Today's NY Times' top story is not for the fainthearted. It implicitly reveals America's national-security community--from the CIA to the Pentagon to the NSA and State--as the most cash-glutted embarrassment in the history of intelligence gathering. On its surface the story features the bloody rise of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but its real villain is the blind, phlegmatic leviathan of U.S. bureaucratic snoopery.
When Hitler's atrocities began to unfold in the 1930s, catching us somewhat off guard, our obliviousness at least had an excuse. We had no professional intelligence gatherers at the time, no CIA, no heavily endowed National Security Agency or the like. Der Führer had nonetheless been immensely helpful in broadcasting, in Mein Kampf, his coming program of genocide and destruction; it's just that we paid little attention to the fanatic's stated intentions. After all, we had not yet sunk untold billions into ferreting out reality from rumor, and facts from propaganda. Although Roosevelt suspected a ghastly future, we largely operated from a defensive position of mystification.
All that changed postwar, or rather, it was supposed to change. We wouldn't be blindsided by our enemies again. The U.S. national security state took root and thrived, cultivated by mountains of cash and beehives of superspooks. Its history of failures ever since--from its boneheaded readings of Castro's Cuba to its having overlooked the impending collapse of a nearly half-century-old foe to its breathless blunders in Bush's Iraq--are indeed legend, but not quite history.
"With just a few thousand fighters," observes the NYT, ISIS's "lightning sweep into Mosul and farther south appeared to catch many Iraqi and American officials by surprise." Yet, like Hitler, ISIS "has published voluminously, even issuing annual reports, to document its progress in achieving its goals." Notes Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism scholar, "When you go back and read it, it’s all there." ISIS "invaded Syria from Mosul long before it invaded Mosul from Syria."
In short, its current success in Iraq appears to be more of a mop-up campaign than an unforeseeable blitzkrieg. Yet, stunningly, just two years ago Tony Blinken (then the vice president's national security adviser, now the president's deputy national security adviser) boasted--as ISIS "strengthened and United Nations data showed civilian casualties in Iraq on the rise"--that Iraq's turmoil was "at historic lows." Few, or perhaps no one, in America's vast security structure seemed to be reading ISIS's "annual reports," or even glancing at U.N. figures.
As a routine part of analogy-disclaimers, it should be emphasized that ISIS is no Nazi Germany. It should also be emphasized, as the NYT does, that this latest of Middle East implosions is--what else? of course--Bush-Cheney's doing. ISIS's "rise is directly connected to the American legacy in Iraq. The American prisons were fertile recruiting grounds for jihadist leaders, and virtual universities, where leaders would indoctrinate their recruits with hard-line ideologies."
Still, its "lightning sweep into Mosul and farther south appeared to catch many ... American officials by surprise." There ISIS was, annually publishing revised editions of Mein Kampf--the Sunni fanatics' "main goals: founding an Islamic state and slaughtering their enemies, mostly the Iraqi security forces and Shiites"--While the National Security State Slept, as Churchill would have put it.