The Explorers' Club, № CCCLXXV

Smedley Butler's cock-&-bull account of the "Business Plot."







The Queue
The central problem with The Way of the Knife is that author Mark Mazzetti neither confines himself to simply reporting nor extends himself to offer a useful critique of how the national security & defense apparatus of the United States has executed the War on Terror in the decade-plus since 9/11. Mazzetti states emphatically the the C.I.A. should not be used as a paramilitary force to capture & kill jihadist terrorists. he also asserts that the uniformed services of the Defense Department should not conduct missions outside of declared war zones, such as Afghanistan & formerly Iraq. The practical effect of this would be for al-Qaeda to operate with impunity inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, & Libya, et al. Mazzetti does not confine himself to simply reporting on the growth of the C.I.A. as a paramilitary killing machine & the intrusion of the Pentagon into the world of espionage. No, he takes it upon himself to denounce the entire history of covert action. (He doesn't confine himself to the post-1947 C.I.A., either, but reports the opinions of Churchill's S.O.E. that the American O.S.S. was reckless in carrying out sabotage inside Hitler's Fortress Europe. Mazzetti never bothers to report to his audience that M.I.6 held as dim a view of S.O.E. as S.O.E. did of O.S.S., casting S.O.E.'s remarks in an entirely new & possible envious light.) Worse than this, though, is that once Mazzetti has stepped beyond his brief as a reporter & offered his analysis & opinions about how the War on Terror has been conducted, he never takes the necessary step beyond to offer an alternative. He details the impotence inside a pre-9/11 C.I.A. & Defense Department that lacked the tools to act against Osama bin Laden & al-Qaeda targets inside Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but then by his repeatedly stated opposition to black ops & failure to articulate an alternate strategy, essentially endorses such inaction as the policy the U.S. should have pursued after 9/11. Mr. Mazetti, if the C.I.A. shouldn't be hunting & killing terrorists but instead confining itself to conducting good, old-fashioned espionage against nation-states, & the Pentagon shouldn't be hunting & killing terrorists but instead confining itself to conventional warfare, whom exactly should be hunting & killing terrorists bend on mass-casualty attacks against civilian targets? Or, if we should not be hunting & killing such terrorists, what method would suggest to defend ourselves & our national interests against those same terrorists' murderous schemes?

In short, The Way of the Knife is long on sanctimonious indignation & short on practicable solutions. Throughout the disappointing book (which was blessedly short, being three hundred pages in an almost comically huge font), I recalled to mind the line of the Colonial Marine from Aliens, on being told that he & his compatriots dare not use their sophisticated firearms to defend themselves: "What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?" If not the C.I.A. nor the Defense Department, what are we supposed to use to defend ourselves from al-Qaeda, its affiliates & allies, & other terrorist organizations? Harsh language?

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