flow 3.flo.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

That would appear to be the sound of gears grinding on the smooth-gliding Obamamobile. Two process errors on the same day! The first one—failing to vet Bill Richardson properly—is forgivable. Nobody vets Richardson. Perhaps I should mention that when I was recently in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif went out of his way to cite him to me as his favorite American politician. Anyway, with a bodies-are-buried godfather of political soul like the governor of New Mexico, you appoint him and hope that he is experienced and mature enough by now to self-police. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de That’s essentially what Richardson did here, by pulling out of the Commerce Department post—a grand-jury investigation into political favors-trading by his office boiled hotter than he had anticipated, so he took himself out before he could do himself or the President-elect any harm. Embarrassing, perhaps, but not a big deal. The Obama team’s second process error, however—failing to consult Diane Feinstein, the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—about a decision to appoint an inexperienced fellow California pol, Leon Panetta, to head the C.I.A., well, that’s a gangly unforced error. Heads need not roll, perhaps, but one or two ought to be bowed in humility.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

As to the Panetta appointment itself, it is unconvincing. The C.I.A. directorship is a diminished post, no longer in charge of the full intelligence community and subordinate to the Director of National Intelligence (who will apparently be Dennis Blair, a retired admiral.) Still, the C.I.A. director has four important jobs: manage the White House relationship; manage Congress, particularly to obtain budgetary favor; manage the agency’s workforce and daily operations; and manage liaisons with other spy chiefs, friendly and unfriendly. Panetta is thoroughly qualified for the first two functions but unqualified for the latter two. He seems to have been selected as a kind of political auditor and consensus builder. He will make sure the White House is protected from surprises or risks emanating from C.I.A. operations; he will ensure that interrogation and detention practices change, and that the Democratic Congress is satisfied by those changes; he will ensure that all of this occurs with a minimum of disruptive bloodletting. All good, but it is not enough. The essential problem is that Panetta is a man of Washington, not a man of the world. He’s seventy-years-old, spends his time on his California farm, and he’s been out of the deal flow, as they say on Wall Street, for about a decade; he knows California budget policy like the back of his hand, but what intuition or insight does he bring to the most dangerous territories in American foreign policy—Anbar Province, the Logar Valley, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? Compared to his counterparts in Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Britain, etc.—the critical relationships in national security that the C.I.A. Director alone can manage—he is a relative novice not only about intelligence operations but also about the foreign-policy contexts in which they occur. The country needs a better clandestine service. The C.I.A. has taken in an unusually talented pool of young case officers who volunteered after September 11th—probably as good a young talent pool as the government has had since the nineteen-sixties. But the agency they signed up for has been battered around and led by revolving door. Panetta may make the White House feel more secure about unfinished bureaucratic and operational reforms at Langley, but he is unqualified to forge the next-generation spy service that a country with as many enemies as this one has needs and deserves.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de