Not just whistlin' Dixie

“GOP Senator says with better intelligence South would have won US Civil War.”  

So shouts the Raw Story headline.  According to the report “Democratic sources expressed outrage that he compared the Civil War to the Bush administration’s war on terror.”  Perhaps we’re so used to the daily deluge of outrageous statements and egregious actions that we just assume the worst, but perhaps the man is right.

According to Roll Call,  Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) made an analogy between the so called “war on terror” and the Civil War during Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on trials, interrogation and detention of foreign terrorism suspects.  Exactly what he said is unclear. Roll call quotes him as saying “We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we’d be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln.”  Chambliss spokeswoman Lindsay Mabry says it really was: "If Gen. JEB Stuart had had better intelligence, we’d all be meeting in Richmond right now."

But of course it’s true even though intelligence of that quality was quite  impossible at the time. If the Confederacy had had spy satellites, camera drones, electronic surveillance and all the other accoutrements of modern technology, they would surely have won even without having to torture Yankees picked up on the streets at random as “enemy Combatants.”  

Beyond that bit of futile speculation, a direct comparison of the War between the States and the occupation of Iraq is meaningless.  With respect to the Neocon Crusade, the true failure of intelligence was the failure to have intelligent leaders and intelligent followers of those leaders as well as intelligent people to provide checks and balances against the rash, greedy, misguided and stupidly executed actions of those leaders.

The first failure of intelligence was to allow George W. Bush to occupy public office.  All that has followed, follows on that failure.