Ding Dong, Khamenei is Dead

Assassinating an evil dictator is seldom a good idea.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends embark on a mission to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, who rules over the Winkies. Over the course of their quest, they battle an assortment of jihadists – wolves, crows, bees, flying monkeys and Winkie soldiers – before encountering the Wicked Witch. Dorothy then kills the Witch by dousing her with a bucket of water. As she melts, so too does the evil she perpetrated. The Winkies suddenly become Dorothy’s friends, and help her to get back to Kansas – the promised land. What a great story.

Ding, dong, Ali Khamenei is dead. The plotline in Wizard of Oz is disturbingly similar to the scenario Donald Trump and his clowncar cabinet envisage arising from the 28 February bombing of Teheran. By this logic, Iranian terror is the creation of a single madman who, by casting a spell, has persuaded thousands of jihadists to carry out his heinous ends. Americans cling desperately to the belief that cutting off the head of the serpent will defeat evil.

We’ve been here before. Remember when President Barack Obama proclaimed that “The world is safer”, after the killing of Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011? He assured everyone that “It is a better place because of [his] death.” And then we got ISIS.

The Oz scenario has long provenance. Back in the early 1960s, the US assumed that a different evil, namely communism, could be defeated by assassinating its perpetrators. Thus, the CIA under John Kennedy plotted to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and poisonous depilatory cream. They also tried to eliminate Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected socialist Prime Minister of the Congo by sneaking a poisoned toothbrush into his toiletry bag. They didn’t succeed (Lumumba was probably killed by Belgian agents), but the CIA did leave a legacy of laughter for students studying the period.

More recently, American policy in Iraq was guided by an assumption that Saddam Hussein’s elimination would make the Iraqis, rather like the Winkies, unanimously decide that liberal democracy is a wonderful thing. Yay, let’s be a democracy! It took about twenty years for Americans to realise that that wasn’t going to happen. That same logic inspired the repeated attempts to eliminate Muammar Ghaddafi, before he was finally killed by his own people in October 2011.

This approach is flawed for two reasons. Firstly, it’s morally bankrupt. Secondly, it doesn’t work. Thus, even if a special moral case can be made for assassinating Khamenei, the logic for doing so would still remain dubious. Only in Oz does killing the Wicked Witch turn the Winkies into nice guys.

Let’s examine the moral issues first. The Americans have killed a killer in order to demonstrate that killing is wrong. That logic, central to capital punishment, does not translate well to international affairs. As one bewildered student at the University of Virginia asked immediately after the killing of Bin Laden, “Doesn’t taking revenge and glorying in it make us look just like the terrorists?” Yes, I’m afraid it does. Imagine how Americans would feel if Iranians tried to assassinate Trump. (No, maybe we shouldn’t go there.)

“But”, say supporters of Saturday’s assassination, “America is good and Khamanei was evil.” Presumed moral righteousness is often used to excuse otherwise immoral behaviour. Heinous acts are assumed to be purified by noble ends; a liberal state, it is argued, is incapable of immorality for the simple reason that it is liberal. These assumptions bred torture at Abu Ghraib and brutal war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also justified the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. Assuming you’re the good guy is often a gateway to evil.

In simple terms, terror has become an appropriate response to terrorism. The US has lost sight of the liberal values that were once its greatest strength. We have seen this with the Patriot Act, under which Americans willingly discarded the freedoms upon which their great nation was founded. We have seen it also with waterboarding and illegal imprisonment at Guantanamo. More recently, we have seen it on the streets of Minneapolis. We see it now with an administration that celebrates the logistics of an assassination but provides no plan for what happens next. What, then, remains of America’s great moral example?

In the wake of the Bin Laden killing, the commentator David Rothkopf argued that “[Bin Laden] cannily recognised that the only power right now capable of bringing down America is America. He sought to successfully use us against us, and he was for too long successful.” It could be argued that he remains successful long after his death. When the Twin Towers came down, America quickly morphed into a place of questionable morals and relativist foreign policy. She also bankrupted herself in the process.

Bin Laden persuaded America to embrace iniquity, authoritarianism and barbarity in its effort to defeat terrorism. Yet a moral mission remains impressive only if it is perpetrated by moral means. To those in the Middle East not sold on America’s righteousness, the US has seemed rather like the rapacious imperialists who once blighted their lives. Trump’s recent bombing of a school looks to them a lot like General Dyer’s use of machine guns to control a crowd in Amritsar in 1919, when perhaps as many as 1,500 Indians died.

Over the course of my lifetime, Americans have grown much easier to hate. Those who scream “Death to America” do so for legitimate reason. They’ve seen their kids killed, their weddings bombed by drones. It’s hard to wear a white hat and kill 160 schoolkids with a single bomb. Marco Rubio said that “The United States would not deliberately target a school.” That might be true, but shouting Oops! doesn’t absolve the crime.

