Comments on: When is Assassination in Order?

By: mc

mc — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:44:58 +0000

abbas: thanks for the clarification, and apologies for confusing your point about the left and Khomeini. I know there was a good part of it in Europe too that were deluded. I have clearly much less of an idea than you on that period and on Iran. All I would guess is, again, popular opinion and the individual “appeal” of a dictator are not all that makes a dictatorship stand for years and years. I’m not that interested in the theoretical part of debating assassination policies, that’s where I really don’t follow. And that real-politik is very relevant to how assassinations, and all kinds of intervention in general, have, or have not, been used. Otherwise, what answer do you give to the question, why wasn’t Hitler stopped before the Holocaust? And can we draw up a list of famous or infamous political assassinations in recent history, and look at the real motivations? How about the Pinochet coup and the murder of Allende, was that legitimate policy? beneficial? to whom? Weren’t most assassinations carried out precisely by dictatorships who had high profile dissenter and opponents murdered? Or, within democracies, against ordinary politicians or political figures who had done nothing dictatorial? I don’t know how that reality of assassinations can be escaped in favour of some theoretical argument that assumes a concern that just isn’t there. I find it baffling, really. On the concept of individual role of dictators – of course “the decisions of powerful individuals are often determinant in history’s crucial events” – but they’re not the exclusive factor, and we can’t know what would have happened if any of those multiple conditions that led to a certain crucial event had been absent. Who knows if in the absence of one catalyst, another could have performed the same role? It’s impossible to say. I’m not arguing from a point of view of squeamishness about political murder. I just don’t see how it can be incorporated as “policy” in the actions of a modern democratic state. Plus, it’s illegal for all nations who signed up to a certain framework of legality. So that’s another reason why there’s no point discussing its pros or cons. It has already been discussed and decreed to be illegitimate. We’re talking of something extreme, not ordinary policy. Even if humanitarian concerns were what drives interventions, there are all sorts of legitimate actions a nation can take before you need to resort to an illegal one, don’t you think? Plus, who would assassinate the leader of a country, its people, in a revolution, or another power, another country’s leaders? By which right? Politically it is not as simple as pulling a trigger. Maybe, that’s also one of the reasons why it’s been made illegal.

By: Abbas

Abbas — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:37:34 +0000

Sloppy spelling, in my case: squeamishness.

By: Abbas

Abbas — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:31:57 +0000

This’ll be a brief, haphazard reply… The left I was referring to re Khomeini was our own, i.e. in Iran. Ostensibly intelligent people who couldn’t see that Khomeini wasn’t interested in their spiteful, petty politics and that he was very serious about instituting an Islamic dictatorship. If I saw it and many of my friends/colleagues did as well, how were the others so blind? I’m not interested in writing a manual on modern assassination, merely in arguing for its theoretical benefits. That (often misguided) realpolitik has guided western governments in the past (and continues to do so today) is irrelevent to my point: the decisions of powerful individuals are often determinant in history’s crucial events. I teach German history so know a bit about conditions before, during and after the Nazi era. My opinion that in Hitler’s absence there would have been no Holocaust and possibly no WWII is now accepted among a wide swath of people in the field. This is not the same thing as absolving—or even mitigating the guilt of—those who were complicit in his actions and, of course, Hitler was a product of his environment and could never have implemented his plans without a fertile context and enthusiastic assistance. But the fact remains that he was the essential catalyst for the Holocaust (and probably WWII) and no amount of research into “causes” will change that fact. Which is why I am receptive to a theory of assassination. When you’ve seen how dictatorships function up close you tend to lose your sqeamishness about some things.

By: mc

mc — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 10:14:01 +0000

Also, leaving aside the absurdity of these what-ifs for one moment, on Hilter in particular I do think it is very naive and historically untrue to see him as the sole instigator of the entirety of something as massive as nazism and the Holocaust, so rather than assassination itself, a much more extensive form of action would have been required in preventive terms. (that said, again, no objections at all to hypothetical retroactive assassinations of Hitler. not one bit.)

