Can Political Assassination Be Justified?

When Theologienne finds common ground with reactionary uber-crank Pat Robertson, may God help us all, right? So I thought. But I had a momentary flash of sympathy when I read that the reverend blusterer-cum-diet shake hawker had called for the assassination of President Hugo Chavez as an alternative to (apparently the only other conceivable course) war with Venezuela.

Now, unlike Robertson, I like to see critics of the Bush administration on the major networks, not in the crosshairs. But I confess I have wondered before why, if an empire-minded government like our own dislikes a particular ruler, they don't resort to direct attack instead of, say, bombing the slums and farms and mountains of the country under that leader's sway. I think I remember learning in middle school that assassination was generally considered unfair, but that never made sense to me. It's better to kill many more people who have much less to do with the problem, without touching a hair on the theoretically guilty one's head?

So I turned to just-war guru Michael Walzer. "Mike", I said--no, just kidding. Here's what I found in his classic Just and Unjust Wars:

"The war convention and the political convention are structurally similar, and the distinction between officials and citizens parallels that between soldiers and civilians, (though the two are not the same). What lies behind them both, I think, and lends them plausibility, is the moral difference between aiming and not aiming--or, more accurately, between aiming at particular people because of things they have done or are doing, and aiming at whole groups of people, indiscriminately, because of who they are. The first kind of aiming is appropriate to a limited struggle directed against regimes and policies. The second [which is terrorism] reaches beyond all limits . . . [However,] the threatening character of the soldier's activities is a matter of fact; the unjust or oppressive character of the official's activities is a matter of political judgment. For this reason, the political code has never attained to the same status as the war convention. Nor can assassins claim any rights, even on the basis of the strictest adherence to its principles. In the eyes of those of us whose judgments of oppression and injustice differ from their own, political assassins are simply murderers . . . [t]he case is not the same with soldiers, who are not judged politically at all and who are called murderers only when they kill noncombatants." (200-201)

So assassination can be justified in the eyes of just-war theory; only don't expect that to hold any water with the international community or the cronies of your target. News that comes too late for Rev. Robertson, but good to know anyway. Walzer later elaborates: "Assuming that the regime is in fact oppressive, one should look for agents of oppression and not merely for government agents" (204), so if you would stay on the right side of both ethics and history, choose your targets wisely.

Questions for a future day: When, for the love of Pete, did you last hear anyone expressing concerns about noncombatants in war zones? When Walzer says soldiers who kill noncombatants are "called" murderers, he means by ethicists--not, we know, the media, the President or the people.

Did GNC drop Pat Robertson's shake in response to this latest and greatest verbal outrage? Google says GNC carried him, but when you follow the link, nothing!

And did the Washington Post really mean to call the history of U.S. assassination policy "hit-or-miss"? Oh, well done.