Take the Shot
There is nothing wrong with assassinating Saddam. Why do we pretend otherwise?

March 5, 2002 11:30 a.m.

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.