By: mc

mc — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 10:07:51 +0000

… sorry for my sloppy writing, “liberated the nazis” should obviously be “liberated Europe FROM the nazis” and “disbanded settlements” should be “dismantled settlements”, ouch…

By: mc

mc — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 10:02:42 +0000

Abbas – Sorry, MC, but some of the biggest supporters of bringing Khomeini back to Iran were those in the radical left. Just so it’s clear, I’m not arguing the merits or coherence of all the left-wings in the west in the past fifty years. But which radical left are you talking of, in the US? in all of Europe? or in Iran? perhaps that’s the souce of the misunderstanding here. I thought you were referring not to Iranian but to US and western left-wing opinion in general. I don’t remember it was that compact on Khomeini, it sure wasn’t in Europe. And was it radical left opinion that led Khomeini to power? again, the left in Iran or the US & west in general? The Shah was identified with the West and that was enough to earn Khomeini their support. You say yourself the Shah’s was a dictatorship, and people were jailed and persecuted and repressed. It may have been turning towards a “benign” regime later, I won’t go into that, but, regardless of the comparison with Khomeini which is not exactly a case of great choices available, it does seem there were a few reasons for the Shah being disliked, other than his western support. This sort of ideological purblindness caused the West to support Bin Laden against the Soviet regime in Afghanistan I thought that was strategy, not ideology, and it was the US government and secret services and their allies. It wasn’t exactly a popular stance with most of the left, at least in Europe. And if anything it shows the huge contradictions of those strategies vis a vis fundamentalism and dictatorships. and is now sadly in evidence in the unholy alliance between the radical left and the Islamists in the antiwar movement in the UK and some places in Europe (see particularly Ken Livingstone’s embrace of the despicable Al Qaradawi in London a few days ago). Abbas, I’m not seeing those radical left plus Islamist fractions in power anywhere. What about the unholy alliance of US governments and the Saudi monarchy? or the continuing unholy alliance with the same Pakistani services and military regime that trained the mujahedeens? or in other places in Central Asia, where oddly the regimes supported do not include only Islamists but also communist dictatorships? Isn’t that perhaps more relevant and influential than anything Ken Livingstone says. Also, the anti-war opinion in Europe was vast majorities or near-majorities of entire countries, surely you’re not equating those with the tiny far-left groups that overtly support Islamists, right? Cos I doubt that those 90% of Spaniards, for isntance, who were against intervention in Iraq would be eager to embrace fundamentalism and terrorism. About cynical manipulation, my point is this: terrorism is, at once, far less of a mass phenomenon than people believe, and far more subject to implementation from above. And on this, like I already said, I totally agree. It is also subject of implementation from below and from sideways, it appears. Like you yourself mentioned above about Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism has served western interests too. We’re not exactly seeing an upheaval of those strategies when there’s so little coherence in how different regimes are handled, and when, even in a post-soviet context, the very same financial interests in the Middle East that existed at the time of the Soviets haven’t changed. The argument about “causes” (root or otherwise) is artificial. Abbas, you brought up this “root causes” argument, I never did, and I already explained what I think of it. I was talking of political solutions, not “root causes”, and specifically limited to Israeli strategies which is what we were discussing. Even Sharon understands the concept of the need of a political solution, it seems, even at the cost of sacking his own ministers. Theirs is not a spontaneous reaction to “injustice”, real or perceived, but something that is taught. I.e. manipulated. Indeed, no argument on that from me. We already agree there. Yet, any considerations on causes does not void the questions about solutions. nd that is why a campaign like Israel’s (against the leaders and structure of the terrorist movement) in a restricted territory over which they have some control, can succeed. Western supporters of the Palestinians might not like these facts but they seem to me incontrovertable. I can’t answer for your standard “Western supporters of the Palestinians” becuase I’m not exactly one, and that’s not the argument I was making. I never said anything about Palestinian demands, we were discussing the merits of the Israeli assassination policy. Well, all I’ve been saying is, no assassination policy, security wall/fence, or military intervention alone is going to provide a long-term solution (or compromise), and that is something the Israeli government and the majority of Israelis understand perfectly already. Because there are plans for a political solution too. Or do you see disbanding settlements and pulling out a concession to that “root cause” argument you despise? Don’t you think that, regardless of what one thinks of the causes of the conflict, that move may be a smart one for Israel too, in the first place? Regardless of discussion on causes, regardless of how effective it may or may not be, regardless of what motivates Sharon to do this, isn’t it fundamentally solution-oriented? I am in favour of euthanasia (you misread what I wrote). I just didn’t and still don’t understand what it has to do with political assassinations, but I didn’t bring it up, so, nevermind. We can only argue about