When is Assassination in Order?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s implicit that we’re talking about a government assassinating a foreign leader (I think the distinction’s important — I would agree that the US assassinating Castro would be illegitimate, but I don’t think it would be wrong for a Cuban to do the deed).

That said, it’s legitimate to for a government assassinate a foreign leader if it could be reasonably be assumed that to do so would avert a war. I don’t think Stalin passes that test, though, which is a shame.

Seems to me the justification for assassination is a subset of the justification for war. Honestly, a bunker busting munition is just a really large, comparatively imprecise bullet, which does far less collateral damage in its sniper-originated form.

So is the only difference that assassination occurs before a declaration of war? Can we declare ‘assassination’ as some relative of war that means we’re just going to send in assassins until the head of state is dead, but won’t actually invade militarily? Seems more humane to me.

Thou shalt not kill …. remember the fifth commandment? What makes a government exempt? Nothing, in my view.

It might well be argued that the world would be a better place without certain politicians – Bush and Blair himself probably fit the bill for many, Putin for Chechens, etc. – but it is still wrong, because the end does not justify the means. By stooping to murder, you become a killer yourself, never mind the motives. Nobody can be trusted with that sort of power.

The intended victim may well deserve death, but most probably other innocent people – bodyguards, bystanders – will also die, and by giving the order you are destroying your own soul and integrity. Why is that so hard to see for so many clever people?

“Why is that so hard to see for so many clever people?”

1) Because they don’t know what the word ‘soul’ refers to, for one thing.

2) Because they don’t see why an assassination of, say, Hitler in, say, late 1941, would destroy the assasin’s integrity, for another thing.

Kant is hardcore

When is torture permissable?
When is pre-emptive war permissable?
When is assassination permissable?

Never.

You may not presume other’s values are identical to your own, and that being given, a universal moral rule here is not possible. Except a negative one.

If you just want to go into utilitarianism, I suspect war waged by assassination is dissociative of society. Renaissance Italy?

I’m with Sidereal, assassination is not worse than war. The thing that makes it feel bad is the deceit involved.

I think a “state of assassination” probably existed throughout most of the cold war with both sides trying to kill key members of the other. The secret services of both sides were almost certainly aware of this as well. I think that state was preferrable to a war.

The question is really whether the public is comfortable with an open admission of the state, or whether an open admission of the state can coexist with attempts at reconciliation.

whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha)

I am intrigued to see Rawlings included here; what is your story wrt him?

This strikes me as a colossally bad idea – ill conceived, poorly thought out, the lot. Once it becomes known that country A is complicit in or sanctions assassination, what is to stop countries B, C, D… I am continually amazed that Israel, for instance, has not lost any number of politicians in retaliation for its actions. To mirror Maria C., in a sort of real politic kind of way, once this nice low path is embarked upon, it can only spiral ever downward. Cheers, if that’s the kind of world you want to live in.

Maria C,
Something I’ve wondered about, if the end can’t justify the means, what can?

“By stooping to murder, you become a killer yourself, never mind the motives. Nobody can be trusted with that sort of power.”

So, umm, should we disband the military?

Maria,

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an avowed pacifist, was confronted with the reality of Hitler, he opted to participate in an assassination plot against him — a choice that ultimately cost him his life and that he seems to have regarded as having compromised his soul’s integrity. In such a situation, it may well be necessary to cast concerns for integrity aside — moral judgments that seem self-evident when we’re sitting in front of our computer keyboards may become orders of magnitude more complex in a situation like Hitler’s Germany.

Also, in his prison writings, Bonhoeffer denounces Kantian ethics as prideful. So there’s that.

“I have always felt that the history plays tell a coherent narrative of what happens to a nation when even a bad king is improperly removed.”

What would count as proper? Shelling cities and invading with tank divisions would be proper?
Why would using a few missile to take out the cars leaders were travelling in chip away more at the unity of a nation than what happens when tank divisions are used?

“Saddam certainly was not a good man or good ruler, yet he may have been the only thing keeping the factions in Iraq from fratricide.”
He wasn’t assassinated, yet, those factions aren’t getting along so well.

Back in the USSR, even after Stalin died, everything wasn’t perfect. Cetain luxury items were occasionaly in short supply. Food for example. Muskovites (and no doubt others) sometimes had to wait in line for hours, days even, to purchhase small amounts of flour, vegetables, meat, etc.

