The NYTimes recently ran an article looking at the current administration's unabashed policy of assassination as a tool of diplomacy. Personally I think it is a bad policy, and not just because I'm a tree-hugging hippy. It just isn't becoming of a nation of our stature and it sets a bad standard. 'Do as I say, not as I do' just doesn't fly as foreign policy.
The article pointed out that "hunting people down, however it plays in films, excuses murder by calling it something else." This is a good point: it's chickenshit to spin murder by construing it as anything but. Assassination needs to be condemned wholesale, even if the your target tried to have your dad assassinated. Making assassination acceptable delegitimizes the assassin's role as enforcer as well. If someone really is so bad as to deserve to be killed, catch them, try them publicly, and then kill them. But to appoint oneself as judge, jury, and executioner, especially with regard to a head of state (and of the country you just invaded, to boot) seems to be asking for more trouble than it can possibly be worth.
But if assassination isn't acceptable because it whitewashes murder, how can we accept capital punishment? It is murder in every sense of the word. How can we believe that killing people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong is an adequate and efficient way of preventing future murders? Maybe if we had public executions their deterrent value would be increased.
If we didn't have the death penalty, the Taliban would have turned Bin Laden over to us after 9/11. They were willing to give him to the EU (because they ban capital punishment) but the US refused that offer. Justice or revenge there? That is telling, and indicative of the US way of dealing with the world.
It is such a shame that we squander the power and potential we have.
Posted by Nutrimentia at July 21, 2003 11:52 AM | TrackBack