the beginning of this article wasn't as compelling to me as the ending which i paste here, and you can take the link to the beginning should you choose;

The US government, like Oceania, switches enemies as necessary. That validates military and intelligence; lasting peace would be intolerable. After World War II the enemy was the USSR and communism, which persisted until the Soviet collapse in 1991. The 9/11 tragedy offered up a new enemy, Islamic terrorism.
Seventeen years later, after a disastrous run of US interventions in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the rout of Sunni jihadists in Syria by the combined forces of the Syrian government, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, it’s clear that Islamic terrorism is no longer a threat that stirs the paranoia necessary to feed big military and intelligence budgets. For all the money they’ve spent, intelligence has done a terrible job of either anticipating terrorist strikes or defeating them in counterinsurgency warfare
So switch the enemy again, now it’s Russia and China. The best insight the intelligence community could offer about those two is that they’ve grown stronger by doing the opposite of the US. For the most part they’ve stayed in their own neighborhoods. They accept that they’re constituents, albeit important ones, of a multipolar global order. Although they’ll use big sticks to protect their interests, carrots like the Belt and Road Initiative further their influence much better than the US’s bullets and bombs.

If the intelligence complex truly cared about the country, they might go public with the observation that the empire is going broke. However, raising awareness of this dire threat—as opposed to standard intelligence bogeymen—might prompt reexamination of intelligence and military budgets and the foreign policy that supports them. Insolvency will strangle the US’s exorbitantly expensive interventionism. It will be the first real curb on the intelligence complex since World War II, but don’t except any proactive measures beforehand from those charged with foreseeing the future.
Conspiracy theories, a term popularized by the CIA to denigrate Warren Commission skeptics, are often proved correct. However, trying to determine the truth behind intelligence agency conspiracies is a time and energy-consuming task, usually producing much frustration and little illumination. Instead, as Caitlin Johnstone recently observed, we’re better off fighting on moral and philosophical grounds the intelligence complex and the rest of the government’s depredations that are in plain sight.
Attack the intellectual foundations of empire and you attack the whole rickety edifice, including intelligence, that supports it. Tell the truth and you threaten those who deal in lies. Champion sanity and logic and you challenge the insane irrationality of the powers that be. They are daunting tasks, but less daunting than trying to excavate and clean the intelligence sewer.

Author Robert GorePosted on November 30, 2018Categories Economy

............https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/11/30/the-deadliest-operation/#more-187747