WASHINGTON: While opinions are divided over whether the revamp of the US intelligence community laid out in the compromise bill just approved by Congress will improve the performance of the relevant agencies
, there is little doubt that the failure of President George W. Bush to push the bill through would have badly damaged his political credibility.
In the end, Bush was forced to pressure recalcitrant members of his own Republican Party - and his own top Pentagon officials - who opposed the re-organization out of fear that the Defence Department might have to give up some of its control over the sprawling US intelligence apparatus to go along with the reform.
But in order to rally support, Bush also weakened some of the most important innovations in the original bill, notably the authority of the new director of national intelligence (DNI) to control the allocation of the community's estimated 40 billion-dollar budget among its 16 agencies.
"Substantively, the intelligence bill's main importance is that it serves as an illustration that the United States government did something in response to the 9/11 Commission report", said John Prados, an independent expert on the national security bureaucracy, referring to last summer's report by the bipartisan group mandated by Congress to examine why US agencies failed to prevent Al Qaeda's devastating Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
"The form and content of the commission's idea for the DNI post were considerably watered down, and, in the final form, the position's authority remains very much undefined", he noted. "Ultimately, the problem is that the commission's recommendations have not really been acted upon".
But, if, as the critics suggest, the re-organisation proves less than sweeping, the bill's approval puts an end, at least for now, to a stronger-than-expected challenge to Bush's authority from within his own party.
Even then, the fact that one-third of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the bill in spite of appeals by both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney suggests the president may have a more difficult time keeping his party in line behind him during his second term than he had in the first.
During the presidential campaign this fall, Bush insisted that he supported re-organisation along the lines proposed by the 9/11 Commission's report when it was released last August, but his public backing came under question after the election.
Bush not only appeared unwilling to lobby on the bill's behalf, but even permitted top Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Richard Myers, to quietly lobby against it. Indeed, it was primarily the Pentagon's opposition to the bill that spurred the dissident Republicans to oppose it.
Failure to force the dissidents and the Pentagon into line risked inflicting serious political damage either on Bush's credibility - in this case on whether he truly supported reform - or on his ability to deliver Republicans behind a legislation that he had described as important and that was strongly supported by Democratic lawmakers and centrist Republicans, as well.
"Bush, fresh off an impressive election victory ... declared that he had assembled a large store of political capital and that he planned to use it", wrote political analyst Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last week.
"But apparently he could not have anticipated the possibility that he would enter his second term with an embarrassing public setback engineered by his own party members in Congresss."
As originally proposed by the 9/11 Commission, the re-organization called for the creation of a cabinet-level DNI with full budgetary authority over the intelligence community and the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) to be attached to the president's NSC that would combine collection, analytical and operational functions of different US agencies and report to the DNI, who was also given the power to fire and hire all agency chiefs.
The commission also proposed that the main components of the intelligence budget, which is currently classified, be made public and consolidated into a single appropriations bill rather than the current situation in which about 80 per cent of the budget is hidden in the Pentagon's spending and the rest is scattered around four other departments, including State, Energy and Interior. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