Hitler in hindsight. Exactly, which makes the what-if discussions pointless. Especially if they ignore that there were several ways of taking out Hitler, assassination included, but they were never carried out. A current dictator whose assassination I would support? Kim Jong-Il. If that was enough to destroy an entire regime and rebuild a country on a democratic basis… But, see, to me the most interesting question is: is there any power planning to do any of that? Is the concern for the victims of that regime taking over in policies about NK? I’m not seeing any of that. We can project a desire that that concern should be there all we like, but it doesn’t make it materialise. That’s one of the reasons I supported the removal of Saddam. Of course, as a goal in itself, it’s definitely unarguable. It’s how to do it, like you acknolwedge yourself, that is always the trickiest part. And again, we can’t ignore that the moral or humanitarian concern there was not the main reason for intervention, otherwise, the same reason would have to motivate intervention elsewhere. On the “interchangeable” dictators – I used the wrong word, what I meant is not so much interchangeable one with the other, but the fact that by themselves, as single individuals, no dictators could have done what they did, it takes a whole system to create a dictatorship and keep it in place. Internal conditions, and external conditions too. To argue that some other fanatical ayatollah would sprung up to do exactly what Khomeini did, is sheer nonsense. That is not what I meant. I find it impossible to argue on what-ifs in the past, I’m merely following what happened for real. To say that Khomeini, or any other dictator, didn’t do it all by himself is not the same as saying “if there had been no Khomeini someone else would have come up to do exactly the same”. We can’t know that anyway! So no point in arguing about it. My point is merely that the emphasis on what made it possible for Khomeini or any other dictator to take power is more interesting than his personality or individual traits alone. Conditions may influence dictators and may facilitate their bane but to argue against their assassination (on policy) is like refusing to treat the symptoms of cancer until we can come up with a permanent cure. First, I already made it clear I am not arguing against the undeniable truth that it would have been better to eliminate Hitler and Khomeini and Kim Jong and Saddam and Nero and Vlad the Impaler before they shed any blood. My argument, sorry to be repetitive, is simply that you can’t argue for the legitimacy of a policy of assassination based on what-ifs about the past. And when it’s about the present, you still have to get real and you can’t dismiss the fact that that humanitarian concern – that motivates your (and Harry’s) willingness to grant some legitimacy to assassination policies – is just not there in geo-political strategies and policies anyway. Most of the time assassinations have been used to all sorts of other ends than preventing massacres or eliminating murderous dictators. I’m not arguing on ideal principles, I’m more than willing to sign up to the elimination of all dictatorships on the planet by any means including assassination but it’s just not real, it’s not being done, or planned, or discussed, it’s pure theory and speculation. Just like the speculation on what-if-Hitler-had-never-existed: And the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred, probably not even World War II. Hitler alone was the instigator of these two terrible events. Others implemented them but, in the end, he alone determined that they should happen You cannot know that, all we know is the Holocaust did happen, that no one who had the knowledge of it occurring and the power to stop it tried to prevent or stop it, and that no one took out Hitler, and the Western powers that finally liberated the nazis did so only well after the Holocaust was under way, only when their own interests where threatened, because that’s how these things work. It’d be great if they didn’t work like that, and it’d be great if we could make it right just by arguing about how nice it would have been to assassinate Hilter and all his associates before they did what they did, or even anticipate the war so that more people could have been rescued from the camps, but it’s pure retrospective wishful thinking. And wishful thining is of no use to discussing if assassination is legitimate in principle, because even today the mini-Hitlers of the world are still not being taken out and their victims not being rescued until some other element tilts the balance towards some intervention of some form or another. In other words, before arguing in principle about the legitimacy of political assassination, we’ve got to see what motivates it and other forms of intervention against dictators in the real world as is, not in theory. Because even if we all agreed that assassination is the best, quickest, safest, most clever and effective and ethically grounded way of toppling regimes and saving people from massacres, those who we would like to take that course of action are not in the least following let alone enforcing the same concerns and reasoning. So what’s the point of arguing whether it is legitimate? If the British government came up tomorrow with a plan to assassinate a top-ten of tyrants across the globe, then it would surely be necessary to discuss if that policy is clever and ethically, practically and politically defensible or not, despite its being technically not legitimate in the sense of legal (which is a fact, but doesn’t mean it’s not justifiable in certain cases). But no what-if-Hitler will help in assessing that. I do believe Harry’s question above is very interesting especially in terms of theoretical discussion on principles. But I also believe it’s not realistic at all.

