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War, Assassination, and Moral Calculus

by Scott H. Payne

As I can’t currently comment on the site during the day, I struck up a conversation/debate with Mike at the Big Stick via email about my Dubai assassination post. Mark eventually got in on the act and we thought that the back and forth was good enough to post here for your review.

Scott: I can’t respond to your comments on the site because I no longer have access to the League from work. But if it would be of interest to you, I’d be happy to have a bit of an email exchange to explore things further. I’ve got some work to which I need to attend this morning, but I’d be happy to fire back an initial response to you comment a little later. Let me know if that is of interest.

Mike: Sure Scott – fire away.

Scott: This is less in depth than I had hoped for, but the long and the short of my post can be summed up as follows:

  • I’m not condemning Israel, I identified that I was not prepared to forgo the conclusion that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh deserved to die and that the Mossad were the right folks to do it,
  • I worry that using tactics like assassination leave us feeling less morally culpable,
  • I feel like we ought to be wracked with every bit as much doubt, uncertainty, and moral consternation over the decision to assassinate someone as we are when deciding whether or not to engage in conventional warfare, granted over different dynamics,
  • And that a belief that it does as a tactic does leave us less morally culpable in terms of state sanctioned violence can and in this case seems to have lead to an attitude that is counter-rpoductive to actually ending the conflict in question.

In terms of your Hitler example, believing that Hitler should have been assassinated does not absolve us from a critical analysis of the use of assassination as an acceptable tactic in all future instances, which is, really, all I’m calling for.

Mike: I’m more inclined to say that it makes us more morally culpable. When we’re talking about general war quite often the higher-ups are insulated from the decision making. How often does the President or the Sec. of Defense get a call asking permission to fire a rocket at a Taliban position or lob a grenade into a cave where bad guys are hiding? On the flip side, when you arrange for an assassination somebody pretty high up the food chain has to say, “Yes, I want you to kill this man”. To me that’s what makes it real for them.

I also think, as many commenters pointed out, that assassination is actually better because there’s no collateral damage. One target, one dead. If you’re going to wage war, they should all be fought that way.

[Read more →]

March 11, 2010   25 Comments

Lack of Self-Awareness Watch

by Mark Thompson

Sean Penn:
Because every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.
Emphasis added.  Via Popehat.  I’m no fan of Chavez, but I’m not sure he qualifies as a dictator yet (I think “wannabe dictator” is more like it).  Still, if you’re trying to say that someone is not a dictator, I’m pretty sure demanding that those who disagree be thrown in jail is probably the wrong way to do it.  But that’s just me.

March 9, 2010   20 Comments

Death of a Blogger

by Mark Thompson

I didn’t know Jon Swift/Al Weisel well enough to appropriately eulogize him, but his death hits close to home nonetheless.   Beyond being a gifted writer capable of earning the respect of one of his most frequent targets, though, he was a hero of the small blogosphere.  I had just been thinking about how his creation Blogroll Amnesty Day had not cropped up this year on Tuesday evening, and how that creation epitomized the blogosphere at its best.  The precious few interactions I had with him by e-mail – and it seems almost everyone in the blogosphere had at least a few such exchanges with him – were always demonstrative of a kind and light-hearted spirit.  He will be greatly missed, and my deepest condolences go out to his family.

March 4, 2010   No Comments

The Crow’s In The Oven

by Mark Thompson

It’s not quite ready to eat yet, but it’s definitely getting closer.  Push still hasn’t come to shove, but Gov. Christie is increasingly looking to have a better idea of how he’s going to govern than he let on during the campaign.  I’ll be quite happy to have been wrong on this.

March 4, 2010   2 Comments

The McDonald Bust

by Mark Thompson

Orin Kerr has a preliminary summary up of the argument in McDonald v. Chicago from this morning.  As one may have anticipated, it looks like the Court is going to sidestep the opportunity to correct the wrong that was the Slaughterhouse Cases.  That’s too bad.

March 2, 2010   1 Comment

Day-um!

by Mark Thompson

Check out the line at 11PM last night to get into this morning’s oral arguments on McDonald v. City of Chicago.  It’s almost as if the possibility (however remote) of restoring the privileges and immunities clause was a big deal.  For comparison, I went to oral argument on the day that the Court heard both the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris school voucher case and the Atkins v. Virginia death penalty case, a rare two-fer of highly contentious, high profile culture war cases, and the line to get in wasn’t even this long at 4 AM, when I got there.  Even then, I didn’t get in to see the arguments until well the second case, Atkins, was about 30% finished.

March 2, 2010   12 Comments

Food Blogging

by Mark Thompson

Thanks to Monsieur IOZ, I made this for dinner last night (well, without the mushrooms, since my wife has an unforgivable aversion to mushrooms even though she’s one of them I-talian-Americans), and the leftovers should last us through tomorrow at least.  It was [Read more →]

March 1, 2010   1 Comment

Paul Mulshine is a State Treasure

by Mark Thompson

This is not the first time I’ve said this.  It won’t be the last, even if I disagree with him pretty frequently on social issues and often have to think to myself “Oh Grandpa, the things you say.”  Here he is on Ron Paul’s straw poll victory at CPAC, and what he thinks (rightly or wrongly) it means for the purported conservatism of Romney, Palin, and Huckabee.

February 24, 2010   5 Comments

Creating a New Establishment

by Mark Thompson

Despite some quibbles with his characterization of the modern Left, I hope Dan Riehl is very much on the right track in arguing that the old movement conservative establishment is no longer capable of holding the Right together, and that the future of the Right lies with the Tea Parties, and in particular with the more libertarian element of the Tea Parties.  [Read more →]

February 22, 2010   6 Comments

The GOP Needs an Agenda

by Mark Thompson

Rick Moran explains why “being less sucky” isn’t going to be enough for the GOP to sweep back into power this fall, even if it will be enough for the GOP to make significant gains in both houses.  I fully concur.  Party of No plus vague platitudes about the Constitution (as Moran points out, they might as well say that they’re for apple pie and grandmothers) equals same shit, different day.

February 21, 2010   40 Comments

The Ahmadi-man Is Not The Issue

by Mark Thompson

It’s things like this that ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is at the bottom of the list of things that keep me awake at night.

February 19, 2010   Comments Off

Austin Rohrshach Test

by Mark Thompson

Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz takes exactly the right tact in discussing the motives of this morning’s suicide bomber of the IRS in Austin, Texas.  She concludes: [Read more →]

February 18, 2010   10 Comments

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