We are going to have to endure some gruesome back-patting from the establishment’s permanent war party, as they jump up and down and cheer wildly for having killed an unarmed man who was trying to run away.
I’m not saying that ISIS were not a horrible bunch of people; they went out of their way to establish and weaponize a reputation for brutality. As someone who was trying to restore an Ottoman-style caliphate, I can only assume that someone was going to be caliph of the mess; i.e.: Al Baghdadi was a proto-king. That puts him in the same league, as far as I am concerned, as his creator George W. Bush. But it’s hard to imagine Bush getting his hands dirty.
Guy of Lusignan places his sword at Saladin’s feet, Pwn’d!
Elsewhere I have mentioned the issue of “kings do not kill kings” [stderr] but I suppose that has to be amended to: “but if you’re not a member of the ‘kings’ club, you are toast.” Bin Laden, who was also unceremoniously assassinated, thought that he was a leader of a credible military insurgency (for a while) and ISIS thought they were establishing a proto-state through force of arms – which is the traditional way of establishing a state.
Why do we bother with these dramatic gyrations around “regime change”? ISIS just experienced some “regime change” and nobody is going to give a shit in 3 weeks, except for Baghdadi’s successor. I keep trying to understand this: the US thinks it is OK to destabilize a country with CIA-backed insurgencies, lead a revolt, and then disintegrate the country with bombing campaigns while leaving their leadership intact? If the problem in Syria is Assad, why didn’t they just send a troop of special forces paladins to hang him out to dry? Why don’t kings kill kings?
Back in the 1900s, anarchists worldwide argued that kings and corporate leaders were the enemy, and they were fair targets. I suppose the reason that idea never grew wings and took off might have something to do with how ruthlessly they were suppressed.
Or is it fear of “tit for tat”? Personally, I’d be fine if a Russian spetznas team showed up in Texas and blew away George Bush. Or Jared or Ivanka. Or Hillary. It appears to me now that the global “regime change” industry has the entire situation backwards – instead of attacking and destabilizing entire nations and upsetting the civilians, why can’t kings just make war on kings? Just make it as bloody – and localized – as possible.
Something to keep in mind when assessing these things is that they are not geopolitical moves at all.
The CIA spent decades pitching targeted assassination as a tool for geopolitics, and mostly got told to go fuck themselves, because even a dumbass knows that targeted assassinations are worse than useless in that game.
The shift with 9/11 brought a new understanding. These are media events. This isn’t geopolitics at all, this is domestic politics. The point it not to kill kings, it’s to generate situation room photos in which the president looks strong yet thoughtful. It doesn’t matter who you kill.
“why can’t kings just make war on kings?”
Because they are bloody cowards! We are still drilled to see sttacks against the leadership as ‘immoral’, a tragedy, a “hit the heart of the country”, aren’t we? (You can claim to start a world war because of it.) Pretty effective propaganda, I would say. Anonymous murder of thousands is much more convenient to kings: They are the ‘nessesary sacrifices’, ‘for the good of the country’, ‘für Gott und Vaterland’… – the death of a (or a thousand) common person is just a blimp.*
Maybe it still works today because we see these leaders every day, in the news, on the TV, everywhere aven though their terribleness is potentually open to everyone. But they *can* make themselves seem irreplaceble to a wider audience and so they of course do. And as long as many people are interelectually lazy, the leadership will get away with it. Think about Trumps “5. Avenue shooting people” garbage. A total disregard for life that is not their own and people still cheer for it, as long as they think that they are too important to be shot at.
(I think, any democracy should should include a passage in their constitiuion, that the politicians who declare and lobby for a war (i.e. are the agressors) must be the first to go to this war, in the first line of combat, dressed in bright and garishly coloured uniforms)
* -> Shifting of the US “Retaliation strike**” targets comes to mind (you did write about that, Marcus, didn’t you?)
**No, not a “First/decapitation strike” and of course no Holocaust! Why would you say something like that? The centre of Leningrad is a targt of high strategic value!
There was a clip of Al Baghdadi on one of the Canadian news broadcasts last night, and I noticed that he had a “symbol of office” at hand. It was an AKS74U short barreled assault rifle with an RPK74 light machine gun magazine, a combination seen in pictures of Osama bin Laden. Obviously Al Baghdadi wanted to be seen as the successor of bin Laden.
So I read this on Twitter today (with the ironic name “@selectedwisdom”)…
My reply, with caveats thrown in to avoid some of the worst responses…
@ 4 Tabby Lavalamp
… how awesome would it be if other countries had special operations that could hunt down war criminals in the United States?
But, but, but, you can’t do that, they’re the good guys, how can they be war criminals….
Andrew Molitor@#1:
The shift with 9/11 brought a new understanding. These are media events. This isn’t geopolitics at all, this is domestic politics. The point it not to kill kings, it’s to generate situation room photos in which the president looks strong yet thoughtful.
