I did’t take any offense at Pasquale and have certainly made too many mistakes to have any illusions about my abilities. Reading some of my old posts is an embarassing experience. And many of those who thought Iraq would end in disaster did so in all honesty.

One of my forthcoming day jobs will be a small project as part of an independent business intelligence team and it is amazingly easy in that field to get things wrong. Even if you do everything right it is still possible, and even likely, that you will get things very wrong. Looking at the consensus-building function of the MSM, you can ask the dispassionate question: how can it be improved?

One way is to find some way to reduce the noise in the signal. My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the Petraeus advantage came from living, day in and day out, with his data set, which the shorthand of combat had reduced to its essentials. He had more because he had less, but it was the right “less”.

Maybe another area for improvement is being able to diversify wire service sources. Families of stories are generated by rewriting the same wire report. It might also help to create dedicated subject tracking teams in major news organizations. I’d like to see a map room at the NYT, with symbols on it generated from their own correspondents, with timelines and tables of estimates for activities. If the press is going to continue to act like a public open source intel agency, they may as well acquire the appurtenances.

Nor all this idle speculation. History never stops. Afghanistan isn’t won nor will it be the last battlefield in the war on terror. Maybe the worst crisis is yet to come. And yet we will be going into it with the same old creaky mechanism that analyzed Iraq. It’s a scary thought, akin to starting a new business with the same MIS team that nearly drove the parent company bankrupt.

But to repeat, I think Pasquale’s comments were all aboveboard.