Assassination: the political strategy
nobody admits to.
Political assassination has always been an element of statecraft. But is it ever ethically justified? And does it work?
Thomas Crooks, aged 20, took a shot at Donald Trump. He
missed.
As assassinations go, it was a debacle. Two people,
including Crooks, died. Another two were critically injured. Trump survived,
defiant and triumphant, gaining unprecedented sympathy that can only boost his
campaign to return to the presidency.
If this act was politically motivated, it had – as usual –
the opposite effect. Most assassination attempts – those in democracies, anyway
– fail. And those that succeed almost always kill the figures who may, if they
had lived, made the world a little more civilised and a little safer.
Assassination has an undeniable place in history and in
politics. For the Romans, it was the favoured method of changing emperors. That
model has been used frequently in India and Pakistan ever since independence in
1948 and, with the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada, India’s
Narendra Modi is expanding its limits. Elsewhere in the modern world, it has
become rare in democratic nations but remains commonplace in autocracies. It is
a standard tool-of-trade for Putin’s Russia and the Kim dynasty’s North Korea.
The attempt on Trump was quickly condemned by world leaders
as being antithetical to democracy, which depends on the ballot and the
peaceful transfer of power.
It is, perhaps, a little disingenuous. It particularly
ignores the scores
of assassinations planned, abetted, attempted and executed by America’s armed
forces and its Central Intelligence Agency.
These include many killings, by drone strikes and more
direct means, of Islamist leaders in the Middle East including, famously, Osama
bin Laden. In 1986 the agency tried and failed to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi,
the Libyan dictator. They tried and failed to kill Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The highest US authorities approved the murder of the South
Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1963; and multiple attempts against
Fidel Castro of Cuba.
They certainly planned, and may have attempted, hits on the
commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces under Allende, President Sukarno
of Indonesia and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.
Does
assassination work?
“Assassination has never changed the history of the world,”
said Benjamin Disraeli. He was wrong. An examination of three assassinations
shows how they certainly do alter history, in each case for the worse.
1914: The Archduke
The first was the killing in 1914 of the heir to the
Austro-Hungarian empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. During a visit to the
Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, he and his wife were shot dead by a 19-year-old
Bosnian Serb, Gavril Princip.
Serbia remained independent.
The assassination provided the spark that led directly to
the First World War. The aged and inflexible emperor, Franz Josef, sent an
unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia; Russia, in a pan-Slavic treaty with Serbia,
stepped in; Germany took Vienna’s side; France and Britain were brought in by
their treaties with Russia.
Four years of slaughter, with 40 million deaths and immense
destruction, followed. The empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia were
overthrown. The Czar and his family were killed and the Bolsheviks took over.
The British empire never recovered.
The economic upheaval led to the Great Depression and the
mishandling of the peace to the rise of fascism and the Second World War.
Princip |
Serbia’s victory was Pyrrhic. The Serbian army suffered the
greatest casualty rate of any nation on either side: 243,600, or 58% of the
army, died. Those killed and wounded accounted for 16% of the national
population.
The twentieth century might have been a better time for
Serbia, Bosnia and the world if Franz Ferdinand had lived and become Emperor on
the death of his father, Franz Josef, in 1916.
Although firmly conservative, he was far less inflexible
than his father and took a much more benign attitude to Serbs. He wanted more
autonomy for Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, and fought strenuously against
hard-liners in his father’s administration, warning that harsh treatment of Serbia would bring
Austria-Hungary into open conflict with Russia, to the ruin of both empires.
1968: The candidate for President
On 31 March 1968, Lyndon Johnson, embattled by the unending
Vietnam war and fearing he would not survive another term as US president,
called it quits. In a television address he said: “I shall not seek, and I will
not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
At the centre of Kennedy’s pitch was the promise to end the
war and bring home American troops – by then numbering 536,000 – from Vietnam.
But his agenda was much wider, encompassing racial equality, economic
justice, decentralization of power, social improvement at home and non-aggression
abroad.
On 4 June, Kennedy won the California and South Dakota
primaries. His journey to the nomination, and from there to the presidency and
the promise of an American renewal, seemed unstoppable.
The eventual Democratic nominee was Hubert Humphrey,
Johnson’s staid and uninspiring vice-president who was closely identified with
the increasingly unpopular war. On election day, the presidency went to Richard
Nixon.