Yes, it appears that when your politics get big enough and important enough the user interface takes on a life of its own and splits away from the underlying reality. Eventually it will resemble rotisserie league baseball.
avalus@#2:
Because they are bloody cowards! We are still drilled to see sttacks against the leadership as ‘immoral’, a tragedy, a “hit the heart of the country”, aren’t we? (You can claim to start a world war because of it.) Pretty effective propaganda, I would say. Anonymous murder of thousands is much more convenient to kings: They are the ‘nessesary sacrifices’, ‘for the good of the country’, ‘für Gott und Vaterland’… – the death of a (or a thousand) common person is just a blimp.*
It sure is an interesting coincidence that the kings make the rules, and one of their rules is “don’t hurt kings” – it’s as if they’re tilting the table in their favor, isn’t it?
Wasn’t there a culture (Minoan?) that sacrificed their kings? I like the idea that you get to rule for a few years and then have your heart cut out. It’d suck when the occasional good ruler had to go on the block, but it would certainly go a ways toward weeding out the venal and corrupt.
hunt down war criminals in the United States?
I seem to recall that sending assassin teams into another country (even if it’s one that we militarily invaded already) is a violation of international law.
I fully support anyone sending hit teams into the US to kill off a few of our war criminals. Russia, if you’re listening: I won’t take you seriously if you don’t start with Kissinger.
I’m sure you all caught how I implicitly defined Baghdadi’s death as an “assassination” rather than justified punishment, or whatever. We can’t talk about this sort of thing without implicitly loading a bunch of things into our speech that flag our preconceptions. It has not escaped my attention that the media coverage of the killing has cast things as justice, or his past catching up to him (justice)
What is “assassination”? It seems to me to bear a notion that it’s unjustified. Although, the original “assassins” – Hassan Sabbah’s ‘hashishin’ were engaging in what was fairly well-justified action against invaders: persians and crusaders. If we go back to the original political meaning of the word, perhaps assassination implies it’s politically justified.
Gavrilo Princip was an “assassin” and an “anarchist” as well as an “ultra-nationalist Serbian” – does that mean he was not justified in shooting the new Austro/Hungarian dictator? His actions’ consequences were a bit larger than he expected, I suppose. He probably felt justified. And so did Bin Laden.
Baghdadi’s done much less damage than George W. Bush did and nobody’s talking about Bush’s past catching up with him.
It does seem bizarre to be that proud that your country sends death squads around the world.
Marcus @9:
Maybe that’s because you’re an American who grew up hearing that word used when talking about JFK, RFK and MLK? To me, it just means “killing of an individual for political reasons”. The plot to kill Hitler in 1944 was, and still is, called an assassination attempt.
True. Me, I would hardly call a military operation an “assassination”.
@John
I would. You’re getting a crew together to go kill a specific person. That’s an assassination/hit. Just because you have state sanction doesn’t change that.
Seems to me that we are back to discussing the legitimacy of state sponsored political violence
dangerousbeans, well… technically, he blew himself up. That’s normally called ‘suicide’.
(Also, by your own criterion, all executions are perforce assassinations, no?)
Blew himself up in response to the US trying to kill him. That seems like splitting hairs.
And yes. If a gang get together to execute a snitch that’s a murder, if a state execute a traitor that’s… justice apparently?
dangerousbeans:
Well, if you don’t care to distinguish between assassination and suicide, I can’t stop you.
(And if you further don’t care to distinguish between assassination and execution, the same)
So… Why didn’t they capture him? Was he already so effectively powerless that there was no point in asking him questions? But that would also cause him to not be very dangerous, so… why kill him then? I understand these are volatile situations and it’s unrealistic to expect to consistently get the best outcome. But all that aside, the attack on bin Laden aimed to kill him from the start and I’d be surprised if this operation were any different (but good luck parsing the orange haired fool to find out, listening to him kills brain cells).
We’re getting quite hypocritical these days. We callously attack hospitals, buy almost any random nonsense as long as it provides a pretense for war, kidnap people from other countries and torture based them on extremely sketchy “evidence”, store captured civilians indefinitely in a sort of POW camp made worse with torture, outright kill enemies that we could probably capture, and to top it off we seem content to encourage a lot more efforts against us by bombing semi-random people and justifying it by slapping an “enemy combatant” label on them no matter who or what they are.
I don’t understand people who think this stuff is okay. It’s like they imagine no other country or organization will ever eclipse the US so we can do what we want and it can’t ever come home to roost. But every powerbase wanes in time and we happen to be quite certain a LOT of them all over the world will be disrupted soon due to climate change. And the people who could help us actually navigate that minefield are shouted down by preening fools smug in their own ignorance. There will come a reckoning someday. And if it’s not enacted in the most heartless, selfish, pointlessly inhumane way possible it will only be because the world has chosen not to emulate us at our worst.
