Reason

Mere days after the release of the 9/11 commission's 600-page report, word from Crawford has it that the president is preparing to implement the panel's recommendations, chief among them the contentious proposal to create a cabinet-level intelligence czar. Speculation is rife that panel members themselves are among the prime candidates for the position.

There is something intrinsically creepy about our democratic society's penchant for using the word for a Russian despot (a term with etymological roots in the Latin "Caesar") as an informal title for so many appointed officials. That, alas, is the least of the troubles with the proposal.

Nominally, of course, we already have a national intelligence director: The head of the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, is in theory the head of the American intelligence community. In practice, as the editors of The New Republic and others have lately noted, this is not the case: The DCI is occupied with the day-to-day running of the CIA, bereft of sweeping hiring-and-firing powers, and given control of only about 12 percent of the nation's intelligence budget. Fatwas from the DCI's office are apparently routinely ignored by other agencies. Acting DCI John McLaughlin (not to be confused with the jazz guitarist or the talk show host) has come out against the creation of an intelligence czar, arguing that the powers of the DCI can simply be augmented without a need for the creation of "another layer of bureaucracy," a phrase which has become a fixture of anti-czar talking points.

That, of course, is a genuine problem. As Mancur Olson and other theorists of public choice have famously argued, the guiding imperative of most institutions either is or soon becomes their own self-perpetuation. An intelligence czar faced with a fractious intelligence community that, by all accounts, is cool to the idea of such a position, would be sorely tempted to rely on a redundant but loyal staff more directly under his own control.

Yet it may not be the biggest problem: It is at least worth asking whether we should be debating how best to centralize intelligence before we've seriously questioned whether we want to do so. The pitfalls of inadequate information sharing among the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies have been so aggressively highlighted recently that we are in danger of forgetting the advantages of having this alphabet soup of spooks.

The agencies may be working toward the shared goal of American security, but they are also meant, to a certain extent, to be in competition, or at any rate, to have the sort of independence that counterbalances the "groupthink" blamed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for intelligence mistakes in the drive to the Iraq war. And if the failure to predict 9/11 was a classic type II error, misjudgments about the threat posed by Iraq remind us that type I errors can be no less damaging to security efforts, leading us to squander scarce resources on ill-starred snipe hunts.

At the time, the conviction of some in the executive branch that Saddam Hussein must pose a dire threat found expression through the creation of the Office of Special Plans. An intelligence czar with extensive budgetary and hiring and firing powers would make such moves unnecessary in the future; the potential for a "chilling effect" on intelligence analysts should be clear.

There's also the very real danger that the intelligence czar would become a kind of magic bullet solution, an ostentatious sort of proof that the president and legislators are "doing something" that serves as a substitute for less flashy but more important lower-level reforms. An intelligence czar would also very probably decrease the likelihood of such reforms in the future by creating a kind of scapegoat to bear the sins of the intelligence community. Next time something goes wrong in intelligence gathering, the solution will be obvious: Fire the czar!

The creation of a national intelligence director is, in short, politically appealing for the very reasons that it's a poor idea. Those who urge a rush to implementation of the 9/11 commission's recommendations should reflect for a moment that the last time Congress acted hastily to make us all more secure, the result was the PATRIOT Act. Before performing major surgery on the country's intelligence apparatus, physicians of the body politic should take to heart Galen's injunction: "First, do no harm."