Where do we go from here?

Two interesting pieces of news this week. Firstly, a National Intelligence Assessment confirms that the presence of the United States in Iraq is exacerbating the terrorist threat. Secondly, the United States Coast Guard is conducting live fire exercises with machine guns on its boats in the Great Lakes.

A National Intelligence Assessment is a position paper which identifies long term trends affecting American interests worldwide or in a particular region. It is supposed to provide the United States' Government with the background to the policies it sets. For instance, an assessment that a particular region is becoming more volatile will prompt the State Department to issue travel advisories and the Department of Homeland Security to keep a watchful eye on people arriving at airports from that region.

This particular Assessment reveals a dichotomy in the United States' Government. For the first time, the intelligence services are on the record as saying that the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq is counterproductive to the Bush Administration's War on Terror. Of course, one suspects that the CIA and the other intelligence services have been saying this for years. This time, the intelligence communities are throwing down the gauntlet by going on the record.

It is interesting that, very recently, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney went on the record saying that they did not believe that the situation in Iraq was counterproductive to the War on Terror. One wonders about the prescience of the interviewers who asked just the right question. Perhaps they knew something about the NIA before it was released. Perhaps they were just very lucky.

In any event, the NIA triggers the question, where do we go from here? Is the Bush Administration going to be a lame duck for the last two years of its mandate since it is pursuing two contradictory policies which fewer and fewer people agree with? Is the Bush Administration going to pull off a coup and keep control of the House and Senate after the mid-term elections? Is there going to be a rational discourse in Congress or the American media over choosing new strategies. Or is it going to be two more years of the same nonsense?

Which brings me to the machine-guns on the Great Lakes. As I mentioned in a recent post to the Globe and Mail, there are lots of security threats one can imagine if one takes the time to consider them. There are many responsible, decent public servants in the United States who do little more than analyze terrorist risks to American interests. Many of these people have access to top level intelligence. Most do not. They are analyzing risks in an information vacuum. When one does that, one is in the uncomfortable position of being able to perceive a risk without being able to assess how realistic it may be. Add to this the fact that no one wants to be the person who had a chance to prevent the next September 11th attack. Under these circumstances, perfectly reasonable people may become a little paranoid.

Bearing in mind that the September 11th terrorists were all in the United States legally, with student visas, and (mostly) under the sponsorship of the Saudi Arabian government, and bearing in mind that there has been no terrorist attack in the United States since then, just why are Coast Guard boats running around the Great Lakes with machine guns? Military officers know that putting fully-armed aircraft, ships or other weapons in close proximity to other aircraft, ships or other weapons is inherently dangerous because the risk of accident increases exponentially. If I were an amateur boater or sailor on the Great Lakes, I would be very worried about becoming the next collateral casualty in the War on Terror.