By: Abbas

Abbas — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 01:11:52 +0000

Three sentences missing after “…but they would have been “right” had he never existed.”: “And the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred, probably not even World War II. Hitler alone was the instigator of these two terrible events. Others implemented them but, in the end, he alone determined that they should happen.”

By: Abbas

Abbas — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 23:15:06 +0000

Sorry, MC, but some of the biggest supporters of bringing Khomeini back to Iran were those in the radical left. The Shah was identified with the West and that was enough to earn Khomeini their support. This sort of ideological purblindness caused the West to support Bin Laden against the Soviet regime in Afghanistan and is now sadly in evidence in the unholy alliance between the radical left and the Islamists in the antiwar movement in the UK and some places in Europe (see particularly Ken Livingstone’s embrace of the despicable Al Qaradawi in London a few days ago). About cynical manipulation, my point is this: terrorism is, at once, far less of a mass phenomenon than people believe, and far more subject to implementation from above. The argument about “causes” (root or otherwise) is artificial. Virtually all studies of suicide bombing, for example, have shown that there is no causal link between deprivation and poverty—even outright oppression—and incidence of suicide bombing. Most studies have concluded that suicide bombers may be susceptible to being recruited by reasons of “humiliation” (real or indoctrinated; it amounts to the same thing) and religious or political fervour, but they have to be recruited. Not only recruited, but trained, supported, etc. Theirs is not a spontaneous reaction to “injustice”, real or perceived, but something that is taught. I.e. manipulated. And this analysis also holds true for much of Islamic terrorism (of the non-suicide bombing variety). And that is why a campaign like Israel’s (against the leaders and structure of the terrorist movement) in a restricted territory over which they have some control, can succeed. Western supporters of the Palestinians might not like these facts but they seem to me incontrovertable. Even moderate Palestinians on the ground, who have been afraid to speak out against terrorism given the climate in Gaza and the West Bank, are beginning to see the proposed Israeli pullout from Gaza as a promising first step, and are beginning to test their voices in opposition to the Intifada. A few other (quick) points… I am in favour of euthanasia (you misread what I wrote). We can only argue about Hitler in hindsight. A current dictator whose assassination I would support? Kim Jong-Il. I can’t answer for Peter but his analysis about the importance of individual human agency in history squares with mine. Sure, “things” were right for Hitler to come to power and implement his policies, but they would have been “right” had he never existed. That’s one of the reasons I supported the removal of Saddam. He was a brutal killer on whom “sanctions” would never have any effect. Trouble is, Bush and his gang are inept ideologues and they’ve screwed it up. I don’t know if an international, UN-sanctioned force would have been better, but it could hardly have been worse. Finally, you say “dictators are interchangeable”. You are wrong. Very wrong. The Shah was a dictator (my cousin was jailed for opposing him), but, by the late ‘70s he had become a relatively benign dictator (certainly by Middle Eastern standards) and Iran was moving perceptably towards a liberal democratic (and largely secular) regime, perhaps some form of constitutional monarchy. Contrast that with what Khomeini has wrought. Khomeini alone. Same conditions, different dictators. To argue that some other fanatical ayatollah would sprung up to do exactly what Khomeini did, is sheer nonsense. Conditions may influence dictators and may facilitate their bane but to argue against their assassination (on policy) is like refusing to treat the symptoms of cancer until we can come up with a permanent cure.

