Tearing Apart the Terrorism Index

Foreign Policy Magazine published its third annual Terrorism Index to much interest by the New York and Washington intelligentsia because it reveals that we are losing the War on Terror (here, and here):

According to the magazine, the survey's respondents are "the very people who have run the United States’ national security apparatus during the past half century" such as "people who have served as secretary of state, national security advisor, senior White House aides, top commanders in the U.S. military, seasoned intelligence professionals, and distinguished academics...[e]ighty percent of the experts have served in the U.S. government—including more than half in the Executive Branch, 32 percent in the military, and 21 percent in the intelligence community."

Like that's a good thing? Weren't these the same people who got us into the 9/11 mess in the first place? Isn't that the verdict of a recently declassified report by the Central Intelligence Agency (as tipped by Publius Pundit):

U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created." The CIA's analysis of al-Qaida before Sept. 2001 was lacking. No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993, and no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled. "A number of important issues were covered insufficiently or not at all," the report found.

It's truly ironic that Foreign Policy, calls on the people who created the problem to ask if they agree with President Bush's solution. Of course these folks don't agree with President Bush's solution because they are biased against his solution for one reason or another. Many are pacificists that believe any loss in American life is abhorent. Others are power hungry and wish to see nothing more than their party and their friends back in the White House. And many others who took the survey like Jim Woolsey, Dan Pipes, Marc Sageman, and others, views are underrepresented by a confluence of "realists" Republicans and anti-War Democrats who had reached a foregone conclusion that the War on Terror has been lost and the Surge in Iraq isn't working.