One man had been waiting in a beef line forever it seemed to him, and word came back that all the beef was gone, but there was nothing to to but wait till more arrived, who knew when. He blew up and began cursing that no good g-d damn Ukrainian idiot Kruschev. “Hush, Vasily, don’t make trouble,” others told him.

“Trouble! I’ll show you trouble, he bellowed, pulling out a Luger atomatic and waving it over his head. “I took this off a dead Nazi general. He missed me and I strangled him with my own hands. I’m going straight to the kremlin and shoot Nikita Sergeivich dead.”

Off he went. “That’s the last we’ll see of Vasily, poor devil,” everyone agreed.

Six hours later Vasily returned, asking sheepishly if he could get his place back in line.

“Thank G-d, you came to you senses!
You didn’t go to the Kremlin to shoot Kruschev after all?” They all sighed with relief.

“I did go there, on Vladimir Ilyich’s grave I swear it! But I couldn’t shoot him.”

“Good, you had a change of heart, then?”

“Never! But the line for shooting Kruschev is ten times longer than the line for beef!”
————-

The above is from memory, and I don’t remember the source, but it credited the joke to Kruschev. I’m sure he told it better than I did.

Andy suggests: What’s interesting is that your dictators, except Hitler, don’t seem to have been a conspicuous threat to those outside their own borders.

Ahem. Only because Lenin and Stalin decided where to draw the borders.

Thinking point on legal assassination:

How can it be morally permissible to attempt to assassinate Papa Doc, even with 100% foresight, when you know that the result will be the reign of Baby Doc, who is also assassination-worthy?

I.e., does the morality on the assassination rest solely on the qualities of the dictator, or does it also depend on his likely successor?

“The schoolyard glee with which many of the male voices here contemplate the killing of another human being is repugnant.”

This male is against killing anyone, anytime, for any reason. This is the RULE. There are limited exceptions, circumstances where deadly force may be justified. To prevent the imminet death of or serious bodily harm to oneself or another, if there is no reasonable alternative. That’s about it. There are The thing is the exceptions are narrow.

I don’t think I can whack whoever because I think, on balance, the world will be a better place, and/or a better place for ME, without her/him. Rather I can, but it would be murder, and and anyway I won’t.

When did this become controversial again?

It’s never ‘legitimate’, at most it can be argued to be of some use, like abbas said. But you’d have to bring up real instances of that, not hypotheses. Especially not hypotheses about Hitler, because he’s dead already, and because there was never a real plan from any other government to assassinate him, or even bother to stop him before he did what he did.

It’s useless to retroactively argue that a leader should have been killed when he hasn’t. It also would be hypocrite to stop at Hitler or Stalin, or any other dictator in recent times, you’d have to argue your way into pre-emptively assassinating all the monsters and villains in history, all the way back.

Sticking to today, and practical considerations (ie. aside from the inescapable fact assassinations are illegitimate and illegal), if you take Castro’s case, it’s just too late, it’d be no use, and you’d be messing things up even more by now. Plus, who is it up to? I wouldn’t blame a Cuban who’s been emprisoned and tortured and then tried to murder him. But I can’t picture any government taking that decision and justifying it in public.

Taking instances of Israel’s public ‘targeted assassinations’ of confirmed terrorist leaders, I just never understood what practical advantage it gave them that overweighed the obvious disadvantages of creating more martyrs, fueling more hatred, and building up a reputation for infringement of international law.

I guess the concept might have a place in a context of declared war rather than as covert operation, but I’m not sure about the legal implications there.

Also, in recent history, assassinations have most often been used for strategic interests rather than ethically grounded elimination of tyrants or terrorists. So let’s not kid ourselves.

” On the other hand, reports appear to indicate that the recent Israeli campaign against leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade has been very effective. ”

Where? How? I don’t approve or disapprove either, I just wonder where all this tactical success is.

Anyway, I do agree it is war by another name, so even if the assassinations are still technically illegal they’re not exactly the same as the plots of the CIA kind in the 70’s in Latin America, for instance.

mc – the tactical success is the dog that didn’t bark in the night. There hasn’t been a suicide murder within Israel proper in a while, and the overall rate has been dropping for quite some time.

anthony – depends on how relative your “in a while” is, and what you define as terrorism because even if there’s been no major suicide attack in a few months, well it’s not like nothing else happened. And experience shows these kind of “pauses” are no guarantee of anything. People in Israel don’t seem to be under any illusions, for a start.

