the guy by the door …

This is news? Well, the Director of National Intelligence has released a new National Intelligence Estimate.¹ It has something that can be taken out of context for pundits of every flavor. So you have a large variance within a single report.²

I would like to offer also the assessment by seven serving military who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which has rightfully inspired voluminous commentary – on the net at least. It is so powerfully written that everyone feels compelled to comment on it. Some even wondered whether soldiers who may not have college degrees could have written it by themselves. I can’t, at the moment, recall anything by a Harvard author of comparable power.³ I submit that the piece has such extraordinary power in part because they did what no one else does. “Write only what you know.”

The piece has seven authors, yet has a clear unanimous voice. I submit these authors have learned lessons that only shared suffering can teach – the suffering they went to prevent, the suffering they may have caused in the attempt, the suffering they may have felt about that – the suffering that they shared amongst themselves and with the Iraqi people.

As serving military, the authors took a big risk in publishing their piece. Editor and Publisher quotes the military saying they will not be disciplined.

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Someone stop me before I blog myself into homelessness.

¹This is not really the NIE. It is the declassified summary. Does this matter? My tautological answer? More than the Bush Administration would care to admit. [The rumor passed along by Rachel Maddow is that the classified version says al-Maliki has got to go.] Also, it isn’t really a new NIE it is an update to the January 2007. Does this matter? I doubt it.

² No wonder nobody besides Noam actually reads these things.

³For this comparison, I include myself.