We’re on a slippery slope, which we first stepped onto in April 1986 when President Reagan ordered a fighter raid on Colonel Gaddafi’s Tripoli compound, in retaliation for a Libyan-inspired terrorist attack on a nightclub in Berlin. Though Gaddafi survived, one of his children died– which rather stuck in the craw, even as one cheered the dazzling display of the latest in U.S. military technology.
To digress for a moment, this was a slippery slope in more ways than one. American television viewers were able to see the raid from the vantage point of a fighter pilot’s cockpit, Gaddafi’s tent-like compound vividly appearing in an infrared targeting window. No doubt, Soviet military leaders watched too, but with alarm rather than awe and pride (and no doubt this was one of the important experiences that contributed to the collapse of Soviet technical self-confidence). Within a decade, the same kind of technology would be put to work in the first Gulf War– Baghdad motorists driving to work saw cruise missiles snaking along highway medians– and then in Yugoslavia, where cruise missiles could be guided through windows to blow up buildings. Arguably, the use of precision-guidance technology and those low-loss victories in Serbia and Iraq led to the hubris of the second Gulf War, the full-scale Afghanistan intervention, and finally– not least–the growing use of drones to assassinate presumed terrorist leaders, often with considerable loss of civilian life and other collateral damage.
The use of ultra-high-tech weapons to assassinate enemy leaders raises a host of legal and moral issues; in particular, there should be much more critical attention to the questions raised by Jane Mayer 18 months ago in a searching New Yorker article about use of drones. But I want to draw attention to just one practical consideration, which in my opinion is not complicated: the practical undesirability, from the point of view of nuclear non-proliferation, of targeting foreign leaders willy-nilly. For if we wish to establish the conditions for a world without weapons of mass destruction, we could hardly do worse than leave a general impression that such weapons might be the only really effective means of personal self-defense.
Reasonable people can differ about just how bad Gaddafi is, the rationale for the NATO mission, and mission creep. But this much we can say with confidence: The Libyan dictator is surely saying to himself how much he regrets agreeing to shut down his nascent nuclear weapons program in 2003, when it was revealed that he had entered into a one-stop-shopping deal with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan. (Following that important incident, some were critical of the quid-pro-quo decision to permit Gaddafi’s reintegration into legitimate diplomacy, while others hailed it.)
Ironically, it was Ronald Reagan who signed Executive Order 12,333, which barred (and still supposedly bars) U.S. intelligence agencies in principle from engaging in political assassination. The presumption against such assassination has deep roots in American law, going back to the Civil War Lieber Code: “The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor. . . . Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.”
Yet international law is generally taken to permit assassination of foreign military leaders under certain circumstances, as well as the assassination of foreign nationals presumed to have committed criminal acts provided they are afforded the privilege of what one scholar has dubbed “fair apprehension.” That is, a terrorist leader should have the chance to decide whether to be taken and tried, or to die a martyr.
The apprehension of Bin Laden hovered on that delicate boundary, the commandos obviously having been told to arrest him if possible–but to not take any personal chances. They got the message, and no reasonable person regrets the outcome.
But it’s a slippery slope from there to President Obama’s intimating, not long after, that the leader of the Afghanistan Taliban might face a similar fate if he does not soon get serious about negotiations. The Taliban, however ghastly they may be from our point of view, represent an armed force in a civil war in which legitimacy is being contested. As such, the Taliban’s leader borders on being a head of state. So sending a message to him that he could be targeted for assassination sends a message to all such leaders that a weapon of mass destruction may be the only effective last-ditch means of personal self-defense.
This week the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Qaddafi, one of his sons, and his intelligence chief; similar warrants could follow for Syria’s leadership, and others. The warrants as such are a good thing. But their existence easily leads to the temptation of killing despised leaders accidentally on purpose in the course of supposedly apprehending them.
Let’s not go there.
