And by the way…

OK, I’ll grant you, it sounds like the FBI/CIA/et alii are stumbling around on Homeland Security issues like a bunch of addled Keystone Kops — but there my agreement with the Professor, et alii, ends.
Case in point: The Civil War. If you were to read the history of the war (and I highly recommend Shelby Foote’s three volumes if you’ve not read Civil War history before — it’s a lot to read but it is eminently readable) and stop just before the Battle of Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863), you would be convinced that the South must have won the Civil War. The North bumbled its way through almost the entire war, including the period after Grant was given the Army of the Potomac. The difference between Grant and his predecessors was that he was willing to face what Lincoln called “the arithmetic”, which meant that he was willing to accept huge casualty lists because he knew that if he inflicted as many casualties as he took, the Army of Northern Virginia (the only serious threat to the Union that the Confederacy ever mounted) would quickly be whittled down to nothing. And in fact, even given the huge casualties the Union absorbed between the time Grant took over and the time he was in front of Petersburg and Richmond, Lee was left with almost nothing to mount a defense. At one point he had one man to every two yards of defensive line, and as time went on leading to the Nine April Days, he had fewer and fewer.
Another case in point: The Second World War. Flatly stated, this country was solidly on the defensive from 7 December 1941 until 6 June 1942 (the Battle of Midway). Many of the same mistakes were made by intelligence services and police forces before Pearl Harbor and before 9/11. The inability of intelligence services to put together random facts to create a whole; the inability of the country to control its borders; the sheer arrogance of thinking we were unassailable by the likes of the Japanese or al-Qaeda…
I don’t know. Gee. I wonder if all these Homeland Security failures are rope-a-dope?