WAY OF THE KNIFE
By William Urban
Book titles today seldom tell you what the contents are — that is found in the subtitle, which in this case is, “The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.”
The author, Mark Mazzetti, is the national security correspondent for the New York Times. That is, there is a tendency to be anti-Bush, anti-CIA, and, until recently, pro-Obama. Mazzetti has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for stories on Afghanistan and Pakistan. These, like Nobel Peace Prizes, have a political bias, too.
Despite this, he is effective in showing how the CIA has repeatedly gone back and forth between its origins in the WWII era OSS and its function of coordinating information collection and analysis. The heart of information gathering used to be clipping newspaper articles and filing them for quick retrieval for when someone asks, “Who is this SOB I’m hearing about?” Today this is computerized, but the principle is the same.
Mazzetti shows that after 9/11 the CIA once again changed from being an intelligence organization (he uses the word “spy”) to a military one, with a world-wide reach, operating in the shadows, and killing by proxy or using drones. Under Bush the process was a “hammer”; under Obama it is a “scalpel”. Bush’s CIA wanted prisoners to interrogate; Obama’s just killed suspects.
“Knife” refers to old-fashioned cloak and dagger operations, but since human intelligence had been largely replaced by technology, that was impractical. Moreover, Bush and Obama both preferred using a bomb in tribal regions of countries with no effective governmental control of its hinterland; murdering a terrorist in a Paris alley would get too much publicity.
The CIA had been largely neutered under Bill Clinton and might have remained so except for Osama bin Laden, but once the decision was made to hit the 9/11 terrorists wherever they were, no organization but the CIA was ready to do it.
The CIA had the language skills, the local knowledge, the experience in working with foreign intelligence agencies, and a tradition of doing unpleasant but necessary tasks. The military, in contrast, was still thinking of massive tank battles and hunting submarines; the ability to work with irregular forces was long gone, and the budget was being cut. Anti-war activists wanted to use police and to try terrorists in American courts; arresting the suspects, however, was impossible. The Taliban mocked American requests to turn over the al-Qaida leaders, “What can they do? Sue us?
Special Forces, the CIA and private security firms quickly wiped those smirks off Taliban faces, but winning the conventional war did not bring peace and harmony, much less good government. Mazzetti’s book deals largely with Bush’s wars, since that was the era when we learned the hard way that we could not rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq as we once did Germany, Japan and Italy; he concentrated on the difficulties presented by Pakistan Secret Service, the ISI, which saw the Taliban as both dangerous and useful in confronting India, while the Americans would soon go home. There were also private armies, infighting between the CIA, the military, and local leaders, and the public’s expectation of quick results, then coming home.
Despite all the problems, some of which were a lack of coordination by the various organizations and jealousy of one another, by the end of 2008 Bush and Obama alike had concluded that both countries were sufficiently pacified to beginning planning a withdrawal. In December of 2012 Obama announced, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,”
Awkwardly, this was just the moment when Mazzetti was finishing his book. For him the greatest American problem was the impact of drone strikes on Muslim public opinion. ”Fire from the Sky” was counter-productive, he said, and should be ended. That is essentially irrelevant now that the failures of the Obama foreign policy are visible everywhere, with Muslims openly killing Muslims across the Islamic world. The heart of this swift change beat in Syria.
When the Arab Spring appeared in 2011 peaceful demonstrations began against the Syrian government; when Bashar al-Assad sent in tanks and helicopters, an armed resistance fought back. President Obama announced that al-Assad had to go. Then he did nothing. Meanwhile, after dictators were overthrown across the region, radicals took over; once again, nothing. The same happened in the Syrian war. Iranians and Hezbollah came in, then jihadists who wanted to establish an Islamic state, but not the US.
These radicals — the ISIS (later called the ISIF, and now the Caliphate) — are more radical than al-Qaida. First fostered by Saudi and Qatar money to overthrow the pro-Iranian government of al-Assad, then by Kuwaiti oil millionaires, this June the jihadists crossed the border into Iraq, making more rapid gains than anyone had thought possible.
This makes Mazzetti’s book less relevant that it was when the Obama administration was following many of the New York Times recommendations; now that we have a world without significant American leadership, with a weaker military, and no guiding principles that allies can count on, the partisan quarreling over the role of the CIA seems, as they say, so yesterday. Pakistan, which Mazzetti depicted as always following its own agenda, not America’s, is now attacking its Taliban. Saudi Arabia, whose money financed the religious schools that trained the radicals, wants to kill jihadists before they can move on Mecca, but doesn’t trust its own military to do it.
The Caliphate’s massacres of Iraqi Christians and minorities has horrified everyone except hard-liners in the UN, Qatar and Turkey who think that Israel is to blame for everything. Elsewhere the Sunni and Shia worlds are being drawn together to resist the Caliphate in northern Iraq, which is flush with money, weapons, and a sense of invincibility. After a propaganda film boasted that the Caliphate’s flag will fly over the White House, administration spokesmen began to speak in hushed tones about the hundred or so Americans fighting with Caliphate and the even more numerous Europeans.
Now, after waiting for months, Obama has authorized limited bombing and drone strikes, but our aircraft carrier is far from the battlefield; meanwhile, the Kurds have almost no modern weapons, while the Caliphate has captured much of what Obama left behind for the Malaki government. There is no base for American operations, no air field, and hardly any Iraqi government. The Way of the Knife is still worth reading, but as history, not as a model for future action.
Review Atlas (August 14, 2014), 4.
