Tom Engelhardt: Creating an Un-Intelligence Machine

Tom Engelhardt writes that the USA is Creating an Un-Intelligence Machine.

You get the point.  Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected.  In other words, somehow, with what passes for the best, or at least most extensive and expensive intelligence operation on the planet, with all those satellites and drones and surveillance sweeps and sources, with crowds of analysts, hordes of private contractors, and tens of billions of dollars, with, in short, “intelligence” galore, American officials in the area of their wars are evidently going to continue to find themselves eternally caught “off guard.”

The phrase “the fog of war” stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what’s happening in the chaos that is any battlefield.  Perhaps it’s time to introduce a companion phrase: the fog of intelligence.  It hardly matters whether those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts (and all those at other commands or at the 17 major intelligence outfits) produce superlative “intelligence” that then descends into the fog of leadership, or whether any bureaucratic conglomeration of “analysts,” drowning in secret information and the protocols that go with it, is going to add up to a giant fog machine.

It’s difficult enough, of course, to peer into the future, to imagine what’s coming, especially in distant, alien lands.  Cobble that basic problem together with an overwhelming data stream and groupthink, then fit it all inside the constrained mindsets of Washington and the Pentagon, and you have a formula for producing the fog of intelligence and so for seldom being “on guard” when it comes to much of anything.

Emphasis Mine

There are two (2) activities that contradict each othet:

1. Extension and strengthening the Pax Americana
2. Elimination of challenges to the Pax Americana

The first activity requires the complete acceptance of the ideology behind Pax Americana, while the second requires understanding why anyone would want to reject it.

As the system comes under increased stress, the emphasis is placed upon the first at the expense of the second. Thus, the adherents of the system are continually surprised by events.