What are the rules that govern the killing of enemy leaders?, Victor Davis Hanson asks:
First, it seems OK to assassinate a terrorist kingpin either by air attack or commando raid. But legal and moral problems arise if he is captured, detained, waterboarded or tried in a military tribunal. A quick death seems to end almost all legal discussions and controversies.
Second, there is also no problem in assassinating a foreign dictator as long as the mission meets two criteria: We must be engaged in some sort of conventional battle with his forces, and we have to kill him through aerial bombing. For some reason, vaporization by a bomb seems to raise fewer ethical issues than execution by a sniper’s bullet.
Third, targeted assassinations are better done under liberal presidents, who are more likely to be seen as humanitarians who only reluctantly order such killings. The Bush antiterrorism protocols — tribunals, renditions, preventative detentions, Predator assassination missions, Guantanamo Bay — were decried as illegal and immoral. Such furor vanished, however, when President Obama embraced or expanded them all. The effort to preemptively remove the mass-murdering Saddam Hussein to foster democracy in his absence was seen by many in the media, universities and legal community as morally wrong — and yet preemptively bombing Gadhafi to foster democracy in his absence is now considered morally justified.
Fourth, success seems to end moral ambiguity in much the same way failure invites it. Had we gone into Pakistani territory and landed in the wrong compound, legal and ethical issues would have been raised. If we keep killing members of the Gadhafi family without hitting Gadhafi himself, at some point the denial of targeted assassination will seem empty. Targeted assassinations apparently have to work on the first or second attempt to be deemed moral and legal.
It’s fairly obvious why senior politicians want to stay well away from an open policy of assassinating senior politicians. But what on earth leads academics and similar talking heads to argue that killing a dictator is much worse than killing one of his 17 year old conscript soldiers?
No effective use of violence goes without criticism from the (secular) pulpit.
Well, we got the bastard, and we should be proud of that.
Doctor Pat:
If you think of progressivism as (an attempt to install) rule by intellectual, then you can think of pacifism and equality as weapons against the military and the productive class respectively, targeted particularly at status accrual.