‘Decapitation strike’ was aimed at Saddam
The decision to launch a “decapitation strike” aimed at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was made by President Bush during an urgently called meeting Wednesday evening in which the CIA director voiced concern that a prime opportunity could be lost, U.S. officials said.
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Bush gave the go-ahead at 6:30 p.m. — 50 minutes before that meeting broke up, the officials said. In addition to Tenet, those on hand for the meeting included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
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At the White House, officials said that just before Bush addressed the nation, he pumped his fist, winked, and said “I feel good.”
The Jerusalem NewsWire, in an ecstatic, exultant editorial titled Got him! – Israel kills Yassin asks,
World leaders have begun to express their condemnation of the killing, with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw – whose own nation tried last year to assassinate Iraqi head of state Saddam Hussein in a “decapitation” attack – saying what Israel had done was “unlawful, unacceptable [and] unjustified.”
What exactly, one observer in Israel wondered, would a “lawful” reaction by Israel be?
Indeed, what is the difference here? The American and British States joined the ranks of rogue and pariah states with their “decapitation” strikes, as the Israelis so gleefully point out. Once the statist logic of collectivism is accepted, the assassination of so-called “leaders” and “heads of state” follows. No longer is it necessary to prosecute individuals for individual crimes. Crimes of individuals are imputed to the collective who is represented by the “head” who can then be punished or killed by other heads of other collectives invoking state war.
Of course, this doesn’t work as exemplified by the Israelis’ past 30 years of bloodshed and violence or as the Americans are discovering in Iraq and Afghanistan. Setting aside the morality of assassination, the statist worldview of “toppling governments” or “decapitation strikes” errs in assuming that people have no individual will and that they do not act on their own volition from their own individual motivations.
The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was driven by this tragically flawed conviction. The assumption was that the Evil Saddam would be killed or vanquished and that “the Iraqi people” would then collectively be grateful and form a new State that loved the Americans and go on about their business with a glow in their hearts for the American liberators. Shockingly, individual Iraqis had very different ideas about what should happen after Saddam was gone.
“Decapitation” assumes that people are will-less, blindly following a leader. The profound contempt for individual, acting man displayed by those who hold this flawed worldview has led them to unleash unending violence everywhere they go meddling.
Robert Fisk writes about the dangerous new precedent the assassination policy sets:
Killing Of Sheikh Yassin – The Chilling Implications Of This State Killing
IT DOESN’T take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Yes, he endorsed suicide bombings – including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday – and something infinitely more dangerous, another sinister precedent – was set for our brave new world.
Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheikh Yassin was the “head of the snake” – to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London – the head of Hamas, “one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisations”. But then came obfuscation from the world’s media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us at lunchtime, was originally freed by the Israelis in a “prisoner exchange”. It sounded like one of those familiar swaps – a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. And then, later in the day, the BBC told us that he had been freed “following a deal brokered by King Hussain (of Jordan)”. Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This “head of the snake” was in an Israeli prison. And then, bingo, this supposed monster was let go because of a “deal”. Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right- wing Likudist Benjamin Netanyahu when he was Prime Minister of Israel. King Hussain wasn’t a “broker” between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison and the late King Hussain called the US President in fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn’t given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn’t released.
Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the “head of the snake” was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the Israeli Prime Minister – a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten yesterday. Which is all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Mr Netanyahu let him go in the first place? It was not a question that anyone wanted to ask yesterday.
But there was something infinitely more dangerous in all this. Yet another Arab – another leader, however vengeful and ruthless – had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill Osama Bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam’s two sons. The Israelis repeatedly threaten to murder Yasser Arafat. It’s getting to be a habit.
No one has begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there has been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government-versus- guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides – government ministers, spiritual leaders – were allowed to survive.
Now all is changed utterly. Anyone who advocates violence is now on a death list. So who can be surprised if the rules are broken by the other side?
With all their own security, Bush and Blair may be safe, but what about their ambassadors and fellow ministers? Leaders are fair game. We will not say this. If, or when, our own political leaders are gunned down or blown up, we shall vilify the killers and argue a new stage in “terrorism” has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all- out assassination spree.
Washington is practically a fortress town now, with the White House and government buildings protected by missiles and massive security. In Baghdad the “coalition” is barricaded into the “Green Zone” behind massive concrete walls, razor wire and a gauntlet of American troops at every opening. Armed security prowls every building. The “heads” take extreme precautions. The rest of us have to look out for ourselves and fend off the attacks provoked by the well-guarded “leaders.”
If the rule of law isn’t dead, it is certainly close. In the current climate of political assassination and indiscriminate killing, the rule seems to be that you can get away with anything if you have sufficient military power to prevent your “regime” from being overthrown.