By: mc

mc — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:33:44 +0000

Peter: but the question raised by Harry is not a philosophical question of individual agency vs. determinism, it’s a practical question, where the role of individual agency is already implied. But the real point to me is not how much history would have changed without those individuals and how much individual influence they had, it’s why was it possible for those individuals to do what they did. That’s what has most relevance to the present, because there are still massacres and dictators and the same patterns of political indifference (not in terms of public opinion, in terms of governments) until something else than humanitarian concerns enters the scene and tilts the balance towards intervention. If assassination is to be considered as a form of intervention, shouldn’t we be looking at what actually motivates intervention in the first place, instead of projecting a desire that it should be motivated only by humanitarian concerns, regardless of other interests? Which would be great, but it’s just not real. Of course history would have been radically different without Hitler, but why and how was Hitler able to get where he was and did what he did? what conditions favoured him? what turned him from an ignorant and repulsive man to a tyrant cheered by the masses? that is rightly the question most historians have tackled because it simply is the most relevant, to that history and to the present and the future. The what-if question on assassinations – “given the self-evident truth that it would have been better to remove those responsible for massacres before they committed them, does this somehow form a basis for legitimacy for assassination in general?” – cannot escape from that historical analysis, because analysis shows that though one man can hugely affect history, he never acts alone. That man is no more, that country is no longer the same, but in another place, another time, the conditions for a different version of the same story can always occur, because dictatorships thrive on the same mechanisms. Dictators are like puppets, they’re inter-changeable, there’s nothing special about them in the first place that can explain the entirety of their role, and even when they do have some charisma, it takes a receptacle to work its effects, and for them to be eliminated by other external powers, it takes more for these powers than concern for the oppressed. It’s just a fact, and it has little to do with theories.

By: mc

mc — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:08:08 +0000

Abbas – to clarify, my point about cynical manipulation going both ways was not the same as yours. I understand your point of view but I don’t have the same experience and I was still in primary school when Khomeini came back to Iran, so I didn’t exactly have a political opinion on that. I never heard that many people who supported him or were that naive about the “revolution”, though. Mostly because the “progressives” where I grew up were communists so while they had no fondness for the US-installed Shah, the last thing they would cheer for was a religious nut in power. If that was different in the US, I have no idea. But I don’t see how it was the opinion of naive and deluded “progressives” that helped Khomeini get where he was. I think he was serving someone’s interests too, just like the Shah. Maybe not just French interests. Why didn’t those statesmen you refer to try and prevent that? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me the approach was very different from that towards Saddam’s Iraq. In both cases, strategies were played and business was made. By all sorts of parties. Finally, to go back to the assassination argument, Marxism or concepts of inexorability is not what I was talking about. It just seems blindingly obvious to me that there is absolutely no point in arguing hypothetically about “what if Hitler had been removed”, when he wasn’t, and when it took a long time (for the very nations who ended up defeating the nazis) to make a move. I for one am not defending euthanasia (? what’s it got to do with this?) nor “writing off” the millions of victims, for gosh’s sake. It’s just that we can’t rewrite history with what-ifs, and clearly those victims were a concern to no one of those great statesmen until they were moved to intervene by self-interest. So if you’re attributing that Alice-in-Wonderland view to me, you’re really misreading my point, which is just about facts, not moral principles, because they rarely enter into political strategies. Fact is, massacres are never stopped by those who have the power to stop them, until they become an obstacle in some geo-political strategy. Humanitarian concerns are NOT what drives politics, simple as that. So what I find naive, and also, charged with rhetorics, is this proposition of “but wouldn’t you have supported assassination of Hitler, don’t you see assassination can be morally grounded?”. the reply to that is not “I don’t care, it’s bad to kill, even when it’s Hitler”, I never said that. It’s implied and obvious that assassinating Hitler would have been A Very Good Thing. But it’s not the reply, it’s the question that’s wrong. Because neither you or I have any power to assassinate Hitler retroactively, so it’s just pointless to argue about it, and it becomes a very sly rhetorical trick to defend the concept of political assassination based on the Hitler argument. Is there any other present tyrant that would deserve elimination? sure, so let’s discuss that, and the advantage of assassination vs. all other kinds of possible interventions that are supposed to be available and legitimate before you resort to assassination plans. Also considering the latter – with the exception of Israel where they’re part of a war – have been generally a tool of political manipulation and strategies that had very little if nothing to do with humanitarian concerns about populations living under repression; and these concerns never entered into the calculation for strategies that involved support of dictators who killed and tortured thousands but who were useful for some political end to the very powers you’d like to project the “moral assasination” concern on. You can’t discuss on the what-ifs only and ignore history and what really drives large-scale political actions.

By: Peter W.

