George Tenet lamented, “Our failures are always trumpeted; but our successes- which are many- are always a secret.”

His point is well taken and reminds me that at its best our media will only give us a part of the story, and one of my axioms is that a part of the truth is often more misleading than all of a lie.

The hard reality is that the CIA is incapable of being able to monitor all the points of potential problems that exist in the world. They must make critical decisions in a world of uncertainty with far from perfect informations. They make a lot of decisions and a lot of them prove wrong.

It takes an operative up to 2 years in immersion training just to learn the language of one country well enough to be effective. The number of different languages and cultures the CIA must fucntion under is enormous. In retrospect the severe budget cuts in the CIA during the 90’s was a disaster.

Like other institutions they suffer from ignorance and arrogance. But little is written about the catastrophes they avoided. No reporter covers the war that was never fought.

…. is that consumer spending drives Wall Street. Our last recessions have occurred during an increase in consumer spending.

A healthy economy is the result of business spending and productivity. Consumption is only 30% of the economy. Is is capital and production spending that drives the job creation that pays the people and supports their ability to spend.

Productivity and savings drive economic growth. This was discovered in the 19th century by French economist Jean-Baptiste and is reffered to as “Say’s Law”.

tips from the latest edition of Forecasts and Strategies by Mark Skousen, a great investment newsletter. Also check out his new book- Investing in One Lesson.

Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Seymour Hoffman as the crass street wise CIA operative was a bit of reality injected into the uncertainty of our foreign affairs. See it.

Womanizing and boozing, but effective, Congressman Charlie Wilson is touched by the plight of the Afghan refugees from Russia’s brutal invasion. He increases the funding of covert operations to arm the mujahideen from $5 million to a billion dollars and helps send the Russians running with their heads between their legs, not only removing the Commmunist threat from the Middle East but neutering the Soviets for decades.

In the end he laments that “… we fucked up the end game.” While willing to fund arms to defeat the soviets, the politicians were uninterested in funding the recovery, building needed schools, hospitals and security forces. We left a vacuum that was filled by the Taliban and Al Queda. We are back in Afghanistan finishing the very difficult work.

We learned from the over bearing reparations forced on Germany after WWI, and after WWII replaced the crushing punishment with the Marshal Plan. We learned from the endless uncertainty of Vietnam and succeeded in Desert Storm with clarity and short term ferocity.

In Iraq we have learned that we must commit to win the peace if do not want to return. Regardless of inteligence failures that may have led us into Iraq, if we withdraw without committing to rebuild and improve the position of the Iraqis we will not serve the cause of peace; we will only be laying the ground work for the next war.