Morality aside, the Iranian operation was illegal on so many levels. Presidents are not supposed to start wars without the permission of Congress. Leaving that aside (and so many presidents have done so), the intentional killing of another country’s leader is always legally suspect. A crucial issue pertains to whether a state of war exists between the two countries concerned. This is especially important now because some elements in the Trump administration are insisting that the US is not technically at war with Iran. Yet if a state of war does not exist, then that killing of Khamenei was simply a murder – a hit perpetrated by a guy who likes to act like a Mafia boss. Only a war can make it remotely legal.

The laws of war permit attacks only against military objectives, such as enemy fighters or weapons and ammunition. Civilians are supposed to be immune from attack, except those who are “directly participating in the hostilities”. That might pertain to Khamenei, but what hostilities was he directly participating in the moment before he was killed? Trump claims that he was a month away from producing a usable nuclear weapon, but no evidence had been provided to support that statement and independent experts have dismissed it as nonsense. A state of war did not exist until the moment he was killed, so it’s impossible to fall back on the justification that the war rendered his killing legal.

Furthermore, for a specific attack on a military objective to be lawful, it must discriminate between combatants and civilians, and the expected loss of civilian life or property cannot be disproportionate to the anticipated military gain of the attack. It’s already clear that the loss of civilian life in this attack is disproportionate to the military gain of killing Khamenei, even if that killing could be justified on legal grounds (which it can’t).

Granted, there are legal experts who disagree with all this. But even if a legal case for assassinating Khamenei could be constructed, the case for doing so would remain dubious because at its foundation lies the Oz fantasy. In other words, America needs to accept that, among many Iranians, Khamenei was popular. Killing him does not eradicate the reasons for his popularity. Removing a dandelion by pulling off its head merely results in the weed returning twice as strong. Killing schoolchildren in an effort at regime change merely creates a new generation of radicalised Iranians bent on revenge. As I’m writing this piece, reports are coming in that Khamenei’s son Mojtaba has been selected as the new Supreme Leader. He’s described as a “hardliner”. Oh good, another one. Logic would suggest that Trump’s next act will be to take out Mojtaba. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Sorry, Donald, Iran isn’t Oz

Killing has become a substitute for diplomacy. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a simple question echoed amidst the outrage: “Why do they hate us?” What seemed obvious to many Muslims seemed incomprehensible to most Americans. The behaviour of Islamic fundamentalists is undoubtedly obsessive, paranoid and irrational, but it is also reactive. As the mainstream Pakistani newspaper The Nation argued in 2001: “September 11 was not mindless terrorism for terrorism’s sake. It was reaction and revenge, even retribution.” It may be comforting to dismiss al Qaeda or ISIS as the creation of an evil wizard, but doing so does not bring the world closer to resolution – or to understanding, or to peace.

For much of the world, American culture seems liberating, if only because of its vibrancy. To many Muslims, however, it seems tyrannical, superficial and relentless — the shallow ethos of godless nation in thrall to things. That’s precisely because America has proved so much more adept at exporting those things — burgers, coffee, Levis, coke, Netflix — than at exporting the liberal values that made her great — humanity, freedom, tolerance, education and the rule of law. Liberal capitalism has been ruthlessly disseminated without the liberal ethic that was always supposed to go with it.

Therein lies the problem. While the Trump administration and a diminishing group of MAGA diehards celebrate Khamenei’s death, in the Middle East, troublesome questions are being asked. What is the endgame? If this strategy didn’t work in Iraq, Libya or Afghanistan, why will it work in Iran? Will this actually make the Middle East a safer place to live and do business? That last question is especially troubling in places like Qatar, Oman and the UAE. Those countries hitched their star to the United States on the assumption that doing so would make them immensely wealthy. And it did. But I suspect they did not anticipate that it would also involve having their airports and luxury hotels hit by Iranian missiles.

Killing is easy; creating the conditions for peace is hard. In the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, the physicist Isidor Rabi, who helped to build that bomb, remarked “The lesson we should learn from all this, is how easy it is to kill people when you turn your mind to it. When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are.”

While Rabi was referring specifically to advances in the technology of war, he was also painfully aware of the simultaneous collapse of morality that had allowed those technologies to be used. Eighty years on from Rabi’s moral dilemma, the separation from reality is even more profound. Drones, missiles and supersonic bombers have turned the waging of war into something akin to a video game. It’s so much easier to kill from a computer screen than it is to look a combatant in the eye and stab him in the heart. Viewed from afar, war seems clean and morally pure. On the ground, however, it’s the same old blood and guts, the same shattered bodies and the same innocent kids crying for their mothers.

I keep coming back to John Winthrop. Sorry if I’ve used his example in other pieces, but it’s especially relevant here. In the spring of 1630, Winthrop, newly elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reminded his fellow colonists of the need to provide an example to the world of “meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality.” Winthrop hoped “that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like that of New England: for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” Americans love to quote Winthrop because they like to believe that they have remained true to his ideals. They still think that they stand atop a moral mountain. But, later in that sermon, Winthrop warned: “if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken … We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.” Perhaps for understandable reasons, that part of the sermon is seldom quoted. Yet on this day, and in the weeks to come, it’s more relevant than ever. Do you hear the curses?

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