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The world according to Bob Inman: how should we change the U.N.? Why didn't we plan for the peace in Iraq? Where could the terrorists strike next? The intelligence and national security guru has the answers you're looking for--and a few choice words about that leak.

Article Excerpt
IT WAS GOING TO BE A DRIVE-BY war--or so the armchair generals predicted. But a year after the invasion of Iraq, the United States is still mired in a conflict without end, battered by mounting fatalities (more the 460 since the statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad was toppled on April 9 in must-see-TV fashion) and baffled by the whereabouts of those weapons of mass destruction. And even if we turn the reins over to the Iraq Governing Council by our July 1 deadline, the trouble may be only beginning: Just as winning the peace has been harder than winning the war, disengaging from what comes next may be more difficult an destabilizing than we assume. And that's without the distraction of the other global challenges now festering, including Osama bin Laden's disappearing act, the tinderbox that is North Korea, and the uncertain role and future of the United Nations. All of which raises the question of whether our approach to foreign affairs is working effectively--or working, period.

* Bob Inman knows the answer, and it would be surprising if he didn't The 72-year-old, a native of the East Texas town of Rhonesboro, has spent half a century immersed in matters of national security and military intelligence. A graduate of the University of Texas and the Naval War College, he spent 31 years in the Navy, retiring with the permanent rank of admiral in 1982. While on active duty, he served as Jimmy Carter's director of the National Security Agency and Ronald Reagan's deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and in 1985 he chaired a commission that presciently studied the growing terrorism threat overseas, in 1993. Over the objection of his family, he agreed to be Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense but quickly reconsidered, hightailing it to Austin before his confirmation hearing; otherwise, for the past two decades, he has steered clear of public life, preferring to sit on corporate boards (including SBC Communications), invest in start-up technology companies, and nurture the next generation of strategic thinkers (in August 2001 he was named the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy at UT-Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs).

* But the man described by Omni magazine as "simply one of the smartest people ever to come out of Washington or anywhere" continues to have strong opinions about the issues that have always consumed him, and he aired them when we sat down in his office in mid-January.

>From your vantage point, what is the state of international relations? Are we on the right track of the wrong track? I think we're in a very turbulent time. Our overreaching strategic vision from the late forties forward was the containment of communism. Parallel to that, an essential element of ensuring success was to help friends' and former foes' economies recover and to build ma international trading system that would keep the non-communist economies growing. Then, suddenly, came the end of the Cold War, after which we continued on a path of growing those economies, though we've become far less generous about helping along those that were much farther down the ladder, ones that didn't work or had never worked.

We failed to recognize that the intense competition between communism and the non-communist world suppressed a lot of ethnic, religious, and tribal strife. Once that overriding mandate was no longer there, we had the breakup of Yugoslavia, the stress in Ethiopia and Eritrea, the civil war in Angola. Somalia came apart. Steadily, over ten years, instead of a new world...

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