Ideology Is Supplanting Intelligence

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/25/ideology-supplanting-intelligence?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

Ideology Is Supplanting Intelligence
by Paul Pillar


With Donald Trump’s earliest appointments to senior national security positions, some of the disturbing implications for the making of foreign policy of his own lack of qualifications for office are beginning to appear. A president-elect whose outrage-filled campaign alienated many serious thinkers in both parties has made personal support even more of a paramount consideration in the appointment process than it usually is, and even more than Trump’s own inclinations would have made it in the first place. Not only does the priority given to insight and objectivity thereby lessen; the president-elect’s own thinness of understanding of the national security issues involved makes it hard for him to perceive the lack of insight and objectivity of potential appointees. Some people are thus attaining positions of power and influence not because of perspicacity and temperament that would make them suited for the jobs they are given but instead because they were not sufficiently outraged during the campaign to exile themselves from Trumpland.

Once in office, the same thinness of understanding at the top will leave the new president ill-equipped to question, to critically appraise, and to push back against whatever hobby horses his non-objective appointees bring with them. A president who doesn’t read books and gets what he thinks he needs to know from “the shows” will be a poor corrective to the less constructive tendencies of ideologues below him. Ideology will bounce around inside a small echo chamber without other correctives from the outside.

snip//

President-elect Trump already has shown his inclination to reject intelligence analysis when it does not suit his political needs, with his slapping aside of the intelligence community’s judgment about Russian responsibility for hacking of email in the United States. Here the political thrust—similar to, but in the opposite direction of, what it was in Casey’s time—has been to portray the Russians as more innocent, rather than more evil, than what the intelligence analysts were saying. And now Iran and Islam have become principal bêtes noires, taking the place in American political obloquy that the Soviet Union and communism once indisputably held. The president-elect has set a tone making it all the easier for the ideologues surrounding him to bend, twist, and most of all just ignore facts and analysis coming out of the intelligence agencies. His tenuous grasp of world affairs also will make it easier for the same ideologues to go off a deep end in ways that will get him and the nation in trouble. Flynn embodies a return to the White House of the spirit of Oliver North: different rank and service uniform, but the same true-believer fanaticism.

[suegeo]

1. My skin crawls to see the pic of those 3 guys

Triggers anxiety to look into their faces

[SamKnause]

2. They are not interested in intelligence or facts.

Those things are unnecessary in a Corporate controlled Christian Theocracy.