The conduct of President Bush's war of choice has been plagued with incompetent civilian leadership decisions that have cost many lives and rendered the war on and occupation of Iraq a strategic policy disaster for the United States.

So I think that our foreign policy the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

Nixon was an awful president in many ways including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America's leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.

As this body of knowledge has evolved a much more critical job for researchers and scientists has evolved into explaining and educating policy makers and the public to the risks of global warming and the possible consequences of action or of no action.

Surely if knowledge is valuable it can never be good policy in a country far wealthier than Tuscany to allow a genius like Mr. Dalton's to be employed in the drudgery of elementary instruction.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media which is our culture. Professors of humanities with all their leftist fantasies have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap the missile gap.

The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are.

In my professional work with the Agency by the late '70s I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy.

You want to keep intelligence separate from policy.

But the same intelligence compels Germany to practise the same policy.

Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy no matter where on the political spectrum they begin and especially so in the areas of intelligence and law enforcement.

We worked to develop our own operations to advance U.S. counterterrorism objectives by penetrating terrorist safe havens and collecting intelligence that would inform policy and enable our own operations.

I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people.

Here's the teaching point if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

And I argued with that intelligence estimate and I think it is a responsibility of policymakers to use their best judgment on the basis of the intelligence they've received.

Policymakers have to make judgments based on the best intelligence they get.