RETHINKING SECURITY

Covert operations are now the newest topic to be graced by the epidemic of pearl-clutching, brow-furrowing, and hand-wringing that seems to have descended on the American national security debate. It seems people really are surprised that “containment” and “special forces and intelligence” touted as alternatives to Iraq and Afghanistan involves “containing” enemies of the United States by killing them with the aid of “special forces and intelligence.”

Exhibit A: Roger Cohen’s op-ed yesterday:

So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options — cyberwar, drone killings, executions and strange explosions at military bases — invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.

How, pray tell, might Iran “repay us in kind,” then? By bombing American military bases? Attacking American allies and clients? Putting the IRGC against us in Iraq? Spearheading an incompetent plot to bomb a Georgetown restaurant? Been there, done that. It goes without saying what al-Qaeda has done to us.

It is, in fact, the United States that is “repaying in kind” to proxy warfare and direct terrorism, some of which dates back 30 years. But this not being done with manpower-intensive counterinsurgencies or preventive war. Rather, it is being accomplished with the knife, dagger, and computer virus. This is, other words, containment, a policy option that 90% of the American foreign policy establishment currently favors—including one Roger Cohen:

Iran, more unpredictable than the Soviet Union, can be stopped short of a bomb through measures short of military action. What is needed is a contain-and-constrain policy. Contain Iran through beefed-up Israeli and Gulf defenses, a process underway. Constrain it to circle in its current nuclear ambiguity through covert undermining (Stuxnet 2.0, etc.), tough measures to block its access to hard currency, and, as a last resort, a “quarantine” similar to John Kennedy’s interdiction of shipping to Cuba during the missile crisis.

If containment and isolation is to be an actual policy option for an American president against Pakistan, Iran, or al-Qeda, it has to involve the liberal use of covert and paramilitary warfare, since all three use irregular or asymmetrical means a force multiplier beyond their relatively meager military capabilities.

Perhaps this cognitive dissonance arises out of nostalgia for the Cold War’s containment regime, juxtaposed with weariness of ten years of American direct warfare. But it seems that this nostalgia has led to a misperception that containment is passive and bloodless.

The United States invested a vast amount of blood and treasure containing the Soviet Union, including extensive land warfare in Southeast Asia, global covert warfare, a massive defense buildup, and the support of allies—a good deal of which were unsavory. The price of containing Iran in the 1980s was backing Saddam Hussein and engaging with authoritarian governments in the Gulf. The price of containing Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, (a policy that may not have been necessary) was an extended nuclear game of cat-and-mouse, an unsustainable sanctions regime, and frequent aerial military confrontation.

If pearl-clutching and brow-furrowing is a default reaction to America containing Iranian regional ambitions, and moving the hunt from al-Qaeda away from Afghan state-building towards global counterterterrorism, then the domestic political sustainability of a containment regime may be the weak link in future American defense policy