Letter to the London Review of Books, May 10, 2001
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But if any US officials, including the President with his panoply of chief advisers, had set out to knock off Bhutto, Gandhi or Rehman, the chances are that they would have been roughly as successful as they were in their attempt to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. Once, long ago, an elite service manned by Ivy League graduates and capable of overthrowing governments, the CIA still gets by on the Intelligence side because only routine skills are needed to extract routine information from overhead photography and electronic collection (analysis is another matter), but its Operations directorate is so inept that, to avoid guaranteed failure, the CIA's top managers routinely deflect requests for any action that requires any talent at all. Assassinations are no problem for them, because they are illegal under US law and so no policy official can request one, but their memo-writing skills are strained by the need to explain why the simplest things cannot be done - things as simple as collecting a soil sample from outside an unguarded factory in Sudan, for example. Whatever cannot be done by supplying money or arms - and that, too, clumsily - cannot be done at all. Bush père had to resort to a full-scale military invasion just to overthrow Noriega, truly a small-timer among dictators, and that was in Panama, a very small country where the US still had large military bases. Clinton had to send cruise missiles after Osama Bin Laden, then living semi-openly in Afghanistan, a country that lacks any kind of border controls, and where cut-throats loyal enough till pay day are easily hired. The US did not do what Tariq Ali implies it did, because it cannot even do things a thousand times easier than killing national leaders without leaving fingerprints. He should take my word for it, but if he will not, he can consult any cognisant member of the Iraqi opposition. Saddam Hussein's more active enemies believed that there was some dark and sinuous plot at work when they were first exposed to the CIA operators who were supposed to help them. It was only after years of bitter experience that they finally accepted the simpler truth that behind the façade of unbelievable incompetence there was only unbelievable incompetence.
Edward Luttwak Chevy Chase, Maryland