Peter W. — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 13:58:21 +0000

Abbas: Very interesting comment. Our natural tendency is to “explain” history and the huge influence of individuals players on its course is not always psychologically satisfactory. We want to believe that there are more powerful currents to history than those generated by influential individuals with powerful axes to grind. The thought that the 20th century would have been very, even totally, different without Hitler, is somehow disappointing to some historians. Anti-semitism and German nationalism (among other factors) were crucial to his ability to implement his nefarious plans, but in Hitler’s absence they might have simmered and never given the chance to boil over into WWII and the Holocaust. It’s hard now to imagine what the world would be like had those two seminal events not occurred, but to think that they were somehow inevitable or independent of individual human agency is to believe in a very mad sort of determinism.

By: Abbas

Abbas — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 20:33:35 +0000

MC, Of course the cynical manipulation cuts both ways. That was exactly my point. I remember how much of a shock it was to me coming from Iran to find progressives like myself, in the west, naively seeming to believe (or, at least, to argue, in a condescending kind of racism) that only the western powers and the USSR would be sophisticated enough to manipulate the masses, and that if there were an Islamic (read “Islamist”) Revolution in Iran which was then exported across the Middle East, that this must reflect a deep-seated popular desire and that the liberal democracies would simply have to accomodate this new, reactionary reality. My point is that far from being inevitable, the Khomeini “revolution” could easily have been nipped in the bud had farsighted statesmen (in the west or east; I blame the French in particular) prevented the miserable ayatollah from being given Iran on a silver platter in 1979. Had they done so, the current political (and social) situation in the Middle East (and, by extension, the world) would be very different. This is what so interests me in the subject of assassination. The people who argue that the course of history is inexorable (determinists? Marxists?), are very wrong. The removal of Hitler (via assassination or some more conventional method like being jailed for sedition) at any time in the ‘20s or ‘30s would have had a profound (pick a stronger word of your choice) effect on the rest of the 20th century. This is not just a parlour game. Can anyone deny that deliberate or accidental deaths have had an enormous influence on the course of events in many countries over the past century? Of course there is a large dose of the hypothetical in discussing assassination (as there always is in discussing history), but I cannot understand how some people will eagerly defend, say, euthanasia, on (hands-on) moral grounds, yet blithely write off the millions of victims of history’s tyrants on what they claim are “moral” (hands-off-or-it-will-corrupt-your-soul) grounds. In short, no, I’m not proposing that we should get busy drawing up assassination hit lists (and no, I haven’t given any thought at all to how it would work, ok?), but to dismiss the importance of individual human agency in the course of current events (blame the neocons for the Iraq war mess but refuse to blame Al Sadr or Al Zarqawi for the insurgency?) is a very curious, Alice-in-Wonderland view of politics and history.

By: mc

mc — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 15:28:51 +0000

Abbas: I wasn’t talking of “root causes”, but root solutions. I’m not referring to any received wisdom, and I’m not discounting any cynical manipulation of genuine grievances. But the manipulation and cynicism regarding terrorism doesn’t work just in one direction. As for causes, I guess there’s a variety of them and they can’t be reduced to one. But ultimately, what causes terrorism is less relevant than how to deal with it – and ok, causes and solutions obviously intersect because to deal with something you’ve got to know why it exists, but, you know what I mean, you’ve got to focus on the present and on political strategies, not just military ones, and not just rhetorics either. In the case of Israeli assassinations, I don’t think basing a whole strategy solely on the right to self-defense is very wise. With self-defense, you can justify anything from the wall to the assassinations and incursions and so on, but what next? You’ve got to go deeper than merely putting a lid on things, that’s all I’m saying. Whatever political views you have about the “causes”, you just have to do something more than military defense, or you’ll be stuck with the problem forever. In the end, what matters most is not the terrorist mentality but the general conditions and attitudes of a society and how they develop. Terrorism can be kept in check, most people even with the deepest grievances won’t go join a terrorist group, but they are far more relevant to how a nation is built and organised, to political life, in general. What you mention about the Shah and Khomeini… maybe it was naive to think removing the Shah would solve everything, but maybe it’s also not exactly a wonderful choice there, between one and the other. I don’t know much about that history, but I take it there were valid reason to dislike the Shah too, right? Maybe with the benefit of hindsight you can argue it would have been relatively better to keep him than have Khomeini back, but it’s rather pointless to argue that by now. Just like with the argument on hypothetically retroactive assassinations. You’ve got to take into account that a lot of the actual assassination plans that were carried out or supported, more or less covertly, in recent history, whether by so-called western or non-western powers, were done for games of interests and power, not for humanitarian concerns. That’s why I think arguing for the legitimacy of assassinations based on prevention of massacres (that happened already) is a flawed position, because that’s not what those tactics have been used for generally. It’s a rhetorical trick that exploits the indisputable advantage of preventing dictators from slaughtering people, but it’s purely hypothetical, and naive. If the governments we would have liked to intervene to stop massacres were concerned with humanitarian reasons, they wouldn’t have maintained, and in many cases, be still maintaining alliances with various thugs and dictators all around the world. Who wouldn’t have liked the Taleban leaders to be eliminated before they could do what they did to Afghanistan? But then, who can explain why they got billions of dollars in funding up to the same year as 9/11 happened? I can’t. But in light of that, and similar things, I can’t delude myself about the benefits of an hypothetical pre-emption of tyranny that never materialised, because it’s blatantly clear that tyrannies have been supported and tolerated when and where there was an interest to, and removed or helped to fall only when that interest failed or was superseded by a different one. At no time the concern for people living under those tyrannies ever entered those strategies – except when it was to convince the public about a regime change. So maybe we shouldn’t project humanitarian preoccupations on policies that are not primarily concerned with them, that’s all.

