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.

Scott: The collateral damage argument is probably the strongest in this case, certainly. That’s why I acknowledged it vis-a-vis Sullivan’s comments.

That being said, choosing to assassinate someone as opposed to engaging in conventional warfare with a group someones doesn’t leave me with nothing in the pit of my stomach, just a different something and, in many regards, of equal weight. But let’s not walk around acting as if there is nothing in the pits of our stomachs because, this time, we chose to assassinate someone.

It is still a decision that we should be torn up about and the likelihood that any conflict in the foreseeable future will shift to solely assassinations of strictly military targets as opposed to general warfare seems pretty dim to me.

Mike: Of course it is a dim possibility but we can dream.

As for ill-feelings caused by assassinations, I actually have little or no problem with them. Hamas does very bad things. They target civilians. I’m glad to see this leader removed from the planet. On the other hand, a Hamas militant who is shot while throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers…that saddens me because often those are just young kids caught up in a bigger thing than themselves.

This may again go back to American sympathies being greatly different than Canadian ones. You will recall that you received some pretty stern feeback from both conservatives and liberals on your post awhile back that theorized bringing a gun to a rally was a sign of our violent American culture (I’m over-simplifying your position here – but you get my point). Americans in general are pretty okay with assassinations of shady individuals. Those kinds of actions are what sells movie tickets and Vince Flynn novels and keeps 24 on the air.

Scott: Could be.

But if your end point is to boil all of this down some kind of cultural relativism, then it seems like something of a waste and really just bailing on a difficult conversation.

I’m not suggesting you need to feel bad for the Hamas official who was assassinated as a person. I don’t have all of the information on him, but odds are he was a deplorable human being. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t recognize that the decision to assassinate someone ought not to cause fairly serious consternation as a matter of principle.

The practicalities of the situation are going to win out for most folks (less collateral, bad man), but the principles of the situation (enabling a powerful entity like the state free reign on killing human beings without the check of public due process), I think, ought to at least weight heavily on us as well.

Mike: I think you tend to over-complicate things Scott. In my experience, quite often cultural relativism trumps most other human impulses. It’s certainly the building block of Israeli foreign policy after experiencing the Holocaust.

Now if you’re worried about how much thought takes place prior to these decisions – i’m sure there is plenty. But it is much more of the logistical variety (“Do I bring the 9mm too or just the .22″) than the moral uncertainty kind. Simply, if you declare a group or certain actors to be your enemy that should be the hard part, the moment of moral decision making. Prosecuting a war against said enemy is just follow-through.

Scott: When it comes to giving an entity like a state the power to take another human life, I tend to think there is no such thing as “over-complicated”. And to suggest as such strikes me as a stunning cop out.

That you suggest that the majority of thought over whether to assassinate someone is logistical is precisely the problem to which I am pointing and the attitude you have displayed tells me, I guess, that we at very different ends of the spectrum. People become enemies all the time, but utilizing critical analysis about what then one ought to do simply does not, at least in my mind, end there. I have a hard time seeing suggesting that once you declare someone your “enemy” most-to-all moral calculus as essentially over as much other than willful blindness.

In short, I am inclined to suggest that you are over-simplifying the issue to suit your pre-determined perspective on it. That this seems to be a common enough exercise strikes me as one of the glaring problems with most foreign policy formulations.

Mike: It’s over-complicated in the sense that you keep hammering this point that there should be a great deliberation that accompanies the decision to assassinate and each time that decision is made it should be an agonizing moral dilemma for the parties involved. I’m simply stating that the decision to go to war with the enemy should be the moment of moral hand-wringing. Look at the Powell Doctrine for example.

It states:

A list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

Answering all of those questions is when the morals should be involved (especially #1, #4, #6 and #7). But once we can say yes to all of those questions we go on to the corollary to the Powell Doctrine which states that, “…when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.” Wouldn’t you agree that assassinations of key opposition leaders qualifies as ‘decisive force’?

What it appears you are looking for Scott is some sign that every time Mossad kills someone the people of Israel will all feel a deep emotional response. You are ignoring the reality that they made their moral decision a long time ago and maybe, just maybe they are at peace with that decision now. Sure, I’m willing to concede that someone at Mossad HQ might have asked for forgiveness from God for ordering a man’s death, just like President Obama may pray for forgiveness every night for commanding a military that kills men and often civilians by accident.

If your worry is over the glibness that t-shirts like the one you showed demonstrate..that’s war. There will always be people who are happy to see their enemies killed and even take joy in it. This is as old as human history. Part of it is also about desensitization, a phenomenon that has also existed for a very long time. It’s how people get through wars. Wanting to inject emotion, apathy and moral uncertainty into every death may be an admirable goal on some level, but it doesn’t help the people involved do the hard work of fighting a war.

