A View to a Kill: Assassination in war and peace

National Review, March 11, 2002 by Richard Lowry

In June 1943, the Germans shot down what they took to be Churchill's plane. Two months before, the Americans had shot down Adm. Yamamoto's plane, after an intelligence intercept revealed that he would be inspecting front-line Japanese bases. Adm. Nimitz carefully considered whether any of Yamamoto's possible replacements would be worse -- i.e., more talented or better liked by Japanese troops -- and, after concluding they wouldn't, ordered the attack. No one at the time complained that this act was incompatible with American values.

The hesitation to endorse such targeted killings today -- when we are a century and several million deaths beyond the age of international chivalry -- involves a misunderstanding of what exactly is proscribed by international law. According to Article 23b of the Hague Convention, "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 current practice, we seem, oddly, to interpret it as anything that would be too precise or sneaky. So, killing Saddam Hussein with a barrage of guided bombs, as long as we are not too frank about whether his death is intended or not, is acceptable (not treacherous), but killing him with one cruise missile aimed right at his bedroom, or, even worse, shooting him with a sniper team or setting a booby trap in front of his motorcade, is forbidden (treacherous). This from-15,000-feet rule is as irrational as it sounds.

In fact, any method that is lawful for attacking an enemy army is also lawful as a way of killing an enemy leader. The use of perfidious means to take advantage of a target's trust -- such as disguising a U.S. hit team as U.N. negotiators -- is forbidden. (Bin Laden's use of assassins posing as journalists to kill Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Massoud last year is a classic case of perfidy.) Otherwise, there is nothing that says targeted killings must take place from the air. As the U.S. Army Memorandum of Law puts it, "No distinction is made between an attack accomplished by aircraft, missile, naval gunfire, artillery, mortar, infantry assault, ambush . . . booby trap, a single shot by a sniper, a commando attack, or other similar means."

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 non-violent means of trying to oust dictators: economic sanctions. Such embargoes almost always punish the innocent (civilians of the targeted country) and sometimes even strengthen the guilty (the dictators who are able to play the besieged victim). In Iraq, sanctions have -- if anything -- helped impoverish the civilian population, without budging Saddam a bit.

Targeted killing can also be morally superior to waging all-out war. One of the reasons the Geneva Convention protects POWs is that soldiers are held blameless for state policies that they were presumably merely following, not creating. So, 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. Indeed, the idea of proportionality in the law of war suggests that the means able to achieve an objective with the least destruction and killing -- e.g., specifically targeting Saddam -- is always to be preferred.