Realism and the Northwest Flight 253 to Detroit

President Obama, in his intelligence meeting on Tuesday, should recognize that our system of multiple intelligence agencies is a bureaucratic mess. Interagency rivalry is inevitable. In turn, the natural consequence is a lack of effective intercommunication.

The web of quasi-autonomous agencies should be radically simplified. There should be a single intelligence agency whose head reports directly to the president. This agency head should maintain a unified file of suspect names, and all intelligence related to a name should be attached to the name. This would automatically “connect the dots.”

If such a structure had been in place, the knowledge in one agency about the Nigerian’s stay in Yemen would have been in the common file. It would have been available to those who compile the watch list and those who control visas.

Herbert Fingarette
Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 3, 2010



You correctly demand a “clearheaded, nonpoliticized assessment of what went wrong” in the Christmas Day terrorism plot and “nonhysterical remedies” to prevent another attack. You should have added that the C.I.A.’s Office of the Inspector General prepared such an authoritative report after 9/11 that has never been fully released to the public, and that President Obama’s failure to appoint a statutory inspector general virtually ensures that such a report will not be prepared this time.

The inspector general responsible for the 9/11 accountability report announced his retirement nearly 11 months ago; Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been derelict in not demanding that the Obama administration name a successor.

Melvin A. Goodman
Bethesda, Md., Jan. 2, 2010

The writer was a C.I.A. analyst from 1966 to 1990.

These are letters to the New York Times. Concerned letters, and rightly so. Behind all the environmentalism, and civil liberties, and even behind morality, lies the primary and sole concern of the security of the state. Or so a realist would say. For those of you not familiar with "Realism" it is an ideology in International Studies, outlined with 6 major tenets by Hans Morgenthau.

1) Political realism believes that politics is governed by objective laws with roots in human nature.

2)The main signpost of political realism is the concept of interest defined in terms of power which infuses rational order into the subject matter of politics, and thus makes the theoretical understanding of politics possible.

3) Realism assumes that interest defined as power is an objective category which is universally valid but not with a meaning that is fixed once and for all. Power is the control of man over man.

4) Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place.

5) Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. It is the concept of interest defined in terms of power that saves us from moral excess and political folly.

6) The political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere; he asks "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?" Political realism is based on a pluralistic conception of human nature. A man who was nothing but "political man" would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. But, in order to develop an autonomous theory of political behaviour, "political man" must be abstracted from other aspects of human nature.


Realism will be a much discussed topic of this blog. For now, I would say this is a fair summary. The Christmas Flight to Detroit was an example of realism at it's best. Moral issues against screening all people from certain nations (the now blacklisted 14) is out the window. The best demonstration of realism is the public outrage. We assume we are secure. Since security is our primary concern, when we are threatened, we react. Our primary concern is survival. When it is threatened, heads will roll. Score 1 for the realists.