Plus, there’s no reason to assume the lull in major suicide attacks is due to the targeted assassinations of leaders. Probably more to political factors and calculations by terrorists, _and_ Israeli intelligence and military operations at wider, and lower, level. Including other questionable operations.

It would take far more radical and wide-ranging changes to the whole situation to reduce the risks permanently. Targeted killings are part of a political game but I don’t quite see how they’re they most effective part.

MC,

There have been a spate of reports in a wide variety of publications — including the Arab press, which I read — concluding that the targetting of terrorist leaders has been quite successful. There may be plenty of would-be martyrs and suicide bombers, but they need a fairly sophisticated support system — the import and manufacture of bombs and bomb belts and the money to pay for them, someone to smuggle the belt into Israel, someone to store it, someone to recruit the bomber, someone to scout targets, someone to select the next target, someone to tape the bomber in advance, someone to give the go-ahead, someone to notify the media and claim “credit” after the deed is done, someone to pay the bomber’s family, etc. — and without leadership and bureaucracy all this falls apart.

Whether the new security wall is legal or illegal (the Israeli supreme court has ruled that it is legal in principle but unduly burdensome on some Arab communities; they have ordered the fence’s route redrawn in several areas), it too has reduced the incidence of infiltrations into Israel. As well, there has been a backlash against the terrorists in some Palestinian towns, from inhabitants who feel that their presence attracts Israeli soldiers and tanks. How much of this is due to the targetting of the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aksa Martyrs and how much to internal (Palestinian) ” Intifada fatigue” under Israeli pressure, is hard to gauge. I think both sides are “fatigued”, which may augur well for any new peace initiatives.

MC,

As I indicated above, I don’t think Israel’s targetting of terrorist leaders is “assassination”. It’s just war by another name. On the other hand, it is a war that Israel now seems to be winning. Some Arab commentators have even begun to raise the possibility that faced with the apparent failure of the “violent option” (i.e. terrorism), Palestinian public opinion may not only be turning against suicide bombing but also against the Intifada itself. This would be a good time for the Israelis to make a conciliatory gesture, it would seem. Trouble is, Sharon is now being threatened by the extreme right over his planned evacuation from Gaza and there are no credible moderates on the Palestinian side (the Israelis will no longer deal with Arafat himself and Arafat refuses to allow anyone else any real power in the PA) to respond to any Israeli feeler.

As for the issue of assassination as Chris raised it, I’ve already stated my regret that Khomeini and Saddam Hussein were not successfully targetted back in 1980. Their elimination would have saved the million Iranian and Iraqi lives lost in the subsequent war (the war was largely Saddam’s personal project but Khomeini had little reluctance to accomodate it with Iranian cannon fodder, uh, martyrs), not to mention all the other victims of these tyrants and their deputies over the years.

Suicide bombing attacks stop and the Israeli death toll triples to match the Palestinian toll. Sounds like a win/win situation, doesn’t it? Perhaps we could also wreck the Israeli economy and increase malnutrition.

Yes, that might work… Hamas would stop at the green line and Israel would promise to remove from its constitution any mention of driving the Palestinians into the sea. The Israeli intifada would be over. Oh, wait, did I get that wrong…?

oh, and the same goes for Hitler. He was an enemy of the Soviets too. The US and Britain took their time in coming up with a coherent anti-nazi/fascist position, and only when it became necessary because of the expansionism. Again, concern for Holocaust victims was not a factor if not at the end.

Dave, they were evidently not included in the strategies about those two dictators, that’s all I meant. I was merely observing that no one stopped them or tried to stop them _before_ the tortures and slaughters, and it is well-known that Saddam was at best tolerated and at worst supported (depending on accounts). With Khomeini it was more complicated I guess, but in the end he too was tolerated. Now, all the hindsight “benefits of assassination” arguments start from a concern for the victims those leaders were going to make. It’s undeniable that it would have been better to take out (politically, militarily, whatever, not necessarily by assassination) those leaders before they committed crimes against humanity. But, clearly, that concern was not a factor for those who had the power to do something yet not only abstained from assassination but also from all other kinds of attempts at preventing mass deportations and killings and the like.

In other words, one can only conclude that no political power gave a toss for the poor bastards who got slaughtered. So it’s kind of naive to base the arguments for assassination on that. It is a concern for us, but not for those who would – in the hypothetical what-if arguments – have enforced those assassination plans. They would have considered them only if it fit their strategy, not out of human compassion.

Is it clearer now? I thought it was already.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Sloppy spelling, in my case: squeamishness.