John Negroponte knows how to use intelligence to fight the enemy

If anybody has be National Intelligence Director (NID), John Negroponte is the man.

Setting aside reservations about the NID as an institution, which looks more like civil-rights-lawyer-filled Department of Homeland Security secretariat than a streamlined intelligence coordinator, the NID is there and it needs not just competent, but exemplary leadership.

Negroponte is one of the few real shining stars remaining in the Foreign Service. He spent much of his career in hardship posts where normal FSO weenies dared not tread.

He knows how to fight the enemy from his earliest days as an FSO, serving in hardship post after hardship post, becoming known to the world as ambassador to Honduras where he oversaw implementation of one of the largest and most successful covert operations of the late Cold War: the supply and coordination of the Nicaraguan democratic resistance against the Soviet-backed Marxist regime.

Those in the Senate who oppose him are merely re-fighting the battles they lost in the 1980s when they were on the other side. They should get over it and support the brave diplomat who knows how to take the battle to the enemy and win.