The protests were entirely to be expected. The Pakistanis know the U.S., if it gets high-quality intelligence, is going to act.

You got me. That was the understanding in the White House and the intelligence community. The story ran and the lights went out.

The quality of this intelligence, based on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen and is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information,

In the case of Iraq the quality of intelligence and the analysis of that intelligence was abysmally bad.

There's an image issue here. Even though the quality of many American cars is as good, if not equal to those of the Japanese, people don't believe that, and a lot of that has to do with public perception — it takes a long time to turn public perception around. So if they don't produce hits, they'll have more problems.

There are two ways of seeing quality decline. One is that you lose high-quality jobs or you gain low quality jobs, and that is exactly what's happening.