The New Orleans hurricane relief efforts are giving a party stunned by losses a chance to revive.

"...the unarmored Humvees that patrolled the streets of Baghdad and caused so much death and injury to the troops would likely have been replaced quickly with armored cars designed to patrol insurgent territory if 'the daughters of, say, President Bush and Bill Clinton had been patrolling the streets of Baghdad with, say, the son of the CEO of the New York Times.'"

In wake of Katrina, agency needs to have independence restored

"Now that another election year is upon us, the fear of Rove is back — even though corruption, cronyism and Katrina have combined to erode the Bush administration's popularity. Some Democrats are so freaked by the past they are arguing that members of the party should stay away from one of the biggest issues of the day: the Bush administration's domestic spying operations."

In the years since the end of the Cold War, the intelligence community (IC) has engaged in much soul searching but with little action. That is beginning to change in the wake of intelligence failures surrounding September 11, 2001, and in Iraq. But the solutions enacted so far, especially the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, do not get to some of the real problems in the community. The community was built to follow the Soviet monolith, and it needs fundamental reforms in the ways ordinary intelligence officers work to meet the new threats of the 21st century.

"Terrorism is not a law-enforcement problem. It is much more serious than a numbers racket in the South Bronx. But so far the record is clear. Smart cops stop terrorists, smart weapons don't. Maybe the front lines of the war on terror should be the precinct houses of every big city in the Western world.

We should spend more money and more time making the average experienced cop on the beat part of our war on terror...."

The final conference of the most comprehensive unclassified review of the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11 took place at the Kennedy School in April. Organized by the Belfer Center's Elaine Kamarck, a government reform expert and lecturer in public policy, Strategic Issues for Intelligence in the 21^stCentury was a five-part series of conferences that began in the fall of 2003.

"....The Democratic opportunity lies in the fact that the Bush vision is very likely to fall apart. It calls for a level of involvement in the world that is akin to that at the height of the Cold War, where we inserted ourselves in countries around the world to keep them out of the Soviet sphere. This level of involvement requires a level of mobilization that the Bush team is reluctant to commit to. It means lots of spies, lots of troops, lots of taxpayer dollars. It's inconsistent with permanent tax cuts and taking money out of Social Security for private accounts...."