Quieting the Silent Option
The limits of assassination.

s we know from our first American battle casualty in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency is working alongside special-ops forces on the ground.

We also know that among its operatives, the CIA employs assassins. According to press reports, President Bush recently ordered the CIA "to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947." The order set aside prohibitions against assassination going back to the Ford administration, and now allows the CIA to conduct a "targeted killing campaign" against Osama bin Laden and selected members of his al Qaeda network.

Presuming this is true, what does that mean for the war on terrorism? Good news or bad?

It's not as good as one might think. At best, an assassination program will be of marginal tactical value. At worst, it will encourage Americans to indulge in dangerously beguiling fantasies about the nature of the war and how it must be prosecuted.

The arguments against assassination fall into three broad categories: legal, moral, and practical.

The legal argument is the easiest to deal with. The assassination ban affecting U.S. government agencies, including the CIA, came as an executive order, not legislation, and what the president giveth the president can taketh away. If Bush modifies or rescinds the executive order, there goes the legal argument.

The moral argument is far more formidable, at least in ordinary times. But these times are not ordinary. We are at war. Once one accepts that, it is difficult to make a cogent moral argument that concedes the deliberate killing of a hapless conscript on the battlefield, but forbids targeting that same conscript's evil commander in his comfortable bunker. (Or, in the case of bin Laden, his damp cave.) In light of today's realities, only pacifists can make a respectable moral argument against the premeditated dispatching of members of the al Qaeda leadership.

But now we come to the practical side of the question, and here are the rocks upon which strategic assassination founders.

In the Middle East, power is respected and weakness is despised. Peace, when it exists, flows from the fear and awe inspired by irresistible might and crushing victory. If the United States wants peace, then spectacular, overwhelming triumph is our only option. Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the states that harbor them must be dealt a defeat the likes of which the region has not seen since the Third Punic War. Violent Islamists and their sympathizers throughout the Middle East must be shown clearly, publicly, and palpably the utter futility and hopelessness of their cause. If not, we will have no peace. And given al Qaeda's well-documented interest in obtaining and using nuclear weapons, the alternative to peace may well be a catastrophe on U.S. soil the likes of which the world has never seen.

Once one fully appreciates the extent and nature of the victory America must secure, it becomes clear that quiet, hidden assassinations — the so-called "silent option" — will get us nowhere. What we need are thousands of angry, screaming U.S. Marines bringing our enemies to their knees. That is how you win in the Middle East, and that is the only way you win.

Take a lesson from Israelis.

Over this past summer, as violence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority continued to spiral, Tel Aviv publicly admitted to a program of assassination against selected terrorist leaders on the West Bank — "targeted killings," the Israelis called them. The assassinations were intended to incapacitate West Bank terrorist organizations or, failing that, to deter the terrorist leadership from further attacks against Israelis and Israeli settlers. Sometimes the hits were relatively subtle, e.g., a sniper's bullet from out of the darkness. Other times they were not so subtle — missiles fired from an attack helicopter, for instance. And the assassinations continue to the present day, according to press reports.

How much success have these assassinations had in achieving Tel Aviv's strategic goals? Close to none, as far as anyone can tell. The terrorist organizations are just as defiant, their attacks just as deadly and numerous as they were before. Meanwhile, peace and safety for Israeli citizens seems ever more distant.

The terrible irony is that Israel, of all nations, should know what it takes to survive in the Middle East. It takes strong, decisive, and ruthless military action — displays of force that leave the enemy in wonder. The 1967 war put fear and trembling in the hearts of Israel's enemies. So, to a lesser extent, did the October War of 1973. That fear and trembling gave Israel peace — it was a cold and tense peace, undoubtedly, but it was peace. Israeli children were not dying.

In the Middle East, anyone can assassinate an enemy in some dark alley, and so nobody is impressed when it happens. But when Israel annihilated the Egyptian air force before it got off the ground, then spun around and destroyed the Syrian emplacements on the Golan Heights, all in a matter of six days — now that impressed the neighbors. And among Middle Eastern nations, impressing your neighbors (and your enemies, too — usually the same people) is what survival is all about.

The late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad understood this. In February 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood (a fundamentalist/Islamist organization, the Syrian wing of which was founded in the late 1930s) staged an insurrection in the town of Hama, in northern Syria. Assad had been troubled by the Muslim Brotherhood in the past, and decided the time had come to put an end to their mischief. He probably did a bit of targeted assassination, but that is not what ended the insurrection and pacified the Muslim Brotherhood. What ended it was a full-scale invasion of Hama by the Syrian army. Upwards of 30,000 people were killed, which amounted to pretty much the whole town. That was the end of Assad's Muslim Brotherhood woes. He had inspired fear and trembling in the hearts of his enemies — or what was left of them. He knew what it took to win in the Middle East, as did the Israelis of 1967 and 1973.

It is easy to see the appeal of an assassination program in our war on terrorism. It's the same appeal as that offered by the air campaign we have been waging, or the use of the Northern Alliance as a proxy force, or the idea of putting U.N. peacekeepers in Kabul instead of an American army of occupation.

Assassinations, B-52 raids, a surrogate "army," and friendly Australians in blue U.N. berets all hold out the promise of victory without extensive American ground troops, without American causalities, without an American conquest. But this is a false and dangerous hope.

If we are to have peace when the war on terrorism is over then we need to leave al Qaeda, along with those states and organizations that support it, prostrate, broken, and humiliated — unable even to contemplate fighting again.

As a collector, interpreter, and disseminator of strategic intelligence, the CIA has a vital role to play in the war on terrorism. But the 7th Infantry Division also has a vital role. We confuse the two at our peril.