The Washington Post: “ Testimony by intelligence chiefs on global threats highlight differences with president.” January 29, 2019. This WP story suggests that the big differences of the so-called “intelligence chiefs” with the President are according to that journal just another example of how the president is “out of touch” or “thick headed” or “incompetent”. The general media took off with this story (as usual) and projected a whole series of negative news lambasting Mr Trump for his differences with his vaunted intelligence agencies. TV and print media and news broadcasts were rife with the story. The gist of these many stories were how the assumed valid incontrovertible “intelligence” spouted by the heads of these organizations was being ignored by the President at his and the nation’s peril. What a lot of gobblydegook!
I was happy to hear that the President was making up his own mind on these foreign policy issues.
As a businessman my self—I soon learned that good policy and good (profitable) business decisions were not formulated by just using the information from the so called “experts”.
An entrepreneur who made decisions on the basis of what his attorney or —God forbid! -his accountant—advised—would not be in business or profitable very long. These executive decisions have to be made —with the expert information in mind —but not slavishly following their advice. I think Trump knows that well.
Intellectually challenged former President George Bush (junior) was constantly heard to be saying he was “leaving his major policy decisions” up to the “experts” such as his generals and his intelligence chiefs. Look what that got him—(and us). Recall that when “young Georgie” was in charge the “intelligence” agencies were all wrong about the threat of Al Qaida prior to 9-11, their assessment of WMD in Iraq, and later under Obama the intervention in Libya etc. etc. etc, They don’t have a great track record. But George listened to them and made the most grievous foreign policy decisions in the nation’s history.
As Mollie Hemingway reminds us in her excellent piece “Latest Intel Assessment Shows How Trump-Russia Hoax Has Hurt American Interests” (February 1, 2019) one good reason that the President is not mouthing the same shibboleths as the chiefs is that, Mr. Trump thankfully thinks for himself, and is rightly well aware of the shortcomings of his cadre of intelligence chiefs and as well their recent duplicity pre and post election 2016, But more importantly he is correct in viewing their role as being there to provide information—not to set policy. Mr Trump was elected to set policy.
That is why we have elections. So that the electorate can have a timely say in what direction the nation should be going by picking the person who will set policy. (We can hire a dummy to simply repeat the mumbling of the intelligence chiefs—and in the past we have. The people’s choice should attempt to put the policies he/she was elected on into practice. That’s what our nation’s chief executive is supposed to do. He/she evaluates all the information and makes his (or her) decisions on the basis of the electorate’s wishes and the overall strategy and policy as determined by the executive branch. Thus one expects that there should be or may be differences between what policies the executive is pursuing and what information the intelligence chiefs are providing.
And lets not forget the elephant in the room—that these same “intelligence agencies” not too long ago were involved in what Mollie Hemingway terms “duplicitous efforts to unseat our legitimately elected President”. I would have said “traitorous actions to undermine a candidate then later to deny the electorate their legitimate choice of candidate by attempting a internal coup d’etat”.
So the credibility, honesty, and trustworthiness of the intelligence chiefs have been grievously eroded in the minds of much of the electorate. In the future these agencies should, as Ms Hemingway suggests, ‘focus on getting the facts right” and leave “foreign policy to those who were elected by the American people to conduct it.”
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