Ill Advised

Froomkin points us to James Fallows who is blogging the Aspen Ideas Festival for the Atlantic, specifically about a panel that included Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6 and the author of the notorious Downing Street Memo. Saving this one for Tommorrow.

The speaker in question was Sir Richard Dearlove. He is famous as a former director of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, and he was favored on this panel by being addressed as “Sir Richard” when the other people were “Jim” or “Danny.” Without ramming home the point, at four or five instances he suggested that just about everything in the American approach to the war on Islamic terrorism had been ill-conceived.

The minor instances came when the other participants, all American, talked about this or that reorganization of the intelligence agencies or the Department of Homeland Security, and Sir Richard (I can’t really call him “Dearlove,” can I? Maybe “C,” his James Bondish organizational name?) confined himself to a one-liner about such organizational details usually being the least important aspects of creating an effective intelligence system. The Americans talked about the expansion of executive power after 9/11, and worried about the larger tension between civil liberties and military security. “C” wrapped up that discussion in two sentences, saying (a) that whenever civil liberties were being infringed, it was crucial that the change be made through legislation rather than sheer executive action, since it built in at least the chance of political debate; and (b) that what had been done via executive action in the United States “would be illegal in Great Britain, as a matter of common law.”

But the main tension involved the larger U.S. emphasis on a “Global War on Terror.” “Terrorism is an extreme form of political communication,” he said. “You want to be sure that, in your response, you don’t end up amplifying the messages that terrorists are trying to convey.” This understanding, he said, explained why his country approach counter-terrorism in so different a way from America’s.

That’s what I wanted to hear more about – in what ways, exactly, he thinks the United States might have “amplified” the Al Qaeda message, and what a different approach would look like.

Like Froomkin, I'd like to hear more about that too, but I'd really like to hear why Tony Blair was so hell bent in following Bush into the Iraqi quagmire and why Blair ignored the advice of his intelligence service.