Robert Pippen, chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, attributes Strauss with believing that “good statesmen must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the king is more important than the king.”
In defending Bush, Richard Perle told the New York Times that the president was a “consumer of intelligence, not a producer of it.”
But that isn't the point of most critics of the administration. No one was accusing Bush himself of manufacturing intelligence. Most Americans critical of the intelligence presented to justify the preventive war have two overriding concerns:
One issue is that the president was not a discriminating consumer of intelligence. Weapons inspector David Kay told Congress that “we were all wrong” about the threat assessments the preceded the war. But neither the UN weapons inspectors nor the International Atomic Energy Commission were wrong when they found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program or stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Apparently President Bush uncritically accepted the politicized intelligence fed to him by his inner circle. However, hundreds of millions of war critics around the world were skeptical of the cooked-up evidence of the Hussein regime's stockpile of WMDs and the claims of ties with al Qaeda bandied about by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Powell. The lesson is that if the president is a merely consumer of intelligence, then he has the responsibility of being an intelligent consumer.
A second concern relates to the issue about whom the president selects to whisper in his ear. The inner circle surrounding Bush is profoundly influenced by the elitist political philosophy of Leo Strauss and by the dubious theory of politicized intelligence promoted by neoconservatives associated with such groups as the National Strategy Information Center, Project for the New American Century, and Center for Security Policy. Bush relies on a tightly linked network of ideologues and militarists within the Pentagon and vice president's office, and to a lesser extent at the National Security Council and the State Department, while sidelining the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This inside network operates in turn as an extension of a web of right-wing think tanks and policy institutes outside the administration that not only routinely whisper in the king's ear but successfully convert their own agendas for intelligence, foreign policy, and national security reform into government policy.
source: irc-online, as before
