“Andrew Bacevich has a piece up at the Washington Post arguing that the U.S. should approach the war on terror like the Cold War; specifically we need a new doctrine of containment, which for Bacevich means everything from decapitation strikes (though not ones that kill civilians — as if any decapitation can be clean) to ‘well-funded government agencies securing borders, controlling access to airports and seaports’ and ‘comprehensive export controls.’ In each of these examples, Bacevich draws exactly the wrong lesson: decapitation attempts achieved little (think of Castro’s exploding cigars) and contributed to some awful blowback during the Cold War; the Soviet Union collapsed less because the Soviets had noisy submarines (thanks to those export controls) than because everybody in the Eastern bloc knew that life was sweeter in the West; and we had a pretty darn well-funded panoply of intelligence agencies and airport-security professional on 9/11, all of which failed to detect and prevent a low-tech attack by a handful of terrorists.” (09/28/09)