Egypt crisis doesn't reflect U.S.

It didn't take long for the Washington long knives to come out and begin to suggest that a root cause of our current challenges in Egypt was the "failure" of intelligence -- the failure to warn, the failure to appreciate cultural movements or technological advances, the failure to take the long view or even the failure to monitor the World Wide Web.

Surely the professionals in the intelligence community will take lessons from the past six weeks, but suggestions of intelligence "failure" miss the mark and betray a lack of understanding of what intelligence can and cannot do.

John McLaughlin, former deputy director of central intelligence, famously remarked years ago that there are differences between secrets and mysteries.

There should be a high standard for intelligence organizations when they are asked to discover secrets and sharp criticism when they fail (We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs, October 2002) as well as some credit when they succeed (We judge with high confidence that there is a nearly completed Yongbyon style nuclear reactor in eastern Syria, July 2007).

But recent events in Egypt and before them in Tunisia did not comprise secrets waiting to be purloined.

They were the products of long-simmering unrest fed by pre-existing and well-recognized political, economic and social conditions. Emile Nakhleh was the CIA analyst who briefed me on these realities when I was director; Emile, now retired, didn't pull any punches. Recently he penned an op-ed in the Financial Times pointing out how he and his colleagues "on numerous occasions briefed policymakers on Egypt's dire economic and social conditions" and how if they were left unchecked, the "Arab street would boil over."

But as good as he was, neither Emile nor anyone else could provide the proximate cause, the exact timing or the specific trajectory of the "boiling over." That was more in the category of a mystery.

As it turned out, the triggering event was the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit merchant 1,300 miles to the west of Cairo. In retrospect, the path of the fuse between Sidi Bouzid and Tahrir Square is explainable, but that particular path was neither inevitable, confidently predictable nor perhaps even prospectively knowable.