A View to a Kill: Assassination in war and peace

National Review, March 11, 2002 by Richard Lowry

Critics of targeted killings still raise several practical objections to the idea. One is that it would prompt retaliation against U.S. leaders. But Saddam Hussein has already tried to kill an ex-U.S. president, Bush I in Kuwait City, even with EO12333 still in force. And Osama bin Laden launched a hijacked airplane perhaps against the White House or the U.S. Capitol. The behavior of our enemies obviously isn't going to be positively influenced by our nice legalisms. In any case, the American president is now, and always will be, surrounded by the most sophisticated and tightest security in the world, executive order or no.

Another objection is that targeted killings simply don't make for good foreign policy. They fail and backfire. Even if they succeed, the resulting new regime can be hard to predict and control. All of this is true, and if we want to influence the course of a post-Saddam Iraq, an invasion six months from now may be preferable to killing Saddam tomorrow. But this doesn't mean that targeted killing shouldn't be an option. And, in the case of Iraq, an incipient invasion (giving us a military presence to control events on the ground) coupled with the killing of Saddam (to end the fighting quickly) may be the ideal scenario.

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. It is this sensibility that splashes every American error in Afghanistan across the front pages, with the revelatory subtext that -- aha! -- we aren't so right and just after all.

Sept. 11 has helped diminish, but not vanquish, this way of thinking. The Clinton administration initially wanted to try Osama bin Laden, then attempted to kill him by arguing that he was, in effect, a piece of terrorist "infrastructure" to be "degraded." The Bush administration has taken a leap ahead in clarity by frankly stating that Osama bin Laden is a person, just an evil one who deserves to be sent to his eternal reward as quickly as possible. As a terrorist bandit, bin Laden enjoys the protection of no international conventions against assassination or anything else. The same should go for Saddam Hussein, and other leaders in the future against whom we wage war.

For practical purposes, the ban on assassinations has recently eroded. The U.S. has over the last 15 years slyly targeted Qaddafi, Saddam, Milosevic, and now Mullah Omar. But we should stop operating under the constraints of the Qaddafi rule, which holds essentially that if an attack on a leader is so imprecise that it might kill his friends and family, it's okay. The cleanest solution would be to add a definition of assassination to the executive order, making it clear that it doesn't forbid targeting a regime's military elite. This might offend the sensibilities of rogue-state leaders the world over, but so what?