Once upon a time, some very visionary and clever people purchased a lot in a remote valley and built a house, intending to live there comfortably and cheaply forever. They cut down the trees on the lot, sawed them into boards and used them in the construction. They drilled a water well in order to have inexpensive water, since they were far from urban water systems. They forgot about sewage, however, until the house was nearly finished, when someone noticed a large pipe protruding from the foundation going nowhere.

That presented a serious problem. The sewage either had to be treated with a sewage disposal plant or underground septic tank, or it had to be channeled away from the house to a sufficiently distant place that it wouldn't cause problems for the inhabitants of the house. But treatment plants, septic tanks and long pipelines cost money, and they had spent almost all their money building the house and were unwilling to spend any more on sanitary system. Instead, they decided to dig a ditch leading to a small pit a short distance from the house where the sewage could accumulate and not cause them any problems. The pit was located behind a tall hedge, so they didn't have to see it when they looked out their windows or walked in the yard. Everyone agreed that it was the best and cheapest solution to the waste disposal problem.

Everything went fine until the weather warmed up and folks started becoming aware of a faint foul odor, the source of which they couldn't locate. It was easily taken care of with some chlorophyll air wicks and baskets of potpourri scattered around the house.

The smell continued to worsen. The residents closed all the windows of the house and turned on the air conditioning to keep the foul air out. A little quicklime in a bowl helped to control the smell inside. When the smell further worsened they completely sealed the house.

Keeping the house sealed worked for quite a while. The small seepage of air into the house was taken care of by the quicklime and the chlorophyll. Everyone said that it wasn't important to go outside, anyway, that they really wanted to stay inside. After a few weeks, they started getting sick and the doctor discovered that they were infected with e coli bacteria. The well from which they drew their drinking water had become contaminated by seepage from the sewage. They started boiling water.

This went on for a few weeks until someone looked out the back window and saw a lake of foul dark liquid filling up the backyard and pouring under the house. Gradually the smell of the sewage found its way into the house through the floor and it finally became obvious to everyone that they could not continue to live there. They had ignored the source of the problem while designing ingenious technologies to keep from being inconvenienced by the costs of fixing it properly.

This parable occurred to me as I was reading an article from the New York Times, Open-Source Spying by Clive Thompson, published on December 3, 2006 ($). The article relates the efforts of the intelligence agencies to share intelligence without betraying sources or leaking sensitive information. The U.S. spends untold billions (much of which is hidden in the classified intelligence budget) on its intelligence agencies but they failed to anticipate the WTC attack because they had no way of putting together the clues possessed by different agencies.

The intelligence community has reacted to that failure in a number of ways, one of which is to experiment with blogs and wikis where intelligence personnel can share related information on a real time basis, rather than sending reports through a bureaucratic thicket and hoping that they will survive the trip.

It was an interesting article. Many of us have a fascination for spy stuff and Thompson writes entertainingly about what is usually a grim business.

Another thought, however, came to mind after reading the article: It's easy to become wrapped up in the intelligence game, much like becoming wrapped up in chess, where the fascination of strategy and tactics is everything. The difference is that in chess, there is no reason to play the game other than for the pleasure of it, or in a few cases for the acclaim one can receive from one's peers. The game itself is morally neutral.

The intelligence game, on the other hand, is played in order to advance national interests as defined for better or worse by the political process. Politicians decide the direction and speed of the ship of state, and the spooks try to spot in advance the icebergs in its path along with other ships in the vicinity that might offer resistance. It's obvious that if the captain and crew sail the ship due north, it will soon encounter icebergs and the intelligence services will be very busy.

The point is that intelligence is a reactive profession, even when it is aggressively pursuing some strategic objective. By its nature, it seldom asks how the world got into the situation it is now in, only what is happening now or will happen in the future. Richard Clarke, advisor on terrorism to the president, wrote "Why do they hate us?" and the president asked that very question in his address to the nation after September 11. Clarke never answered it. The president stated that they hated us because of our freedoms and our open society. Clarke was the more honest man. Bush simply lied, because the truth contradicts our national story so completely that the American people would dismiss it without thinking. Many people in the middle east hate us because we treated them badly and stole their oil for nearly a hundred years, telling ourselves (and them) that we were bringing civilization to the middle east.

Like the householders in the parable above, we have created something dangerous that could be kept out of sight and mind for a long time. When bad things started happening, we created clever fixes in order not to face reality and to prolong the good times. Eventually, what we have created has found its way to our back yard and under our house. Then it is too late; all choices are bad.

There is simply no substitute for realism. Things have a way of coming around; deceiving ourselves as to the cause of our troubles guarantees that there will be further bad consequences. Exhausting our cleverness producing fixes without solving underlying problems guarantees disaster, including in this case more 9/11s.