Perhaps The Best Way To Decide

Peter Hitchens writes:

Imagine perhaps ten years into the future: just as the President of the United States and his chief aides sit down in the Oval Office to discuss the new, mysterious leader who has taken power in Russia, they see a brief, strange flash of light and gasp in unison as the air seems to drain out of the room.

Then they are vaporised in less than a second by a hypersonic missile.

They are not alive to hear or see what follows. Passers-by on Pennsylvania Avenue hear the thunder of the explosion and see the debris of the shattered White House as it hurtles towards the sky and falls again.

Dense oily smoke curls upwards, rolling towards the tall obelisk of the Washington Monument nearby. Rubble, and more horrible things than rubble, lie on the South Lawn. Within a few minutes, reporters are broadcasting to the world the hideous sight of a ruined Executive Mansion in which the President’s entire family have also been incinerated.

Shocked voices, from around the world, demand vengeance and justice for the obscene action, and denounce the deed as cowardly murder.

In Moscow, the new leader’s spokeswoman, blonde, menacing and silky, appears on state TV to say in perfect English ‘Why are you so outraged? You yourselves did this in Iran. Did you think nobody would ever do it to you?’

It will be a difficult question to answer. On the face of it, the killing of civilian leaders looks very different from the deaths of armed, trained soldiers matched against each other on the battlefield.

We are still rightly outraged by the murders committed on our territory by Vladimir Putin. We are justly angered by Russian bombing of civilian targets in Ukraine.

Assassination in general is despised as a low and tricky action. America’s enormous grief in 1963, over the murder of President John F. Kennedy, was mingled with moral fury at this particular kind of murder. The same is true of the killing of the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and of JFK’s brother Robert, a few years later.

This has not really changed. The response of President Trump’s supporters when a gunman wounded him at a rally was angry, patriotic defiance. Mr Trump raised his fist and cried ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’

Yet the same rules do not seem to apply elsewhere. This is partly because distant killing does not quite feel the same as close-quarters death. The US has in recent years been very keen on killing by remote control as a means of getting its way.

We all know about the recent deaths of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter and his son-in-law. Perhaps 40 others died in simultaneous strikes all over Iran.

So extensive has this campaign been that yesterday Tehran called for a complete halt to ‘aggression and assassinations’ ahead of any peace deal.

But these strikes had been foreshadowed in January 2020, when President Trump ordered the drone killing, in Baghdad, of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. By and large, Mr Trump got away with it then. Iran’s retaliation was deliberately limited. No war followed. And there was not much criticism of it in US domestic politics.

Washington said the action was lawful targeted killing in self-defence, against a terrorist leader who was actively planning attacks. Critics said it was lawless, arbitrary killing or assassination.

What is noticeable is that when the same method was recently used to wipe out the core of Iran’s government, there was almost no protest at all. The world is getting used to this sort of thing. And no wonder. It has become hideously easy. Modern war technology, either drones or super-accurate rockets, can kill people thousands of miles away. Many terrorists and alleged terrorists have died in this way.

Before the Second World War it is hard to think of any civilised power using such methods. Before 1940, even bombing civilians from the air was frowned on, and attempts were still being made to ban it when war began.

As for assassination, the First World War actually began largely because the Austro-Hungarian empire was so righteously furious at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Vienna’s enraged demands for recompense from Serbia led to four years of war in which millions died.

Modern enthusiasts for assassination claim that there was a serious attempt by the RAF in 1918 to kill Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is based on sketchy documents found long afterwards. But the air attack involved – on a French chateau where the emperor was thought to be staying – was so loosely planned that Wilhelm wasn’t even there. It is hard to believe that then premier David Lloyd-George was informed, or approved.

Likewise, Operation Foxley, a 1944 plan to kill Hitler devised by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), came to nothing. It probably fizzled out precisely because it never won high-level authorisation.

As late as 1939, British ministers had clearly rejected killing Hitler because it was ‘not cricket’, and because it might lead to the appointment of someone even worse. Or it might fail. In 1944, German officers tried to kill Hitler themselves and failed, with horrible consequences for anyone remotely involved.

The 1942 killing of the Nazi ruler of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich, was done in Prague on the say-so of the Czech government in exile. Winston Churchill’s fingerprints cannot be found on it, even though the SOE trained the killers. Given the reprisals that followed, in which many innocent Czechs were murdered or tortured, it is not surprising nobody much wanted to take responsibility.

The point at which assassination of foreign leaders became respectable in the US was in 1943. That was when Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – the man who planned the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 – was deliberately shot down and killed by American warplanes. The action was highly popular among Americans given their fury about the sneak attack on their Pacific fleet.

No evidence has emerged that President Franklin Roosevelt knew about it in advance. But here is the interesting point about this long-ago assassination. President Trump used it to justify the Soleimani killing in Baghdad, 77 years later.

Not absolutely everybody bought this explanation. A senior State Department official briefing reporters on the decision to order Soleimani’s death grew angry with sceptical reporters, and snapped: ‘Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?’

In fact, he did. It was a weak precedent, as the US and Japan had in 1943 been fighting a declared war. But, as no country has declared war on any other country since 1942, such annoying details do not really matter any more.

What should we do? Cold logic may excuse this form of war. But something deep inside me tells me it is wrong and dangerous. There is something worryingly ruthless about such killing, however much you may dislike those who are its targets. Nor, so far, does it seem to have achieved all that much.

Perhaps the best way to decide is to ask ourselves how we would feel if it was done to us. No other method is as good for working out what you think of any act of war.