Khamenei’s killing renews questions for US on assassinations : NPR

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The initial attack of the US-Israeli war on Iran was a highly sophisticated operation that dealt a major blow to the Islamic Republic, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his office in central Tehran.

The US and Israel used an array of high-tech intelligence and military hardware to eliminate it – a stunning display of power and lethal precision. But lost in all that modern wizardry is a fundamental moral and strategic question: Should America be in the business of assassinating foreign leaders?

“Technology sometimes takes us to places we haven’t gone before, before we’re ready for it,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University. “And now our ability to oust foreign leaders is putting us in a place we have never been before. We must take stock of the strategic, philosophical and ethical implications of this.”

The United States has had a long and changing relationship with the idea of ​​assassinating foreign heads of state.

In the first few decades of the Cold War, the US wanted to keep all options, including assassinations, on the table in its global conflict against the Soviet Union.

Luca Trenta, a professor at Swansea University in Britain and author of a book on assassinations in American foreign policy, said, “There was certainly a perception that assassination was just another contingency, and something that the United States could not completely rule out in a confrontation with the Soviet Union, which was seen as such an omnipotent and terrible enemy.”

Trenta said that in the early years of the Cold War, the US often helped set the stage for removing or killing a foreign leader by providing weapons or intelligence, but local allies pulled the trigger.

The assassination of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 is an example of this. The Eisenhower administration wanted to remove Trujillo but he was ultimately assassinated by a group of Dominican dissidents.

The CIA was also ready to take direct action.

In 1960, it plotted the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, even sending poison into Congo to kill him. Ultimately, Lumumba was assassinated not by the US, but by Congolese rivals.

During the 1960s, the CIA repeatedly plotted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including once using a poisoned pen. None of those efforts were successful, and Castro ruled Cuba for the next four decades.

Church committee inspires introspection

All of this was done in secret, without the knowledge of the American public.

This came to the fore in the mid-1970s when revelations of CIA abuses led to congressional investigations, including by the Church Committee led by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church.

The panel issued an interim report in 1975 that examined US involvement in plots to assassinate foreign leaders and determined that the US was indeed implicated in such efforts.

It also declared that “short of war, killing is inconsistent with American principles, international order, and morality;” The panel said the killings should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.

Trenta said, “The Church Committee investigation really provides a brief moment of self-reflection for American politicians, for the American public, to understand that maybe if we are a democracy and we have to be separated from the enemies we are fighting, then we shouldn’t be doing these things.”

In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning the US government from engaging in political assassinations.

Naftali of Columbia University said that the consensus that developed against assassinations in that era was the result of several things, including public dismay at the imperial presidency in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

The political elite, meanwhile, was still deeply affected by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., he said.

“Gerald Ford realized that this was not the tool he wanted to use, and what’s really interesting is that his successors expanded the ban,” Naftali said. “So Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter both felt that the United States should not be in the killing business.”

A multi-decade pause on killings, with an asterisk

For the next 20-plus years, America was out of business, albeit with an asterisk or two.

In 1986, the US bombed several locations in Libya, including the family compound of leader Moammar Gaddafi. And twice in the 1990s the US attacked the palaces of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush, was interviewed by Peter Jennings of ABC News about targeting Saddam in 1991.

Asked whether the US wanted to kill Saddam, Scowcroft replied: “Uh, well, we don’t kill, but yes we hit all the places where Saddam could be.”

Jennings then asked whether this meant the US was prepared to deliberately kill Saddam if possible. After a long pause, Scowcroft said: “I think, yes, that’s fair enough.”

In Naftali’s view, the operations against Gaddafi and Saddam were not plots to kill a foreign leader, but were instead military operations targeting command and control facilities.

He said, “These military operations were not designed as assassination plots, but if the head of state had died, the United States would have cried no tears.” “And I think that’s how Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton banned murder.”

Naftali said this reflected, at least to some extent, that presidents found the killings distasteful, and thought the American public did too.

change after 9/11

This changed with the terrorist attacks of al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. Congress responded by authorizing all necessary means to locate the perpetrators of 9/11.

“By all necessary means, including killing,” Naftali said. “And I think the taboo against using murder, if you want to call it a specific and public taboo, disappears.”

In the post-9/11 world, the US adopted a new technology, armed drones, to kill al-Qaeda leaders around the world. But these attacks targeted alleged terrorists, not foreign government officials.

President Trump blurred that line when he ordered a drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020 that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. While the US considered Soleimani a terrorist, he was a high-ranking Iranian government official.

Iran responded with its own plots to assassinate Trump and senior administration officials.

Now, six years later, a joint US-Israeli operation has assassinated Khamenei, Iran’s top political and religious leader. America provided intelligence while Israel carried out the deadly attack.

Trump said on social media about the operation that Khamenei was “unable to evade our intelligence and highly sophisticated tracking systems.”

Those sophisticated intelligence and military capabilities make it easier to target foreign leaders with a higher probability of success, Naftali said.

He said, “That was not possible in the Cold War and the early post-Cold War. And in that kind of environment, it may raise or lower the threshold for the decision to engage in political assassination.”

This makes not only America’s adversaries but also America more vulnerable.

“Sometimes mutual vulnerability leads to resistance, but sometimes it can lead to existential crisis and instability,” Naftali said. “And again, not to mourn Ayatollah Khamenei, but at this point we should just take stock of how rare it should be for the United States to assassinate a foreign head of state and try to maintain a sense of the taboo around it. And then as a nation, have a conversation about when we might violate something like that, but keep that bar very high.”