NYTimes.com Article: When Frontier Justice Becomes Foreign Policy

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The declining willingness of the US to defend its actions according to 
international norms or even its own legal system is symptomatic of its 
increasing interest in simply abandoning a recognizable hegemonic project.

Steven Sherman

threehegemons@aol.com

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When Frontier Justice Becomes Foreign Policy

July 13, 2003
 By THOMAS POWERS 




 American intelligence organizations and military forces,
once forbidden from attempts to assassinate foreign leaders
by the executive orders of two recent presidents, have now
embarked on an open, all-out effort to find and kill Saddam
Hussein in a campaign with no precedents in American
history. 

Despite three strikes aimed at Mr. Hussein since the
opening night of the American war on Iraq, intelligence
officials have conceded that a recent broadcast of Mr.
Hussein's voice is probably genuine. A concession that the
Iraqi leader remains alive is also implicit in Washington's
offer of a $25 million reward for his capture or proof of
his death. 

Since President Bush announced the end of major military
operations on May 1, it has become increasingly clear that
the Iraq war is not over, that there is a concerted
campaign of resistance and that Mr. Hussein remains a
formidable foe. Over the last 10 days the chief American
official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has frequently
stressed the importance of capturing or killing Mr.
Hussein. 

The campaign to kill him, frankly admitted and discussed by
high officials in the White House, Defense Department and
Central Intelligence Agency, has committed the United
States for the first time to public, personalized,
open-ended warfare in the classic mode of Middle Eastern
violence - an eye for an eye, a life for a life. 

American officials in the White House and Iraq have argued
that Mr. Hussein's survival encourages resistance, and
killing him is therefore a legitimate act of war. But the
United States has never before openly marked foreign
leaders for killing. Treating it as routine could level the
moral playing field and invite retaliation in kind, and
makes every American official both here and in the Middle
East a target of opportunity. 

Realists may scoff that war is war and that things have
always been this way, but in fact personalized killing has
a way of deepening the bitterness of war without bringing
conflict closer to resolution. In April 1986 President
Reagan authorized an air raid on the home of Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi of Libya that spared him but killed his
daughter. The Reagan administration never acknowledged that
Colonel Qaddafi, personally, was the target, nor did it
publicly speculate two years later that Libya's bombing of
an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270
people, was Colonel Qaddafi's revenge for the death of his
daughter. But the administration got the message: after
Lockerbie, Washington relied on legal action to settle the
score. 

It is impossible to know how, or if, Mr. Hussein's
supporters will find a way to retaliate for the American
campaign to kill the deposed Iraqi leader, but that effort
inevitably reopens a long-simmering American argument over
assassination, never embraced openly in so many words but
never repudiated once and for all. Despite much tough talk
of killing enemies since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush
administration still shrinks from using the word
assassination, and much of the public continues to oppose
it as both dangerous and wrong - dangerous because it
commits the United States to a campaign of murder and
countermurder, and wrong because hunting people down,
however it plays in the movies, excuses murder by calling
it something else. 

Mr. Hussein himself doubtless understands the first
argument, since the man leading the effort to kill him now
- President Bush - is the son of a man Mr. Hussein tried to
have murdered a decade ago. 

In the middle of the last century, at the height of the
cold war, the United States often wished, sometimes planned
and occasionally took concrete steps to kill foreign
leaders. The best known of its targets was Fidel Castro. 

At least three of the marked men were actually killed -
Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the
Dominican Republic and Abdul Karim Kassem of Iraq - but
apparently none were killed, or at least not provably, by
Washington. 

Unlike current efforts, these plots were wrapped in deepest
secrecy and vigorously denied until the facts were finally
exhumed by a Senate investigation under Senator Frank
Church in 1976. The difference now is that the
administration has quit arguing the rights and wrongs of
killing enemies, and makes plain its determination to kill
Mr. Hussein if he can be found. 

Killing him appears to be the primary task of a secretive
military organization known as Task Force 20. Loosely
attached to the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, Task Force
20 can and does draw on the resources of the entire
American military and intelligence community. On June 18 it
conducted a combined air and ground attack on what has been
described as a convoy of S.U.V.'s in western Iraq as it
allegedly made a dash for the Syrian border. Five Syrian
border guards were wounded and briefly detained, but the
Pentagon has declined to say how and especially where -
inside Iraq, or inside Syria? 

"Removing Saddam" has been the stated goal of the
administration for more than a year, and last fall Ari
Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said war with Iraq
could be avoided at "the cost of one bullet." This open
discussion of killing Mr. Hussein marks a profound retreat
from the longstanding insistence that the United States did
not and would not use assassination as a tool of state. The
revelations by the Church committee in 1976 that the C.I.A.
had plotted to kill several foreign opponents including Mr.
Castro was described as an aberration; supporters of
Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy
insisted they had authorized nothing of the kind, and
official efforts to pinpoint responsibility never went
further than the words of Defense Secretary Robert S.
McNamara, who told a Senate investigating committee, "I
just can't understand how it could have happened." 

Executive orders banning assassination issued by Presidents
Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan, prompted by public dismay
over the poisoned cigars and exploding seashells intended
for Mr. Castro, have never been formally revoked. Mr.
Reagan's order flatly states that "no person employed by or
acting on behalf of the United States government shall
engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." 

Taking this order literally, President Bill Clinton's
national security adviser, Anthony Lake, asked the F.B.I.
in 1995 to investigate possible criminal charges (later
dropped) against the C.I.A. officer Robert Baer for his
efforts to organize a coup that might have ended with the
killing of Mr. Hussein. President Bush, in contrast,
personally approved the attempt to kill him, without
feeling the need to explain why Mr. Hussein was no longer
protected by President Reagan's prohibition and without
being asked to do so by Congress. 

Can it still be called assassination if it is carried out
in wartime? Does a White House decision to attack Iraq make
it "a war," and thereby turn Mr. Hussein into a legitimate
target? Old hands in the intelligence business say that
legal questions raised by the deliberate killing of named
individuals, the core definition of assassination, are less
important than practical matters. 

In moments of heat during the cold war, many enemies of the
United States were suggested as targets of assassination.
Wise heads often urged second thoughts because an assassin,
once the deed had been committed, would be in a position to
extort blackmail - or worse, suffer an attack of conscience
and go to the newspapers. 

Two arguments were regularly cited by those who counseled
restraint. The first was implicit in the unwritten cold war
rule against killing intelligence officers or political
leaders: two can play that game, and once started it is
hard to control, as Americans learned in the Lockerbie
bombing. Mr. Hussein is not the only figure in danger of
sudden death in Iraq at the moment, and it is a tossup who
is in greater danger - Mr. Hussein or Paul Bremer? 

But the final argument against assassination, often noted
by American intelligence officers, was the most practical -
you might get rid of public enemy No. 1, but who would take
his place? Mr. Bremer has cited the survival of Mr. Hussein
as a kind of psychological barrier, scaring off some Iraqis
who might be willing to work with the Americans, and
inspiring others to go on fighting. 

But how can Washington be sure that killing Mr. Hussein
will be a change for the better? Success might only clear
the path for another Iraqi leader, just as intransigent but
free of Mr. Hussein's terrible burden of decades of crime
against his own people. 

Like most questions in wartime, this one is impossible to
answer in advance. The administration clearly thinks there
is more to be gained than lost, and the public, so far,
appears content to wait and see. 

Thomas Powers writes frequently about intelligence issues.
His most recent book is "Intelligence Wars: American Secret
History From Hitler to Al Qaeda." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/weekinreview/13POWE.html?ex=1059024242&ei=1&en=e69874d6c76aa29c


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