@lanir
He blew himself up,in response to the US attacking where he was living. I guess he felt he wouldn’t get a fair trial, or that he would be tortured. So killing him might not have been the US’s stated aim.
John Morales@#16:
Well, if you don’t care to distinguish between assassination and suicide, I can’t stop you.
Seems to be another one of those problems with applying vague labels. It’s literally “suicide” if you kill yourself before being captured (anticipating a show trial or torture) but it’s hardly a matter of choice. I used the term “assassination” to embed its political nature – as opposed to “murder” – and avoided “suicide” because it was not his choice to die that day.
Years ago a friend of mine drunkenly confessed that they had “murdered” a relative who was a late-stage cancer patient, by giving them a large dose of morphine. Was that “murder” or did the cancer kill the patient? These seem to me to be flaws with how language works.
Rob Grigjanis@#11:
Maybe that’s because you’re an American who grew up hearing that word used when talking about JFK, RFK and MLK? To me, it just means “killing of an individual for political reasons”. The plot to kill Hitler in 1944 was, and still is, called an assassination attempt.
Interesting point. I think you’re right that my terminology is hugely influenced by popular usage surrounding JFK, RFK, and MLK. I was a kid at a critical age when those happened, and they remain memorable to this day.
“Killing of an individual for political reasons” is a pretty good definition and I am going to use it from now on. It embeds the idea that the killing is individual and therefore targeted and that further ties it to its political purpose.
That’s all interesting because the narrative that I grew up with was that MLK was assassinated by a lone gunman, who may have been a racist cracker personally, but was not part of a larger plot. (Whether JFK was part of a larger plot is something I don’t care to speculate about) but he was rather obviously assassinated as part of a larger, highly political, plot. It has always left me darkly amused that so many conspiracy theories swirl around white politician Kennedy yet not about black organizer King. Could the CIA have killed Kennedy? Nobody’s even asking if the CIA killed King. Or, was it the FBI? Or was it just some rando cipher? I always assumed it was the CIA and never even bothered to ask.
lanir@#17:
There will come a reckoning someday. And if it’s not enacted in the most heartless, selfish, pointlessly inhumane way possible it will only be because the world has chosen not to emulate us at our worst.
I’ve felt the same way, but you said it better.
When empires fade, they seem to be fairly careful to keep their chickens from coming home to roost. Rome remained quite powerful for a long time and most of the world had learned not to mess with Rome even when it was weak. Ditto England. France, maybe less so. Germany? Their chickens came home to roost in a pretty major way.
What bums me out is that the people who caused it are going to escape into a comfortable grave. Kissinger will be beatified and buried in state. No Cambodians will be allowed to dance on his grave because it will be guarded.
In a different context, it goes “You can’t fire me, I quit!”
If only there was some sort of reference book in which you could look up words like “assassination” to see what the commonly accepted usage of it actually is. Someone’s gonna come up with this and make a bundle, mark my words.
He blew himself up
And pray, explain to me why I should believe that?
For that matter, I still have a niggling suspicion that bin Laden was possibly dead before the US special forces attack.
So, we have a possibly innocent man facing an execution in Texas. What should that be called?
@ 25 robertbaden
Premeditated judicial murder?
Marcus @#19
Human languages certainly are flawed communication tools, but often enough people abuse these flaws in order to purposefully mislead others. For example, when your side kills some living creature, a different word will be used to describe the action compared to when somebody you dislike commits an identical action.
I’m inherently suspicious whenever some action gets described with words that have either positive or negative connotations beneficial for the viewpoint that gets presented to me.
John Morales @#16
I purposefully refuse to distinguish between such words, because whenever somebody tries to force upon me a word with either better or worse connotations, they are trying to manipulate my perception. I don’t care who ordered and excused the killing of another human being, I don’t think that some USA government employee has more rights to authorize murder than some street thug who claims that “this person deserved to die.”
@dangerousbeans #18: Ok, bad timing. I didn’t look into it much, just read where someone described him as running away in the comments.
@Marcus: I think there are three general types of people when it comes to empire thinking like this.
There are the politicians who are old enough they probably can’t imagine it all falling apart in their lifetimes. The world doesn’t necessarily go with the “sins of the father” business when your PR is good enough to get your crimes labelled as political actions.
And there are those making a profit off of it and they actually have a legacy of wealth they want to pass on, so there may be some more thinking involved. But my guess is if there is, it’s just “move to the vacation home in Europe for a VERY extended stay” as soon as things start to look uncomfortable.
The third type is just everyone else who mostly doesn’t think about it. I’m not sure people like me are numerous enough to even bother defining as a type of our own.
lanir@28 There are a surprising number of people in any Imperial Operation who genuinely believe they are doing good.