THE ARROGANCE OF THE CLERKS

THOSE WHO listened to the Senate hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence heard Gates (a former CIA official) accused of having purveyed conservative ideological fancies at the expense of facts. The hearings themselves, however, consisted largely of gossip from the CIA bureaucracy rather than of arguments about the outside world. Listeners quickly got the feeling of witnessing a family squabble they did not really understand. What was going on? Two sets of liberals—Democratic senators and CIA analysts—were bashing Gates in order to push two somewhat overlapping agendas.

The senators’ agenda was transparent enough. Ronald Reagan had built a decade’s political dominance by depicting the Soviet Union as an evil empire at home and dangerous abroad. Now the Democrats asserted that their (highly unpopular) opposition to U.S. military spending and muscular foreign policy had been right all along because the “real” CIA had always known that the Soviet Union was collapsing at home and a paper tiger abroad. By filling intelligence documents with Mr. Reagan’s favorite images—raw meat thrown to Reaganite lions—Gates and his former boss William Casey had indirectly disinformed the American people. Even Daniel P. Moynihan, who knows much better, pilloried Gates along these lines. Dogs bite man.

AM

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Angelo M. Codevilla

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THOSE WHO listened to the Senate hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence heard Gates (a former CIA official) accused of having purveyed conservative ideological fancies at the expense of facts. The hearings themselves, however, consisted largely of gossip from the CIA bureaucracy rather than of arguments about the outside world. Listeners quickly got the feeling of witnessing a family squabble they did not really understand. What was going on? Two sets of liberals—Democratic senators and CIA analysts—were bashing Gates in order to push two somewhat overlapping agendas.

The senators’ agenda was transparent enough. Ronald Reagan had built a decade’s political dominance by depicting the Soviet Union as an evil empire at home and dangerous abroad. Now the Democrats asserted that their (highly unpopular) opposition to U.S. military spending and muscular foreign policy had been right all along because the “real” CIA had always known that the Soviet Union was collapsing at home and a paper tiger abroad. By filling intelligence documents with Mr. Reagan’s favorite images—raw meat thrown to Reaganite lions—Gates and his former boss William Casey had indirectly disinformed the American people. Even Daniel P. Moynihan, who knows much better, pilloried Gates along these lines. Dogs bite man.