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:50:22 +0000

jdw- I dunno man, the letters that followed your pithy snark seem further proof of what I said. Adolescents looking at a video screen, talking about the deaths of real human beings like they were points on a scoreboard, with a “poor bastards” thrown in here and there to make it sound all adult and real man-ish. There’s no morality in most of the posts, just strategy. It’s like two separate species confronting each other, there’s no moral valence, just power and force. Two separate moralities that have no overlap, no conjunction. Different animals sharing the same symbols, for a while. You won’t believe this but I have to go look up “ad hominem” – I’m not academically trained; but then I’m not academically circumcised either. Now, having looked it up, I have an even clearer sense of the academic nature of your dismissive posture. There are rules, and one of the rules is – logic always trumps emotion. Stuff it. Logic is for insects. Emotion means more in the long run than logic ever will. For human beings. Shakespeare’s logic is bent to serve his heart, and in that serving it becomes a higher form of what it starts as. I’m fine with ad hominem, I’m fine with immorality really; as long as it serves my goals I’ll dispense with all of it – logic, morality, sense, sanity. As long as it works, let’s go. True emotion, by which I mean an accurate emotional response to the truth of life, which is unquantifiable, which can’t be measured or dissected, matters more than logic. Logic alone is a mineralization, a drone motive, and its worship will mean the death of humanity. Stuff it. Without passion human beings are worthless meat, purposeless inferior machines. But you knew that already.

By: Abbas

Abbas — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 17:12:20 +0000

MC, Yes, “war by another name” applies to the whole context. But, just as there are many ways of waging war, depending on the context, this one has its “rules”, and they seem to have changed with the targetting of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders. Like you, I would have thought that this would simply have energized the troops and resulted in increased terrorism, but it seems we have underestimated how much of (this variety of) terrorism is a top-down phenomenon. You say: A temporary lid on terrorist attacks is not the same as going towards a solution. I agree. But this is a war and Israel seems to be winning it. The received wisdom is that terrorism has causes and the only permanent solution is to eliminate those causes. I was never all that convinced by that argument, at least insofar as these were supposed to be “root causes”. I always suspected that the causes in some instances of terrorism were simply cold political calculations taken by higher-ups, cynical manipulations of popular opinion and genuine grievances. I saw this many times when I was still in Iran. The regime there (not the powerless elected officials) is now highly unpopular and they’ve begun to seize on the nuclear dispute with the West and transform it into an issue of Iranian nationalism, thereby (they hope) regaining some of their standing with the disaffected young. This is classic political manoeuvring and I am surprised when otherwise intelligent people discount such cynical manipulation in the area of terrorism. As for Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (circa 1980), of course my opinion is more idle hindsight than anything else. But I remember having heated debates in Tehran in 1979 with friends and colleagues in which I and a few others warned of the dire consequences of allowing Khomeini to return. They hated the Shah and thought that the only way Iran would progress towards democracy would be by removing him. How naive they were!