Although Nixon promised to bring the war to an end – “peace
with honour”, he said – the reality was different. Some troops were brought
home but the bombing campaign continued and intensified. As US morale collapsed
among troops in Vietnam and the population at home, Nixon secretly authorised
the bombing of targets in Cambodia being used by the North Vietnamese to bring
weapons, supplies and personnel into the south.
In 1970 the neutral Cambodian president, Prince Sihanouk,
was deposed by a US-backed general, Lon Nol, who undertook a campaign of
internment and massacre of Vietnamese. North Vietnam invaded and put the Khmer
Rouge, under Pol Pot, into power. And so the killing fields began, as the Khmer
Rouge pursued a vast program of murder.
Of the 196 prisons operated by the regime, the most
notorious was Security Prison 126. Of the 20,000 people incarcerated here,
seven survived. The victims of such prisons were taken to fields nearby and
killed, often bashed to death to save bullets. These became known as the
Killing Fields.
Eventually, in 1978, the Vietnamese – having won their own
war – invaded again and installed Hun Sen. That regime, now led by Hun Sen’s
son, remains in power.
Finally, on 9 August, Richard Nixon resigned.
If the bullet the killed Robert Kennedy had not been fired,
it is likely that none of these things would have happened. Almost certainly,
he would have prevailed over the unpalatable Nixon at the polls, ended the war,
Cambodia would not have been destabilised, the civil unrest in the US,
Australia and around the world would have ended, South-East Asia would have had
a better chance of peace, and millions of lives would have been saved.
Robert Kennedy’s death came during a period of six years
which formed one of the bloodiest and chaotic periods in American history.
Seven key civil rights leaders were shot dead: Medger Evers
in 1963; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who tried to
encourage black Americans to vote, died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan; the
Klan also killed Vernon Dahmer, a black civil rights organiser in
Mississippi.
Then came the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, Martin
Luther King in 1968 and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers in 1969.
One far-right leader also died: George Lincoln Rockwell of
the American Nazi Party in 1967.
President John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas on 22
November 1963 and his assailant, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed while in
custody two days later.
America has never fully recovered from the trauma and
madness of this period.
Bobby Kennedy’s death, and the consequent failure to end the
Vietnam war, also had indirect but profound effects on the global economic
system. In 1944 a conference at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire met to design a
system of monetary management for the postwar decades ahead. The key figure was
the British economist, Maynard Keynes.
The Bretton Woods system, as it became known, put the US
dollar at the centre of international exchange rate settings. The agreement required
countries to peg the value of their national currencies to the US dollar; in
turn, the US guaranteed that its dollar would be convertible to gold at the
fixed price of US$35 an ounce. This allowed nations some leeway to adjust
exchange rates as conditions demanded, and enabled international currency
trading.
It worked because the US had the financial heft to keep its own
currency stable. But the soaring costs of the war made the system untenable. In
1971, Richard Nixon ended the US convertibility guarantee. National currencies were
left on their own, and the postwar period of stability ended.
The effects of assassination are unpredictable but can linger
far into the future.
The Prime Minister
At his trial, Sirhan Sirhan explained that he had shot
Robert Kennedy because of America’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War
of 1967. “I can explain it,” he said after his arrest. “I did it for my
country.”
The terror campaign failed utterly. Rather than drawing
international sympathy for the cause of dispossessed Palestinians, the world
condemned and shunned the PLO and the people it claimed to represent. But the
entrenched hatreds on both sides delayed serious peace negotiations for another
two decades.
In 1993, many – though by no means all – on both sides were
weary of conflict and were ready to find a way out of the mess. And so the
process which eventually produced the Oslo Accords was able to begin, brokered
by the United States and Norway.
The first Accord, signed in Washington that year, was a
framework for peace that allowed for the creation of a self-governing
Palestinian Authority. The second Accord, signed in Egypt in 1995, called for “peaceful
coexistence, mutual dignity, and security, while recognizing the mutual
legitimate and political rights of the parties.”
There was passionate opposition among both populations: the
fears and hatreds were deep and lethal, and the sight of Rabin shaking hands
was anathema to right-wing Israelis.
