TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102389/10238900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 111 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 118

We Shoot People, Don't We?


By Michael Kinsley


    You wouldn't want to be General Manuel Noriega the next time
George Bush gets a bead on him. For reasons having more to do with
random events and petty frustration than with any rational calculus
of relative evil and threat to the nation, the pit-faced Panamanian
dictator is now U.S. Public Enemy No. 1. Our top foreign policy
goal, for the moment, is to wipe him out. Nothing would add more
to the nation's pursuit of happiness. Even those liberal Democrats
who would want six months of hearings before responding to a
nuclear attack are screaming for blood.

    But Bush will have to hesitate before pulling the trigger. In
pursuit of Noriega's demise, we may impose sanctions to wreck
Panama's economy (as we have done), we may support a coup, we may
even rain bombs on Panama City (though no one is suggesting that).
The one thing we cannot do is take him out on purpose. Executive
Order 12333, issued by Ronald Reagan, says, "No person employed by
or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage
in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." The Bush people claim
that this standing order even made it hard for the U.S. to aid the
recent coup because someone might have spontaneously shot the
general, though that may just be an excuse for the Administration's
incompetence.

    The ban on assassination goes back to President Ford in 1976.
It followed the mid-1970s revelations about CIA covert attempts on
the life of Fidel Castro and similar pranks, and is a distant echo
of the reactions to the assassination of President Kennedy. But
there is nothing in the order limiting the ban to covert action or
to attempts on heads of state. It simply forbids "assassination."
What is assassination? If the word just means killing someone,
anyone, for political reasons, then it effectively bans the use of
-- or even conspiracy to use -- lethal force. That would make
America the first pacifist superpower. The whole Pentagon should
be arrested.

    The Administration prefers a less spacious definition. But
attempts to limit the scope of the anathema make it meaningless.
According to State Department legal adviser Abraham Sofaer,
assassination is the "unlawful killing of particular individuals
for political purposes." The key word is "unlawful." It's not
unlawful to kill combatants in wartime, or even to kill
noncombatant civilians in the course of a legitimate military
operation. It is "self-defense" to kill a head of state who is
masterminding terrorist operations that threaten the national
security of the U.S., the argument goes. But if the assassination
ban forbids nothing that is otherwise lawful, it forbids nothing
at all. It is like a law that says, "No drinking in places where
drinking is not allowed."

    What the assassination ban amounts to in practice is a rule
against killing people whose names you know. Killing anonymous
soldiers or even civilians is merely war. C'est la guerre. Killing
someone with a name attached is assassination. Not done, old chap.

    This absurdity was most in evidence during and after the April
1986 U.S. bombing of the military barracks in Tripoli, Libya. That
was when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was the villain of the month.
Although Gaddafi and his family were known to be living in the
barracks and although the attack killed many soldiers and some
civilians -- including, Gaddafi claimed, his 18-month-old adopted
daughter -- American officials were at pains to insist that they
did not intend to kill Gaddafi himself. President Reagan said, "We
weren't . . . dropping these tons of bombs hoping to blow that man
up" -- although "I don't think any of us would have shed tears if
that had happened." A senior White House official said, "We were
showing him that we could get people close to him." Oh, well,
that's O.K., then. As long as we didn't know Gaddafi had a
daughter, it's fine to kill her. Just don't kill him.

    Is there any sense in a national policy that has Government
officials gloating over the death of an 18-month-old girl while
denying any intention to harm one of the kings of international
terrorism? That has the U.S. impoverishing a whole country (Panama)
through the blunt instrument of economic sanctions because we deny
ourselves the use of a more surgical tool? One defense of the
assassination ban is cynical. It is part of an unspoken agreement
that brings a bit of order to the international chaos by ruling out
one especially messy technique of war. Explicitly limiting the ban
to heads of state would be too openly cynical, but the deal in
essence is: You don't kill our leader, we won't kill yours.
National leaders, if not their citizens, sleep better that way.

    However, the real roots of the assassination ban are American
and idealistic, not worldly and cynical. Assassination, said
Secretary of State George Shultz, defending the ban after the Libya
bombing, "doesn't fit our way of thinking on how to do things."
Legal adviser Sofaer says, "Americans have a distaste for official
killing, and especially for the intentional killing of specific
individuals."

    In short, we just don't do that kind of thing. But what exactly
don't we do? Kill people in the national interest? Sorry, we do it
often. As a denial of the obvious -- that we do in fact do that
kind of thing, and sometimes must do it -- the assassination ban
can be seen as an unhealthy expression of national naivete, or as
a healthy expression of a national ideal that can't always be met
in practice. Even from the latter point of view, though, its
practical effect is unclear. Does this hypocritical ban on killing
in the national interest make actual killing harder? Or easier, by
allowing us to "do that kind of thing" while preening that we
really don't? I'm not sure. Removing the most surgical tool of war
does make the resort to war more difficult. Given our flighty
negative enthusiasms -- Gaddafi yesterday, Noriega today -- that
may be no bad thing.