The Senate now has a good excuse to take a serious look at whether it was really so

intelligent to create a position called the national intelligence director.

Last week Dennis C. Blair, the third person to hold the post since it was invented in the

post-9/11 upheaval of the American spy apparatus, announced that he was resigning. The

official announcement was accompanied by much reportage, most of it citing mysterious unnamed

sources, that Blair had lost a series of turf battles with leaders of the CIA, Justice

Department, Defense Department and White House staff, before finally losing the confidence of

President Obama.

It didn&#8217t help that he was in supposed charge of the spook universe when such low-tech

terrorist flops as the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the Times Square car bomber came to

light. Both could have been horrible disasters and, in hindsight, both seemed to have escaped

the notice of the global dot-connecting machine that we thought we assembled after the failure

of our previous defense grid to head off the attacks of 2001.

It is fair to question whether Obama was right to have hired Blair or, having done so,

whether he gave the retired admiral the budget, staff and clout necessary to do his job.

Reports are that the president didn&#8217t fully back his national intelligence director when

he was fussing with CIA Director Leon Panetta over who was supposed to hire intelligence

station chiefs for all U.S. embassies around the world, and that Obama wrongly made other,

supposedly lesser, White House staffers the public face of the nation&#8217s intelligence

command.

But more important now for members of Congress, as they consider not only Obama&#8217s

nomination for a replacement but also the whole intelligence structure, is whether any

president and any national intelligence director can do their jobs properly with the current

structure &#8212 a structure mandated by law and only changeable by an act of Congress.

After 9/11, the assumption was that what was then called the director of central

intelligence was in an untenable position as both the head of one agency &#8212 the CIA &#8212

and the supposed overseer and presidential liaison to all of the intelligence community. So

the boss of intelligence was given a boss, the national intelligence director, who was

supposed to be the spider in the middle of the web, favoring no agency&#8217s turf, reading

all the warning signs and filling in all the gaps.

But turf is important in Washington, as in all large bureaucracies, public, private and top

secret. With no real empire of his own, the national intelligence director risks becoming a

whipping boy for everyone and anyone else&#8217s failures, with little opportunity to

accomplish much of anything.

And the issue the structure was created to address &#8212 the natural tendency of any large

organization to have overlaps, gaps, honest disagreements and petty rivalries &#8212 has not

gone away.

Congress should consult the experts on how to restructure the American intelligence

establishment, again, so as to minimize those flaws. And the first expert it should consult is

Dennis Blair.