why it's important to have a smart president

George Friedman, without ever saying so, makes it clear why it's important to have intelligent, experienced, carefully informed people in the White House.

Dr Friedman is the founder, chief intelligence officer, and chairman of a private intelligence and foreign affairs analysis company called Stratfor. He is the author of America's Secret War and The Future of War.

Before he entered the private business sector a decade ago, Dr Friedman taught political science for nearly 20 years during which he also briefed senior commanders in all the US armed services, the Office of Net Assessments, the U.S. Army War College, National Defense University and the RAND Corporation on security and national defense. In 1994 he founded the Center for Geopolitical Studies at Louisiana State University to conduct integrated economic, political and military modeling and forecasting. the Center was the only non-Department of Defense/non-governmental organization granted access to Joint Theater Level Simulation (JTLS) by the Joint Warfighting Center.

I write all that by way of introduction to Friedman's remarkable (and remarkably clear) analysis of how the US came to be where we are in Iraq — Iraq: The Policy Dilemma.