"For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane"
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A politician’s neatest trick is to indict the machine while absolving the people operating it. Bass’s line does that with practiced restraint: “intelligence failures” evokes catastrophe without naming any single debacle, while the careful disclaimer - “it wasn’t due to incompetence of anyone in the system” - preemptively defuses the accusation that he’s just hunting scalps. It’s a sentence built to sound fair-minded in a town that runs on blame.
The real charge lands in “arcane.” That word isn’t merely descriptive; it’s a moral judgment dressed up as process critique. Arcane means impenetrable, priestly, accountable to insiders. Bass is signaling that failure is structural, not personal: good actors inside a bad architecture. He’s also smuggling in a second claim: if outcomes are repeatedly wrong, the problem isn’t a few bad calls but a system designed to be too complex to audit and too secretive to correct. In other words, opacity becomes a feature that protects itself.
The “four years” matters as political positioning. It frames him as a steady listener, not a partisan firestarter, and it quietly implies access: he’s been in the room where the stories are told. That’s credibility by duration, a way of saying, I didn’t get this from cable news.
Contextually, it fits the post-9/11 and post-Iraq pattern of official reviews that identify “failures” yet struggle to assign responsibility. Bass’s rhetoric embraces that paradox, then flips it: the absence of individual incompetence doesn’t exonerate the state; it condemns the system that makes failure predictable.
The real charge lands in “arcane.” That word isn’t merely descriptive; it’s a moral judgment dressed up as process critique. Arcane means impenetrable, priestly, accountable to insiders. Bass is signaling that failure is structural, not personal: good actors inside a bad architecture. He’s also smuggling in a second claim: if outcomes are repeatedly wrong, the problem isn’t a few bad calls but a system designed to be too complex to audit and too secretive to correct. In other words, opacity becomes a feature that protects itself.
The “four years” matters as political positioning. It frames him as a steady listener, not a partisan firestarter, and it quietly implies access: he’s been in the room where the stories are told. That’s credibility by duration, a way of saying, I didn’t get this from cable news.
Contextually, it fits the post-9/11 and post-Iraq pattern of official reviews that identify “failures” yet struggle to assign responsibility. Bass’s rhetoric embraces that paradox, then flips it: the absence of individual incompetence doesn’t exonerate the state; it condemns the system that makes failure predictable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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