I think we need to rethink this. It just doesn't seem right that it would be illegal to, say, send in a small team of spooks to neatly assassinate Gaddafi, but World War I was perfectly legal. Why should it be legal to kill thousands, even millions, of soldiers and civilians and destroy infrastructure and livelihoods, but illegal to sneak into some despot's compound and off him in his sleep?
I'm certainly not saying that people or countries should be allowed to kill people and then get a get out of jail free card by calling it assassination, or that assassination is even objectively a good thing, at all, ever. I'm just thinking it might be a less unpalatable shade of grey than full-out military action.
In his article, Mr. Chomsky says:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
And his point, that the American people would not be best pleased with that development, is, of course, correct and valid. But I suspect the American people would be even less pleased if war were declared on the whole country and millions of innocent civilians found themselves bombed out and under military occupation when the occupying force really just wanted that one guy.
Perhaps it would be useful for international law to create a framework inside which assassination can be legal. Perhaps countries who want to assassinate someone could go before an international court and get an assassination warrant. (Q: But then wouldn't the target know they're about to be assassinated? A: Are there any plausible targets for assassination who aren't already assuming someone wants to assassinate them?) As a starting point, I propose that, in any situations where war or other military occupation would be legal, targeted assassination should also be legal (and military action should not be a prerequisite to targeted assassination.) Perhaps, before military action could be considered legal, the initiator should have to justify why targeted assassination isn't an option.
I'm certainly not under the impression that military actions normally stick to the letter of international law in the first place, but nevertheless, even if just for form's sake, the action with the less harmful outcome should be just as legal as the action with the more harmful outcome.
3 comments:
I think (not positive) that part of the admonition against assassination is because the target would be unarmed, taken by surprise. Because - as incredible as this seems these days - "lawful" combat is supposed to be between armed military forces. The entire act of dropping bombs on mass populations of civilians is actually illegal!
In other words, the whole thing is completely fucked up.
Absolutely it's fucked up. But in a way it actually has a positive effect; if countries agree that one another's leaders are off-limits, then the small commitment needed for an assassination is actually a much bigger commitment to fight a war.
If leaders were not considered off-limits, then if there are two countries in a dispute, one could try to decapitate the other country through an assassination. It would make a pot-shot attempt worthwhile. With the agreement in place that such acts are illegal, then the commitment to a pot-shot assassination attempt is actually a commitment to going to war.
Another advantage is that negotiations are a lot safer. If you are negotiating a peace (or to avoid a war), you need to know that your leaders are relatively safe. You wouldn't send your leaders to negotiate if it weren't already established that they aren't fair game.
Of course, it's all completely academic when you're dealing with such a huge military imbalance as the USA vs most of the world. You'll remember that the USA tried the pot-shot assassination route in 2003, bombing a couple of places in Iraq before schedule on the off chance that Saddam was there. Of course this was just before the completely legal and legitimate bombing and invasion of Iraq so it didn't matter anyhow.
In fact, the assassination of bin Laden seems far more "legitimate" to me -- if it makes any sense at all to say this murder is preferable to that one, and of course it doesn't -- because bin Laden was not a head of state or anything like that. Countries are not necessarily bound by law when it comes to dealing with extra-political leaders. The USA, of course, is not bound by law at all, so it's kind of a poor example.
Btw, in your suggestion for getting assassination warrants -- that in itself might be enough reason for one country to attack another. You intend to kill our president? Then we have a legitimate reason to attack you pre-emptively. Not the turnout we want!
It didn't occur to me first time through that an assassination might lead to a war, because people who are candidates for assassination tend to be something of a dickhead, so I was thinking their populations would just be glad they're gone. But now that I think about it, dickhead leaders would have the loyalty of the military and at least some of the political establishment, or they wouldn't get to be leaders for very long.
I guess the next step would be figuring out how to stop an assassination from leading to warfare. The first thing that popped into my head was bribing key figures not to escalate into warfare. Which led me to wonder how many people could be bribed effectively for the cost of a war, and whether it would be enough to achieve the war-initiating nation's goals.
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