Thursday November 6, 2008

I've Been Thinking:

Today, November 6th President elect Barack Obama received his very first security briefing.
Obama received the exact same security briefing that President George Bush had received first thing that morning.

Obama has a very serious learning curve ahead of him.
The hardest thing for him to do will be to reconcile his world view with information he receives in security briefings.
It will be a devastating clash of ideology and reality.
Briefings are not political.
Briefings inform the president of major and minor threats to the United States and to US interests and US citizens at home and abroad.

Briefings are talks about friends and foes and those in the middle who are sometimes friends and sometimes foes.
Briefings describe a big game a chess with big name players like China, Iran, Russia, almost all Middle East leaders and of course, Al Qaeda.
At the beginning it will be very difficult for the new president to assess what is real and what is machismo, to determine which are idle threats and what is rhetoric.

Daily security briefings are the bottom line.
The United States has enemies and there is no way transforming these enemies into lovers.
That's a hard lesson for a new president to learn.

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