The insidiousness of assassination I think is whats reprehensible, using death to further specific political ends just looks dirty. With a formal declaration of war I’d say even specific enemy combatants are on notice. I’d say Yamamoto was assassinated but he was fair game.
OK, sure, but does that really make a difference? I submit that if Booth had managed it a week earlier, we’d still call it assassination.
Of course Yamamoto was fair game; he was a soldier. But consider the fact we are even talking about his killing. It is (still) controversial. As Freud said, there is a taboo is most all human societies against killing the chief.
That’s because Lincoln was a political leader. Commander-in-Chief is not a military rank, it’s a statement of his authority as political leader over the military forces of the US. Other countries’ laws may be different, but the distinguishing feature is the political nature of the position.
And they failed to kill him. He finally died in 2002 at the age of nearly 100.
Personally I define assassination as any planned and targeted killing of a specific single individual for political reasons. And I define wars as fundamentally political, once you get above the neighboring tribes/Hatfield-McCoy levels. So to me, this question has a trivial solution- of course it was an assassination.
The fact that it was an assassination has little or nothing to do with wether he was “fair game”, though - many would say that as a member of an opposing army in a mutually declared war, he had effectively flagged himself as a valid individual target regardless of his rank or abilities. Others will base their assessment on the pragmatic question of wether killing him was justified by the outcomes. (In that case I’d suspect that an explicitly assassinated politician would be assessed similarly.)
Yes it was an assassination. So what? Is a conspiracy automatically bad? Not by at least one definition I could quote, but most people have a built in idea that a conspiracy is something bad. You’re using a word some of whose connotations do not fit the situation, but somehow using the word means that those connotations must some how be relevant. We each have an idea in our head of what a word means and at the outset assume that our conceptions about it are precisely the same as those of other people. We then turn are thus arguing more over semantics than over the appropriateness of the actions.
If I want to define assassination as the premeditated killing of a specific human being who is in a position of some renown, then the military operation in question counts as one. However, others might define it differently. The generally compelling reason to use a definition of a word is that others agree on its meaning. Thus this thread could be seen as more of a IMHO topic: “Does your definition of word ‘assassination’ include operations that target military commanders?” However, it is reasonable to assume that the original question was meant more along the lines of “Is it fair and/or acceptable to target military commanders?”, something actually worthy of debate.
My answer to that question is yes: military commanders are as vital of a military asset as anything else in warfare. It is no different thant targeting a munitions factory.
Totally agree, also when you set up an ambush or a sniper kills an enemy combatent thats just a normal part of war.
I always wonder how many millions of lives could have been saved if someone had assasinated Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot ?
The assassin would have been a hero,unlike the monsters he would have theoretically killed.