“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower; it’s one of Rumsfeld’s Rules

This is far more of a conjecture than a reported fact, but bear with me/take what follows in that spirit. There were real operational consequences to declaring through the Bush era that we were at war with “terror.” To be fair to Bush, there’s no evidence that he meant the U.S. was at war with the tactic of intentional spectacular violence inflicted on civilians. His phrase “terrorist groups of global reach” was evidence of what he meant. But that itself is problematic. Because all of a sudden we’re not at war with al-Qaeda, the actual people who declared war on the U.S. and attacked us on 9/11. We’re at war with… Hezbollah, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or more-than-just-al-Qaeda. And then that expands, both in people’s minds and in op-ed pages and before you know it you’re talking about Long Wars and convincing yourselves you see links between unrelated circumstances and start unrelated wars. This is the cost of imprecision.

Another cost is a practical one. How do you operationalize a war against more-than-al-Qaeda? If you’re tasked with running important aspects of it, you do things like devote half your analytic capabilities to stuff that’s either unrelated or indirectly related to al-Qaeda. Imprecision mixed with bureaucracy has real consequences. When the Flight 253 hearings begin next week, I truly hope some lawmaker will ask Mike Leiter why NCTC shouldn’t really be the National al-Qaeda Center. There is one terrorist organization that threatens the United States. And yet there are people at NCTC who study Hamas and Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers and fucking ETA. There are places for intelligence on those organizations: the home agencies of the intelligence community. The NCTC was envisioned by the 9/11 Commission — correctly in my view — to be a center for deriving net assessments about U.S. vulnerabilities to terrorist threats. It’s unfortunate that the 9/11 Commission used the term “terrorist organizations with global reach” as the scope of NCTC. But now it’s long past time to sharpen that focus.