With the persuasive report from the 9-11 Commission and a fast-track Senate committee working toward reform, the position of a director of national intelligence recently became inevitable, so it was smart of President Bush yesterday to announce that he too wanted to create the job. The announcement allows him to help shape the role and removes a potential campaign issue.

The problem was outlined forcefully by the 9-11 Commission – the director of Central Intelligence is nominally in charge of all intelligence agencies but he doesn’t control 80 percent of the budget that goes to these 15 separate agencies, most of which are in the Pentagon, and the CIA and the military have been in competition with each other for decades. Sharing, the commission concluded, wasn’t one of the things these agencies did as well as they should.

The conclusion seems obvious – so obvious, according to the National Journal, that it has been proposed an average of once every 18 months since 1947: create an overseeing director to coordinate strategies, avoid duplication and share information. Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry supported the idea more than a year ago. Sen. Susan Collins, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee currently holding hearings on the commission’s recommendations, supports it. If the president came late to the idea it may be because he is the one who would most directly confront the CIA and the military about the position, and they have consistently opposed it.

Yesterday, the president said he wants both a director to oversee all the intelligence agencies and a national counterterrorism center to replace the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which was set up in response to 9-11 and did not perform as well as expected. One of the debates over the director’s job is whether it would be a Cabinet-level position. The president said he wants it outside the White House, appointed by him and confirmed by the Senate.

On Sunday, The Washington Post provided a half dozen opinion columns by security experts addressing the question of whether a director would improve intelligence reporting. The experts had widely differing opinions of whether a director would help or hurt, but two warnings seemed especially important. The first is from William E. Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency, who wrote, “There is no way to depoliticize the role of the president’s intelligence chief. It is a desirable aspiration, but intelligence is just as political as policy-making and military operations.”

That is, whether the director is inside the White House or out, serving a fixed term or at the pleasure of the president, the role will be political. If that is the case, then the Senate committee can spend less time trying to insulate the job and more time working on what several of the experts as well as others have described as a more difficult challenge: the overall structure of the intelligence agencies. Even as, for instance, the military has been remade over the last two decades the intelligence community too often relies on structures put in place with the National Security Act in 1947 and guarded ever since.

That act, former Sen. Gary Hart told the National Journal, “was the statutory basis for the prosecution of the Cold War. The Cold War is over and there has not been any comprehensive review of that act.” The president alluded to part of the problem yesterday, suggesting that Congress reform how lawmakers oversee the intelligence services to reduce the number of committees with overlapping jurisdiction.

Nearly three years after the 9-11 attack, major reforms may finally arrive. Congress would do well to make sure its reforms get at the many sources of the problem and are made lasting to improve the nation’s ability to gather intelligence.