Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik is a very moral man. He hates war, being particularly concerned about the suffering of civilians. So when war came anyway, one would have expected him to applaud the missile attack that was launched directly at the Iraqi top leadership on the first night of the war. After all, if succesful, the attack would have killed the very people the Americans were most interested in having killed, shortening the war, and potentially saving the lives of thousands of Iraqi citizens, soldiers as well as civilians.

But no. Assassination, too, you see, is wrong. According to Dagbladet, (no link),

Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik criticizes the Americans' direct attempt at killing Saddam Hussein. [..] - I don't support having people removed from power by removing them from life, Bondevik replied when questioned about the American wish to have the Iraqi dictator killed.

I haven't heard Bondevik criticize the Americans for killing Iraqi soldiers yet, though. Can we then conclude that it's right to kill a man who's forced to defend a lousy dictator, but not the lousy dictator who forces him? At what level of the command chain does an officer receive this guarantee of immunity? High moral standards can be so confusing.

You're not likely to find many "kings" that endorse such a definitive form of regime change.

This non-assassination has been in effect for a long time. Rulers wanted to conquer each other, but not necessarily kill each other (in 1800's Europe, many were closely related); lower rank nobility were more valuable for the ransom that could be extorted. But of course, peasants and serfs with no money did not qualify.

As late as WWII, the Allies decided against assassinating Hitler - except for encouraging Germans to do it for them.

John: Could it be that they decided against that for other reasons? After all, if foreigners had killed Hitler, without defeating his army, that would have made him a German martyr. If his own people had killed him, his martyrdom would have been less pure.

Could your PM's attitude show a respect for rank? Saddam glories in his additional role as leader of the Iraqi Army. It's all right to kill a private in the army, but wrong to kill a top ranking officer?
In WWII, Hitler & Churchill didn't place one another "off limits", and (had I been Norwegian) I'd have been more than happy to target Quisling, who did far less evil to his people than Saddam has done to his.
[I like your "rules", but I'm unlikely to pass through here again, so best wishes.]

With America being pro-death penalty in contrast to most of the rest of the "civilised" world the fact we are assassinating Saddam Hussein goes in one ear and out the other mostly, even though we know our government claims not to carry out assassinations. If we had killed Saddam via one well-placed sharp shooter, keeping Iraqi civillians more safe than they are now, then we could have NEVER justified that in face of our so-called beliefs. So the war is an elaborate excuse for an assassination, because why would we be at WAR of all things if it wasn't needed? We'd much rather worry about the super bowl than Iraq... so of course this war is just -- we are the moral leaders of the planet, and it's police, you know. ;o)

Assassination is generally a problematic strategy; there's no real guarentee that the guy you kill is a tougher opponent than the guy who replaces him.

I've always wondered what would have happened had allied soldiers found Hitler before he killed himself. (Orders or no orders)

I've thought it possible that if ordinary soldiers, no officers around, had found him they may have shot him and claimed self-defense. Had this happened, he'd be even more of an icon to his current followers than he is now. At least he died a coward's death.

I think leaders (Kings, Prime Ministers, Presidents) want to have their enemy's leaders captured and have a trial rather than have the enemy's leaders killed. Could be lots of reasons for this. They may consider the martyr/icon possibility, or they just may be against the idea of killing their enemy's leaders in the same way ordinary soldiers are killed.

As far as Saddam is concerned, I'd like to see one of the following happen:
- Saddam and the top leaders kill themselves,
like Hitler did.
- Saddam and top leaders held for trial by the
*new* Iraqi Government, consisting of those
he and his gang have brutalized for years.

I will not mourn if he gets killed via a missle or bomb. But, this is too noble a death for him. It's a warrior's death. He's been nothing but a brutal tyrant who doesn't deserve to die in battle as a warrior, possibly becoming an icon for other nuts. He and the others need to die with shame.

I'm not someone who has become uncivilized because some states (not mine) have the death penalty. I *hate* the fact we have to have this war at all and find it very difficult to watch the news.

I don't care about killing those who have killed, and continue to kill, innocent Iraqis. I just hate the thought of putting the Iraqis through the hell of war. They've been through enough hell already.

I have loved ones in that area who may have to pay, with their blood, to get rid of that monster. But, the monster has to go. Had an uncle in WWII who died helping to get rid of another monster.

War is hell. But, sometimes it must be waged.
You can recognize its necessity and still hate it.
You can even mourn for the enemy soldiers who are killed because you realize they probably have a family who loves them.

Regards,
Chris J.
Boston, MA.
USA

I have to say that I'm rapidly losing all traces of optimism by the hour, not for military but for political reasons.

I still have little doubt that allied forces can win the war militarily; but it's clear that we get zero credit for trying to avoid killing civilians; the Iraqi regime has a free pass to kill as many as they want and enforce apparent loyalty to Saddam through bullets to the back of the head; and world media and world opinion will largely go along unquestioningly. At this point even if we found a warehouse full of nuclear bombs, the general opinion everywhere outside the US and maybe the UK would probably be that the CIA somehow put it there.

