for popular consumption and those of the viscerally anti-Soviet émigrés among us who want us to see the Soviet Union merely as “evil.” Instead they study confidential staff papers that are circulated inside the Kremlin; they talk to high-level defectors; and they have coldbloodedly “gamed out” Soviet strategy. Their understanding of it equals their Soviet counterparts’ understanding of ours.

Somewhere in my book, The Game of Nations, I say, “You can hardly win a game if you don’t even know you are in one.” General Eisenhower put it less colloquially when he said, “If you can correctly define a problem you are already half-way towards its solution.” The lack of a clear, unambiguous definition of our main problem on the international gameboard was the root cause of Irangate. We will have many more such messes until we have a clear understanding of how we stand vis-à-vis those who would destroy the American way of life.

It happens that we have had, in the attics and basements of our governmental intelligence apparatus, a number of analysts who have defined the problem and who understand it very well. With the cool, judicial mien of Dr. Kissinger’s “intelligent, dispassionate visitor from another planet,” they have disregarded both those utterances that the Soviets make for popular consumption and those of the viscerally anti-Soviet émigrés among us who want us to see the Soviet Union merely as “evil.” Instead they study confidential staff papers that are circulated inside the Kremlin; they talk to high-level defectors; and they have coldbloodedly “gamed out” Soviet strategy. Their understanding of it equals their Soviet counterparts’ understanding of ours.