UK Guardian: We Don't Do Assassination

[Taxloss]

Really savage critique of Bush's "misconceived moral crusade". Great stuff.

During the Falklands conflict in April 1982, a call came through to the Whitehall office of John Nott, Margaret Thatcher's defence secretary. At that time the British military task force was still steaming southwards through the Atlantic and the eventual outcome of the hostilities could not be predicted. But this call came directly from the Argentine-occupied islands themselves, from an SAS unit secretly at work close to Port Stanley. "We are looking straight at General Menendez in the cross hairs of our rifles," the SAS caller whispered. "Do you want us to take him out?"
Back in London there was a hasty high-level discussion about what to do with this opportunity to remove the head of the Argentine forces on the Falklands. But the response was unanimous and quick. Don't kill him, the SAS were told. We don't do assassination.

Britain's record, in war and even in peace, does not bear out that claim as neatly as this anecdote might suggest. Remember Death on the Rock? But nor does the record show that, in the name of the security threat, anything goes. We should accept that, faced with real danger, from jihadist terrorism, there is a divergence between the more aggressive and permissive approach of the US and Britain's more cautious and restrictive one. That does not mean the British approach is perfect or unproblematic - or the US approach unworthy of any defence at all - but it does mean that ours is distinctive, and better.

As a case in point, contrast two recent statements. The first is the 2006 US national security strategy, published last month, which begins with an explicit and uncompromising introduction by George Bush. "My fellow Americans," it starts, "America is at war." That sets the tone for a highly aggressive, highly proactive doctrine of systemic global change. The terrorists must be killed or captured. The fight must be taken to the enemy. There is an overriding obligation to pre-empt danger. The war will continue "for generations". The aggressive and interventionist implications of this are almost limitless. Bush's approach is all the more disturbing because, post 9/11, so much of his system of government depends on barely constrained executive authority.

A recent but, until now, unreported public speech at Chatham House by Sir David Omand, the former Cabinet Office security and intelligence coordinator, offers a very different prescription. Omand may not be the leader of the world's only superpower, but until last year he played a key role, with Tony Blair and small number of officials, in shaping Britain's response to 9/11. Like Bush, Omand sees a long-term challenge that requires strategic responses. Like Bush, he acknowledges that jihadist terrorism is something new in type and scale. But that is where the resemblance ends.

The rest:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1749665,00.html

[dchill]

1. I hereby renounce and...

disqualify George Bush's privilege to say, "My fellow Americans." That's it. He's done.

[bemildred]

2. Mr. Kettle needs to aquire a deeper understanding of British history. nt

[Taxloss]

3. Well, famously had the opportunity to whack Hitler, and didn't take it.

But that was down to pragmatic, rather than ethical, reasoning.

I can think of several moments in 20th-century British history when a timely bullet could have saved a lot of hassle - Gandhi springs to mind, and Ian Smith. We didn't even kill Napoleon. But we did engineer the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by training Czech partisans for the job. And it was often talked about on a massive scale re the IRA - the Tory bluster was that we had all the necessary names and addresses, it would take a single evening, 200 people dead, conflict over. Cooler heads prevailed.

In fact, I don't think we've had a real policy of state assassination since Walsingham. We dn't quite have a thing for it like America - only one prime minister has ever been assassinated (Spencer Perceval, by a deranged bankrupt). Assassination as a routine matter of state policy went out with Walsingham, I think.

[bemildred]

4. It's the "never" part I object to. Like "we would never think of that".

I wasn't trying to imply you are in our league, at least not lately.

[Taxloss]

5. Fair enough.

And I certainly wasn't trying to imply that we're squeaky clean - it has recently emerged that we starved and tortured suspected communists (our recent allies) to death in prisons in post-war Germany.

[bemildred]

6. Done. nt