Scott: You’re confusing emotion with morality. I have already clearly stated that I’m not suggesting an emotional response is necessary, just a recognition of the morality at play in ordering an assassination, which might be decisive but is not necessarily morally acceptable in all cases.

Mark, I’m curious to get your take on this.

Mark: It’s pugilism – you’re both landing blows, but no cheap shots, although I think you’re talking past each other a bit.

If you’re asking where I come down on the issue, that’s where I wound up running into a dilemma in my response. I’m quite torn on it. On the one hand, I think you’re right to decry the celebration over this coming from some circles.

On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing how this celebration is a new development – I view it as functionally equivalent to the way in which crack warriors – samurai, ninja, knights, etc. – have been celebrated as virtuous over time, just in the age of the T-shirt. Assassinations are also not only surgical, but personal in a way that drone strikes and laser-guided bombs are not. As such, they arguably make us care more about war – this particular assassination of one Indisputably Bad Dude seems to have drummed up far more outcry than the average accidental bombing of an Afghan wedding in addition to drumming up the type of celebration that concerns you.

I think that personal element – despite the surgical nature of assassination – on some level actually does force us to confront what War really is in a way that impersonal attacks do not. The trouble is that when actually faced with what War really is, humans seem to wind up having no problem with it. The near-deification of the assassins coming from some circles is in some sense just a way of expressing that yes, this war is worth fighting. The hue and cry coming from other circles though is likewise just a way of expressing that no, this war is not worth fighting.

When war is fought impersonally, not only do people care less, but those who do are ultimately merely debating methods rather than whether or not the war is worth fighting at all. Personal killings like this, however surgical, bring that core issue much closer to the surface, and force us to put all our cards on the table. The purpose of war is to kill your enemy. Surgical assassinations do exactly that – and only that.

I know the above is quite muddled. That’s because I’m genuinely trying to sort out what I think about this issue. I do know that I think the assassination was an acceptable act of war. What I’m not sure about is what I think about whether the reactions thereto are healthy, merely normal, or outright unhealthy.

Scott: Muddled, sure. But the above is, essentially, all I’m really looking for. A recognition that the act of assassinating someone ought to cause reasonably serious deliberations about moral ramifications of the decision and that making the decision does not let us off the hook of those deliberations anymore than making the decision re:drone attacks just because it is surgical.

We might decide that it is worth it. I think one can make the case that the Dubai assassination was the right thing to do. But it ought not to be a light-hearted affair and the fact that there is and has been a light-hearted reaction to the decision and its outcome does not make that reaction okay or acceptable.

Mike: So how do you recognize it? A public ceremony? A letter to the press expressing regret? What is the mechanism through which that moral recognition is shown which will be adequate for you?

I’m asking this because you can’t tell me with any certainty that there isn’t a moral recognition from the parties involved. Can you tell me how well those Mossad agents sleep at night? What about the Israeli people on whose behalf that assassination was carried out?

I just don’t know what you are looking for Scott. Do you think that the t-shirt proves there is no moral recognition, or is it the absence of some public display that bothers you so much?

Scott: That’s a good question to which I don’t have a pat answer. What I can say is that the t-shirt and the kinds of responses by folks like Marty Peretz leave me concerned that there is a sort of after the fact moral glibness at play that may well point to a similar tendency before the fact. If the response was more akin to Andrew Sullivan’s, “this is an awful thing to do, but ultimately justifiable on numerous levels”, I wouldn’t have written about it. In some senses all we have to go on is the after-the-fact reaction, which is most certainly fallible, but not insignificant either.

What I would suggest, I guess, is that I have larger concern about the kinds of critical analysis that not only go into formulations of foreign policy before the fact, but during, and after the fact in general. Things like the use use and defense of torture, my own country’s potential tacit implication in those kinds of issues in Afghanistan, the response to this assassination, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the like. These things concern me vis-a-vis foreing policy and I think that they potentially point to the kinds of defficiencies writ large that I’m outlining with regards to this assassination.

I think a failure to continue our moral calculation after the decision that someone is an enemy and we’re at war can and has lead to some horrific things that undermine the very values for which we claim to be fighting and make the world a worse place overall. As you said, this is not a soccer game, it’s war. War is a very serious affair and there have been indications of late that the actions of many participants have not reflected that gravity.

