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 fter
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, President Bush signed a secret
finding authorizing the CIA to attempt to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
Bob Woodward reports in his book The Commanders that "the
CIA was not to violate the ban on involvement in assassination attempts,
but rather recruit Iraqi dissidents to remove Saddam from power."
In other words,
according to the strict letter of the finding, Saddam was to be
ousted not "dead or alive," but only alive — at least
as far as the CIA had any control over it.
Why this tender
concern for Saddam Hussein's well being? It was part of a hangover
from the implosion of America's moral self-confidence that occurred
in the 1970s, in the wake of Vietnam and the Church committee's
battering of the CIA as a hapless dirty-tricks operation.
The Ford administration,
bowing to congressional pressure, rushed to issue an executive order
banning assassination. The first Bush administration didn't let
its regard for the Ford order actually stop it from bombing Saddam's
personal compounds, but it pretended not to have entertained the
idea of specifically killing him.
As I wrote
in the last NR, this garble reflects a lack of exactly the
sort of clarity that the war on terrorism demands: Killing enemy
belligerents, even if they are heads of state, is a lawful and moral
application of American power.
The Ford order
on assassinations — reissued by Reagan — should either
be amended, or at the very least publicly reinterpreted, so there
is no longer any confusion on this point.
The upshot
of the Church committee's work in 1975 was that after 30 years of
the twilight struggle, the United States should get out of the twilight
business. And so, the committee concluded that "assassination
is unacceptable in our society." Period.
But this was
— to use the favorite disapproving adjective of the French
— "simplistic." In judging such killings, this is
really the crucial distinction: between peace and war.
From the Romans
to the U.N. Charter, international law has recognized certain "protected
persons" — heads of state, diplomats — who can't
be killed by a foreign power in peacetime.
But war changes
everything. There is a right under international law to target an
enemy's command and control during wartime, including anyone in
the chain of command right up to the head of state.
The odor attached
to targeting specific individuals in wartime is partly a leftover
from rather polite 18th- and 19th-century rules of warfare. It wouldn't
have occurred to the French, for instance, to try to kill William
Pitt.
But this all
changed with the advent of total war, and of leaders, such as Hitler,
unfit for the chummy "community of nations." In April
1943, for instance, the Americans deliberately shot down Adm. Yamamoto's
plane.
The hesitation
to endorse such targeted killings today involves a misunderstanding
of what exactly is proscribed by international law. The Hague Convention
says, "It is especially forbidden to kill or wound treacherously
individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army."
This is not,
however, a prohibition on all targeted killings. Instead, for a
killing to be considered an unlawful assassination, it has to use
treacherous means.
Treachery is
an extremely narrow concept. In fact, any method that is lawful
for attacking an enemy army is also lawful as a way of killing an
enemy leader — bombs, missiles, sniper fire, whatever.
International
law aside, the morality of targeted wartime killings, when compared
with other possible policies, seems obvious.
Such killings
are clearly superior to the Left's preferred nonviolent means of
trying to oust dictators: economic sanctions, which always punish
the innocent (civilians of the targeted country).
Targeted killing
can also be morally superior to waging all-out war. It's odd to
consider it unacceptable to kill Saddam, but acceptable to kill
thousands of his soldiers who may want nothing more fervently than
to surrender to the nearest American.
In the end,
critics of the idea of targeted killings fall back on the assertion
that it is somehow incompatible with American values. This is just
Frank Churchism, a moral equivalence that condemns us for trying
to kill first the people who are bent on killing us.
It finds it
intolerable that we might engage in any difficult or severe action
in the course of defeating our mortal enemies, and perversely revels
in any mistake, folly, or transgression we might commit along the
way.
Sept. 11 has
helped diminish, but not vanquish, this way of thinking.
The Bush administration
has taken a leap ahead in clarity by treating bin Laden as a terrorist
bandit, who enjoys the protection of no international conventions
against assassination or anything else.
The same should
go for Saddam Hussein, and other rogue-state leaders in the future
against whom we wage war.
"Rogue
state," after all, isn't just an idle phrase. It signifies
a government that is operating outside of all civilized bounds.
The U.S. now seems to willing, not just to recognize this fact rhetorically,
but to act on it with a policy of regime-change.
How very odd
then that we would insist on maintaining the polite norms of long
ago, when every sovereign was a sort of brother.
Saddam Hussein
is a far cry from William Pitt. It is time we stop pretending otherwise.
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