Yigal Amir |
The Prime Ministership passed to Peres, who held the post
for only seven months before the right-wing Likud Party prevailed at the 1996
general election. Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister and the quest for
peace foundered. Hamas and Hezbollah grew and prospered, backed by Iran.
Israel, backed by the United States, became ever more intransigent.
The slaughter in Gaza is only the most recent manifestation of
the hatred and chaos that could have ended but, because of three bullets from an
assassin’s gun, did not.
Aaron David Miller, a former Middle-East peace negotiator
with the US State Department, was a colleague and friend of the Prime Minister. “Rabin’s murder on 4
November 1995 traumatised a nation and killed a peace process,” he wrote in Foreign
Policy.
“Tragically, it did more than that: his assassination both
reflected and accelerated a process of polarisation and deepening
anti-democratic and messianic tendencies that would help drive Israeli domestic
and foreign policy ever rightward.”
“I remain convinced,” said Bill Clinton in 2017, “that had
he lived we would have achieved a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians
by 1998 and we’d be living in a different world today.”
A most uncertain technique
There have been many assassinations and assassination attempts.
A large study
collected data on all publicly-reported assassination attempts for all national
leaders since 1875. This produced 298 attempts, of which 59 resulted in the
leader’s death.
“Whether the attack succeeds or fails in killing the leader
appears uncorrelated with observable economic and political features of the
national environment,” the authors wrote.
“We find that assassinations of autocrats produce
substantial changes in the country’s institutions, while assassinations of
democrats do not.
Even there, the technique carries immense risk: “In
particular, transitions to democracy … are 13 percentage points more likely
following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on
an autocrat.”
The ethics
of assassination
Is the removal of a political leader by assassination ever morally
and ethically justified? There is a decent argument that it can be, in certain
circumstances. The clearest example is that of the 23 documented attempts on
the life of Adolf Hitler. Some were planned but never carried out; all failed.
But the success of any of them would have saved the lives of millions.
Two of these attempts stand out: a time-bomb planted in a Munich
beer hall in November 1939 exploded successfully. It killed eight people and
injured 62 others – but Hitler had left early. The unsuccessful perpetrator
died in 1945 at the Dachau concentration camp less than a month before Nazi
Germany’s surrender.
The plotters aimed to remove the Nazi government, establish
a ready-made provisional replacement acceptable to the Allies, and conclude a
peace before the Russians entered German territory.
If it had succeeded, the peace settlement would probably
have followed similar lines to that later imposed on Japan: a pacifist constitution
and the return of democratic freedoms.
In the United States, the executive order on the subject
seems unequivocal:
No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United
States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
But this is an executive order, not a law. Several attempts
in Congress to enact such a law have failed. It could be overturned by any
president at any time, and there are important loopholes. According to a 1992 paper from
the Cornell International Law Journal, a president could:
- Declare open war;
- Interpret certain criminal acts as legitimating self-defence;
- Narrowly construe the executive order; or
- Repeal or amend the order, or permit Congress to do the same.
The first three of these loopholes have allowed successive
presidents, notably George W Bush and Barack Obama, to conduct widespread and often-indiscriminate
assassinations of Islamist leaders in the Middle East. Many of these were conducted
by drone strike, with substantial civilian casualties which went unreported –
or, at best, under-reported – in western media. These attacks have also powerfully
increased anger among ordinary people in the affected countries against the US
and its allies.
The 9/11 attacks led to the triumph of gung-ho neo-conservatives
in the George W Bush administration that produced not only two disastrous wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq but also to torture, imprisonment without trial, “rendition”
of prisoners to secret locations in authoritarian ally countries such as Egypt,
and extra-judicial killing.
A contemporary paper by a lieutenant-colonel and issued by
the Army War College put
the case somewhat chillingly:
“Assassination is an ages old tool that has been used by
some militarily weak nations against stronger opponents. Critics of the use of
political assassination contend that those that would use this method are
immoral.
“This is an overly idealistic view. The strategic
application of assassination to cause political or social change, or strike
emotional, if not physical fear, in the target or enemy force so as to steer
behaviour in the direction of the desired political or social outcome is
realistic and as this paper will argue, legal and moral.
“Viewed in this unemotional manner, political assassination
is but one weapon of many available to national leaders to use to attain
national security objectives.”
Perhaps the most cogent argument against assassinations is
that they have a very strong tendency to make everything much, much worse.