corrente

People, I'm not making this up.

Brooks burbles:

The people at the C.I.A. understand the problem: on the C.I.A. Web site, you can find a book called "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis," which details the community's blind spots. But the C.I.A. can't correct itself by being a better version of itself. The methodology is the problem.

When it comes to understanding the world's thugs and menaces, I'd trust the first 40 names in James Carville's P.D.A. faster than I'd trust a conference-load of game theorists or risk-assessment officers. I'd trust politicians, who, whatever their faults, have finely tuned antennae for the flow of events. I'd trust Mafia bosses, studio heads and anybody who has read a Dostoyevsky novel during the past five years.

And an example of Brook's very model of a modern intelligence analyst? Wait for it...Saddam Hussein:

[T]he thick-bearded, disheveled ex-strongman that U.S. soldiers captured was living in a mud-brick hut ...

In the hut, a dozen books were piled on top of a chest near a bed. There was a book on interpreting dreams, volumes of classical Arabic poetry titled ``Discipline'' and ``Sin,'' and Fyodor Dostoevsky's ``Crime and Punishment.''

It makes a weird kind of sense, actually. Like giving the right kind of Nazi a free pass after World War II ...

If Saddam had been any good at intelligence, which he wasn't, really. Just better at disinformation than Bush is.