Don't panic July 31 2002
Is assassination an effective political tool?
To answer this question, I have conducted a highly scientific study of every political assassination in recorded history. Utilizing teams of scholars, advanced search engines and sharks with friggin' laser beams on their heads, here's what I found: Assassinations are 100 percent effective in ending the political careers of those assassinated. All other results vary by situation.
Thank you. See you next week.
Oh. You want me to elaborate. Fine.
Assassination is a surefire (ha!) way of stopping one person, but not necessarily the cause that he or she represents. For example, immediately after he mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, John Wilkes Booth leapt onto the staged and yelled, "Sic semper tyrannis. The South is avenged."
Well, from the Atlanta window where I sit as I write this column, I can see three American flags and not a single Confederate one. In other words, Lincoln was (and as far as anyone knows is) dead, but his cause, the preservation of the Union, lived on. As for Booth, he and his "Sic semper tyrannis" are nothing more than barroom trivia questions.
The question of political assassination and its efficacy has relevance today in the Middle East. Since the most recent Palestinian uprising began two years ago, Israel has been targeting for assassination people it accuses of killing, or planning to kill, Israelis. On July 1, Hamas bomb maker Muhaned Taher was killed in an Israeli naval commando raid in the West Bank. (No word on why naval commandos were used for an inland operation. Perhaps Taher had a moat or large birdbath in front of his house.)
Last week, Israel assassinated Hamas military commander Salah Shehada in the Gaza Strip. Despite being closer to the sea than the West Bank, the Gaza assassination was carried out not with naval commandos, but with a single one-ton bomb dropped from an American-made F-16 jet. The bomb, dropped on a building in a residential area, killed 15, including Shehada, his wife, his young child and eight other children. One-hundred-and-forty-five were injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government believes political assassinations are a necessary and justified tactic to fight Palestinian terror attacks. While it's hard to shed a tear over the death of any member of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups like Hamas, the assassinations have a couple of downsides.
For one thing, they're a violation of international law. One of the essential principles of human rights is that whole bit about guilt being determined by courts rather than weapons technicians.
But let's say, as Sharon has, that there's no time for the niceties of judicial proceedings when you're fighting a war against terrorism. If you believe that argument, it's still difficult to make a convincing argument that assassination is effective. As Israel has stepped up assassinations of terrorists, terrorists have stepped up their attacks. Israel claims success every time it kills a terrorist, but that "success" usually seems to breed more violence.
It's as simple as that. As long as the conditions that allow Hamas and the like to flourish (Islamic fundamentalism, the Israeli occupation, inability to find a light beer that doesn't have a "watered-down" taste), the suicide bombers are gonna continue. Assassinations don't douse political fires, they fuel them. Hamas and other Palestinian leaders were discussing a ceasefire before Shehada's assassination. Now, they're calling for revenge. Lots of Israelis will die in those revenge attacks. At least one already has. Nice going, Ariel.