The conclusion is that in a media-saturated world, it's impossible to fight a sufficiently brutal dictatorship without becoming an international pariah. Maybe the US ought to just retreat into its borders and let terrorists kill a few thousand of us now and then, because that's the only way we'll ever be liked.

>John: Could it be that they decided against that for other reasons?
The propaganda effects and potential "martyr" status were doubtless also taken into account. This is also traditional, as in the use of the "Horst Wessel Lied" making a person who would probably have been sent to one of the "special" camps into a national hero.

To some extent this also works in reverse. While Vlad The Impaler is the base for Dracula, his display of his dead unnerved mid-Eastern invaders so much (If he does that to his own what will he do to us?) that it stopped what might well have been a successful invasion of the whole of Europe. Oh, he was not a nice guy even for his time, but he seldom gets credit for this. And he knew what he was doing: he spent his childhood and teen years as a "guest" (hostage) in the Middle East.

>>>WaPo reports:

With U.S. Special Forces operating field artillery, calling in airstrikes and supervising a massive infantry charge, 6,000 Kurdish fighters today overwhelmed a band of radical Islamic Kurds in a remote mountain valley in northeastern Iraq.

The combined Kurdish-U.S. assault began at dawn and ended in a rout. By midafternoon this rugged village in the Shram Mountains near the Iranian border was no longer the headquarters of Ansar al-Islam, a small but dangerous militant group that the Bush administration charges has links to the al Qaeda terror network.

Reaction from Mullah Krekar...?

Must be reassuring for all the Church Lady types who, being atheists nowadays, need some other public symbol of righteousness and upright goodness.

Adverting to your initial post, rather than to the comments, which have perhaps taken on a life of their own.

Marcus Tullius Cicero is a grandiose name for a hall monitor...

(I know, Bjorn, I know... Don't insult your guests... This is just a ribbing...)

Getting back to Krekar (a running Bjorn Staerk theme), I really would like to know his thoughts about his community getting annihilated...

Matt McIrwin: It is exactly at a moment like this that you should make a decision to be courageous. There will be countless more times when we, as a nation, will come to a crossroads (such as this apparent lull in the drive to Baghdad) and make assessments. The worst possible thing we could do is to doubt that the essential job has to be completed.

It's not going to be easy. And you're not alone in feelings of qualm about what we have gotten ourselves into: there are always plenty of others. But you should try to have an internal review mechanism in your mind where you measure against the worst case scenarios, the information you receive, and the essential right thing to do. I myself feel that your comment that we should just take future hits from terrorists is just totally unacceptable.

I think that you worry too much about world opinion. Believe me when I tell you, - as someone who's lived on both sides of the Atlantic - that the loud anti-American voices in Europe are the voices of paper tigers. They are much more paranoid about their own weaknesses than is apparent to most Americans. And I'm not just talking about military weakness. I mean political, economic, moral, ethical, philosophical weakness. Europeans just cannot understand why they are not as strong and decisive as America. The big question they are asking themselves is: what do we have to do to achieve parity? And, by all indications, they are as divided on the subject as they've been for the past 50 years.

You said: " Can we then conclude that it's right to kill a man who's forced to defend a lousy dictator, but not the lousy dictator who forces him?"

I think the reasoning behind is that in "WAR", which this is, it is reasonable to expect that those trying to kill you are fair targets. Killing Sadam would be ok if he was going to kill you and you can make an argument that going after him is just going after "command and control" and this makes it fair.

And I am not saying that war is good or that any killing is fair. But that is just the way it is... Maybe war is not understandable, maybe it is not acceptable, but it is a fact.

Markku: I know, I know, I just gotta vent sometimes. I expose myself too much to world opinion, I think.

I'm not so upset over the Europeans right now; I'm more upset at the anger the US is getting from the very people who have the most to fear from Saddam, even though upon further thought their outrage is completely understandable and not really a reason to quit now. The people who fear us the most right now are the people who would be slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands in an instant if the US pulled out of Iraq.

A funny thing: going by the newspapers and the Web it sounds as if the US is on the verge of splitting apart over all this. Yesterday my wife and I were driving around the neighborhood and I realized that I'd never seen so many flags up-- the place is as red, white and blue as it was right after Sept. 11, 2001. And actually talking to people I get the feeling that they differ as to whether it was wise to go into Iraq, for intelligent reasons, and they're not going to abandon those objections retroactively, but most of them want to see this through now. This in a part of the country that's often stereotyped as a bizarre left-wing enclave.

It gets tough but I think we'll pull through OK.

Update: Krekar's community apparently retreated to the Iranian mountains...

ct: Krekar hasn't made any statements that I know of since the attack on Ansar began. I take a lot of pleasure in knowing that he knows, though. I only wish he were there.

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