Aside from the moral ugliness of violent covert action, its record as a national-security strategy isn’t encouraging. On occasion, interventions have delivered short-term advantages to Washington, but in the long run they have usually sown deeper troubles. Lumumba’s successor, the dictator Joseph Mobutu, may have been an ally of the United States until his death, in 1997, but his brutal rule prepared the way for Congo’s recent descent into chaos. Memory of the C.I.A.’s hand in Mosadegh’s overthrow stoked the anti-American fury of the Iranian Revolution, which confounds the United States to this day. Foreign policy is not a game of Risk. Great nations achieve lasting influence and security not by bloody gambits but through economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas.
During the nineteen-seventies, it seemed as though this era of covert action were coming to an end. After a congressional investigation exposed the extent of C.I.A. plots, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning political assassinations. Successive Presidents strengthened the ban with executive orders of their own, codifying a growing bipartisan consensus that assassinations undercut America’s avowed commitment to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
But after September 11, 2001, as lower Manhattan and the Pentagon smoldered, C.I.A. leaders advocated for the right to kill members of Al Qaeda anywhere in the world. George W. Bush eagerly assented. On September 17th, the President signed a still classified directive delegating lethal authority to the agency. “The gloves come off,” J. Cofer Black, the director of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, told Congress early in 2002.
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