So what I’m really doing here, at best, is shouting about things I see as potentially pointing to that deficiency and asking whether, in light of those things, we’ve thoroughly thought this all the way through because failing to do so has had some demonstrably dire consequences. And I understand that the response might be, “that’s just the way things are,” and that such a response might be accurate. I just happen to find the, “that’s just the way things are,” conclusion unsatisfactory.

I should note, too, that Powell was the great exception to the below description. So you’re invocation of his doctrine is fair. It would more effective it were still the dominant force in US foreign policy, which, as I understand things, it is not.

Mark: Well let me pose this question to you – what, if anything, makes this celebration of Mossad materially different from say the celebration of warriors in the past?

On some level, it’s certainly almost barbaric, but then again doesn’t war require a certain level of barbarism, not just from the soldiers, but also from the population that supports the soldiers? I guess I’m wondering if the lack of serious reflection on this subject isn’t a necessary consequence of a society’s decision to go to war. In order to win a war, a country must be willing on some level to dehumanize the enemy, to view the war as a battle of absolutes, of good vs. evil.

Scott: It’s not necessarily different, per se. But the context in which it occurs, specifically the moral context, is different. And so our response to it necessitates a different calculus.

Mark: I guess I’m not sure I see what you mean by the moral context being different. Is it that the clinical nature of this required in essence a sneak attack? Such attacks have been celebrated in cultures for centuries, whether we are talking about commando raids or the Battle of Trenton.

I should say that I’m quite certain at this point that the positive reception for the assassination is on net a moral evil that, from a libertarian perspective, is also problematic because it is a celebration of the State in all its naked brutality. I’m just wondering if it’s also a necessary evil that must occur if a society is to maintain the determination necessary to fight and win a war.

Scott: I’m saying that the moral context of our actions is not static.

Our terms of morality evolve over time. Actions that were considered morally acceptable in the past are not necessarily morally acceptable in the future. But it’s not a black and white affair, there is nuance. So I’m not saying that State sanctioned vigilante-ism in the form of assassination, if we view those assassins in the historical context as warriors and the celebration of warriors, if not immoral and therefore evil. Rather I am saying that is presents a different moral conundrum than it has in the past that makes the celebration of it less acceptable in a contemporary context.

The moral context of 16th Century Japan is not the same as the moral context of 21st Century Israel/America, and not just on a cultural basis. We understand ourselves and our actions in a different context and therefor apply different analysis and response to them.

Mike: My concern here is that you are choosing the lowest common denominators and focusing on that. That t-shirt is typical of a certain kind of bravado/dark humor that represents a minority here.

I recall going to the gun range when I was a kid and being able to purchase a paper target that had Gaddafi’s face on it. You can also go to gun shows here in the US and find some really redneck tshirts with similar messages. But what % of society is wearing them? That’s why I caution reading too much into these things. That guy carrying the gun at the political rally…he represents a fraction of a % of Americans.

I would liken this kind of stuff to sailors writing messages to Hirohito on Allied bombs before the planes took off. That glibness makes war more palatable. It’s a coping mechanism.

Certainly the decision to remain at war should be constantly re-evaluated, but I still maintain that once you are war, it’s unlikely that the players are going to always feel the level of moral uncertainty or inflection you seem to want more of.

I think the Obama administration would probably rely on it if they had to start a new war. My understanding is that it’s still popular among the military leadership.

Scott: I’ll admit to being overly cautious here. Your criticism is fair. But I think we’ve seen enough wrong perpetrated in the cause of war lately to be a bit overly cautious.

I would add, though, that rather than just base my critique on the shirts, I did go and seek out something more specific in terms of Marty Peretz’s comments. And I would offer that the positions of a Marty Peretz, former assistant professor at Harvard, former owner of The New Republic, and current Editor-and-Cheif of that same publication, are hardly on the fringe.

Seeing the Obama go back to something more akin to the Powell doctrine would be a welcome event. I wonder if Obama isn’t working out his own doctrine, which I would surely be interested in seeing. I have a lot of reservations about his decisions vis-a-vis Afghanistan that has resulted in some harsh criticism, but I still respect the man and would be, at the very least, curious to see what his own stamp of foreign policy formulation would look like.

Mike: I would guess Obama’s policy would rely a bit too heavily on diplomacy and put the bar so high that military action would be almost impossible.

Scott: I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Certainly there would likely be a recalibration back to a greater emphasis on diplomacy, but Obama has proven himself capable of hawk-ish behaviour. His foreign policy rhetoric during the campaign was an equal mix of diplomacy and use of force.

Mike: I don’t think you can win a US presidential election without mentioning a willingness to use force.

Scott: Ha! Fair enough.

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