FREE FOR ALL - SOMETIMES, ASSASSINATION IS THE RIGHT WAY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000100690001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 11, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 26, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT ,,,,,,;,-,. Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/11: CIA-RDP91-00587R000100690001-7
ON PAGE Z/
WASHINGTON POST
26 April 1986
Free
ForAll
Sometimes, Assassination Is the Right Way
James Turner Johnson's recapitulation of West-
ern civilization's scholarly judgments on the moral-
ity of assassination versus war ["Why We
Shouldn't Assassinate Muammar Qaddafi," Out-
look, April 201 leaves the argument just as it has
always beep; unsatisfying and unsettled.
Yes, as individuals and societies we instinctively
shrink from the idea of assassination as a political
tool, and, yes, we applaud and support sanguinary
"just" wars like the struggle to stop Hitler's Ger-
many from imposing its hegemony and moral code
on Europe. Yet logic tells us that the successful as-
sassination of Adolf Hitler at any time between
1936 and 1945 would have deflected and eventu-
ally halted Nazi aggression and saved, literally,
millions of fives. And it is at least arguable that the
elimination of the Castro brothers in Cuba early in
the 1960s would have spared this hemisphere a
great deal of political, financial and human suffer-
ing.
Before anyone leaps to the conclusion that I be-
lieve assassination is always a more efficacious
political tool than war, let it be pointed out that the
assassination of Gen. Hideki Tojo or Emperor Hi-
rohito probably would not have been a profound
deterrent to Japanese imperial aggression in the
1930s or 1940s; the impetus for that aggression
did not come from any one dominant leader and
would have prevailed despite the decapitation of
any of the several military-dominated govern-
ments of the period. In fact, many historians be-
lieve that the calculated ambush and assassination
of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by U.S. fighter pilots
in April 1943 deprived the Japanese leadership of
an intelligent and pragmatic counselor whose
subsequent influence might have persuaded the
government to end the war sooner than it did.
Assassination, like war, is a continuation of poli-
tics by other means, however much that notion
may outrage Clausewitzian scholars. I suspect that
our Western distaste for assassination stems from
two sources, one instinctive and the other merely
historical. Our species shrinks from cold-blooded,
face-to-face killing of our own kind (though less so,
it would seem, than most other mammals). War,
which helps make the act of killing impersonal,
overcomes that innate revulsion.
Historically, kings and autocrats have had a
vested interest in conducting their political killings
at a distance and in protecting their own skins.
Hence, in addition to promoting the idea of their
own divine selection, very early on they must have
fostered the idea that it is somehow more repre-
hensible to kill a king than to slaughter a battalion
of soldiers or the inhabitants of a village. The Bor-
gias, who killed their peers more or less personal-
ly, and Niccolo Machiavelli, who counseled "When
you strike at a prince, strike to kill," have there-
fore been reviled by popular historians. But histo-
ries and philosophical treatises on statecraft are
written by statesmen and their courtiers, not by
infantry grunts or orphaned peasants.
So Johnson and the sophisticated philosophers
he cites remain only that-sophists, seeking to ra-
tionalize the irrational notion that it is better for
dozens, hundreds, even millions to die in war than
for one self-elected tyrant to be killed in cold
blood.
-Richard D. Kovar
The writer is a former analyst for the Central Intel-
ligence Agency.
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