Bob Woodward claims that the drop in violence in Iraq following the “Surge” can largely be credited to a secret program to target and assassinate certain leaders/terrorists.
He does not have a problem with this.
Do any of you see a problem with state-sponsored murder in a country that we’re trying to turn into a stable society under the rule of law?
What about assassination as a tactic under other circumstances? Assuming the CIA is actually responsible for assassinating various foreign leaders or dissidents during the Cold War, is that criminal or not?
And yes, I know assassination as an American tactic is not unprecedented, at least in actual wartime. See Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
This administration has done it’s best to prove America will do what it wants. Torture, sure. War against someone who does not threaten us, no problem. Ignore the Geneva convention, right on. Spy on your own people, can do. Eviscerate the bill of Rights, go ahead it’s too radical anyway .Assassination was supposed to be off the table but we have done it before and tried it a few more times.
What makes the killing of Yamamoto an assassination? He was a military leader and therefore a completely legitimate target who was taken out by the U.S. military.
Assassination was takin off the table because the leaders all managed to get together and agree that they could screw the rest of us without killing each other.
Presumably, these local government leaders in Iraq weren’t toeing the “screw the plebes, all hail the power” line and had to be dealt with.
I fail to see the difference between sending soldiers to proactively attack a target and sending a black-cloaked assassin to stab somebody in their sleep. Therefore by my view, if one approves of attacking military positions, then one should logically approove of assassinating military personel in a more assassin-style manner, and vice versa. Similarly, if one disapprooves of soldiers cutting down civilians, then one should disapproove of the assassination of civilian targets, and vice versa.
I have no problem with assassination, as a tactic. I may have issues with the objectives that tactic is meant to advance - but if the objective is legitimate, then why not employ assassination? It’s far better to kill one man, who holds enormous responsibility for his group/country’s policies, than it is to kill a dozen or a hundred grunts, along with collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties. Anything which limits the scope of war’s horror is a good thing.
But in this situation, we’ve supposedly already won, and our troops are supposed to be just policing the country. And the police do not assassinate their suspects.
We’ve won the war against the Ba’athist government of Iraq. However, no one denies that we’re still fighting a guerrilla war against well-equipped insurgents. When it’s possible, we do try to arrest these people. However, it isn’t always possible to do so safely - and when it isn’t possible, shooting them is entirely appropriate. Police in the United States, for example, have use-of-force rules that allow them to use deadly force to save lives. How is Iraq any different?
Yah, but if you’re sending an assassin, the idea is to kill him when he’s not fighting or fighting back. Which makes it more analogous to cops sneaking into a house and plugging the suspect/confirmed crook while they sleep.
If you have to do it, it’s better to kill one person than to kill dozens or hundreds of civilians.
I personally think that wars should be fought only by the assholes who start them, in the words of The Postman (Kevin Costner.) Preferably in a one-on-one duel.
In all seriousness, there’s no reason why assassinating a political enemy is murder, but one soldier killing another soldier is not murder. Any way you look at it, it’s killing someone, which is a pretty shitty thing to do, but if it has to be done, it’s better that it be one person than 20 or 100.
It’s an interesting question; but let me risk sidetracking the thread by suggesting that if someone had managed to assassinate Hitler during WWII (and lots of people tried), he would have been replaced by someone who was, in all likelihood, a far more competent military commander.
Applying the same scenario to whichever Sandpit you’d like to apply it to, the question is this: If the real-life equivalent of James Bond or Jason Bourne goes into Sandistan and “neutralises” the General of the Sandistan Liberation Army, isn’t it quite likely that his replacement will be even more Anti-Western than his predecessor? I can see it causing a lot more problems than it solves, to be honest.
I suspect that is taken in account and weighed against the issue of causing chaos amongst the enemy. Here we have a group who’s persistant but not super-competent. They gonna hate on us anyway. And in any case, this is not a situation where law and order is functioning normally. These are military targets, being killed in military operations.
So far, I notice, nobody is even suggesting Woodward made any of this up.
CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware does not question the assassination program’s existence, but disputes his conclusions, instead attributing the drop in violence to the effective division of the country into ethnically homogeneous enclaves and the cutting of deals with Sunni leaders.
I do think Woodward is making it up, more or less. Not that we don’t kill them, but that taking out the leaders in and of itself won’t solve the problem. Bin laden, if he’s still alive, is almost certainly hiding in northern Pakistan beyond our reach, but he doesn’t really control things anymore. Good if we could riddle his body with shrapnel, but he’s now less a legendary terror figure than a pathetic remnant.
So why was it so terrible that Saddam Hussein tried to get Shrub’s Daddy assassianted? Or is this another of the many “When we do it to others, we’re still the good guys, but if anybody else does it to us, they’re evil” kind of thing?
And it’s better to kill the guy actually in charge rather than the 20 y.o. draftee who, in all likehood, would rather spend the evening with his girlfriend instead of fighting.
Assassinating a military enemy is equivalent to one soldier killing another soldier. Assassinating a political enemy is equivalent to murdering an innocent civilian.
I think it sets a dangerous precedent. If we claim it’s OK to covertly murder leaders who are not direct combatants, we are opening our leaders up to the same. Right now we are fighting people with limited resources who don’t really follow the rules of war that well anyway, but we could end up in more traditional conflicts in the future. If we end up defending Georgia from Russia, we could end up with our generals and possibly even our President dying of polonium poisoning and not have much moral high ground to stand on.