With all the talk of Nazi and Communist purges in reaction to the story of Porter Goss being ordered to clear out the "disloyal," I wonder if we're missing the one of the most applicable historical analogies we could be making here: McCarthyism and Vietnam.
More below the fold (I think... it's my first diary, so I'm partly investigating how it works)
During the struggle between Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao, many State Department personnel and assorted intelligence assets were reporting back and trying to get it through the heads of the government two very important facts. (1) Mao was not a unquestioning tool of Moscow, especially after the 1927 Shanghai Massacre of the communists by the nationalists, which happened partly because Mao was following the COMINTERN's "popular front" strategy. (2) Chiang was utterly corrupt and so wedded to the landholding elites that he had next to zero chance of garnering the popular support needed to bring him to power.
Of course they were largely ignored by Truman and the U.S. lost a major chance to be a moderating influence on the Chinese.
Move forward to McCarthyism, one aspect of which was that the liberals were accused of "losing China to the communists." Purges of the State Department's "China hands" followed with the unhappy result being that by the time it came clear that the Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem was completely untenable, there was nobody left in the State Department to tell the President things like "Ho is not a tool of Beijing" and "no Vietnamese regime that ignores the need for huge land reform is going to survive."
Now all the "Middle East hands" that thought the Iraq war was a particularly stupid idea are getting purged from the CIA, and there is no one to tell future Presidents (because Bush wouldn't listen to them anyway) things like "Bellicosity strengthens the domestic hand of the hard-line mullahs." and "The nationalism of the Iranians means that an invasion of Iran will make Iraq feel like getting greeted with flowers and sweets."