Tyrannicide: An American Value? – CounterPunch.org

The United States has had a long, checkered relationship with murder. On the one hand, the myths of 1776 tell of a nation born of resistance to the tyranny that forms the core of its identity. Values ​​that legitimize tyrannicide can be seen in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

On the other hand, since the Lieber Code (1863), the United States has followed the international ban on murder and General Order No. 100, which describes murder as a “relapse into barbarism.”

Nevertheless, assassinations were common in American covert operations, and many argued that the United States should be exempt from such prohibitions in times of war and against foreign forms of tyranny. The Church Committee (1975) reiterated this position, noting that assassinations, while contrary to American values, were not contrary to American values.Today we should not rule out supporting dissident groups seeking to overthrow tyrants…“ (emphasis added 1975, 258).

President Ford banned the use of assassination in the first of a series of executive orders adopted and modified by all subsequent presidents. But the War on Terror, the War Powers Resolution, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, and the Intelligence Oversight Act demonstrate that the United States has significant capabilities for covert assassination.

The US strikes on Hussein in 2003 were the first open attacks by a state to target and kill another ruler. NATO carried out similar open attacks on Gaddafi during the Libya intervention in 2011.

The alleged conspiracy between terrorist groups and Hussein was used to justify these first assassination attempts. Gaddafi assumed that genocide was imminent.

In addition to the strategic advantages that accrue from the tactics of attacking both heads of state, it is the moral arguments in the rhetoric of Presidents Bush and Obama that make clear the strong rationale for deliberately violating an international prohibition as significant as murder. The language President Bush used to justify the attacks was carefully chosen to appeal to American morality: it combined a just war against tyranny, the promotion of human rights, the expansion of democracy, and the embrace of American values ​​as universal goods.

Importantly, it was only when weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize that the Bush administration increased the moral rhetoric of fighting tyranny and promoting freedom. above security threats or alleged links to al-Qaeda.

Similar moral justifications emerged when the US targeted Gaddafi. The rhetoric of “freedom versus tyranny” was a stronger theme from the start, as the UN Security Council’s mandate was to prevent an impending genocide. President Obama was clear about this: “The goal (of the intervention) is to make sure that the Libyan people can decide how they want to proceed and that they are finally freed from 40 years of tyranny…”

Afterward, Obama praised Gaddafi’s death in moral terms, saying it had removed the “dark shadow of tyranny” and “ushered in a democratic era for Libya.” Yet he later lamented that what happened in Libya after Gaddafi’s death was the “biggest mistake” of his presidency. The rapid return of slavery in Libya has ridiculed any notion of a “humanitarian” reason for intervention.

In both cases, murder was interpreted by the US as a legitimate tool of liberal power, a moral obligation, something essential to a state’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, from incivility to civilization. The cases demonstrate that, in the absence of a countervailing force or interest, the US has come to regard illiberal/tyrannical rulers, when associated with terrorism (whether that association is real or imagined), as so threatening and morally monstrous that it overrides the usual normative restraints against attacks on sovereign leaders.

Moreover, as a democratic state and a leading global power, the United States derives both domestic and foreign policy legitimacy from this specific form of political violence inherent in the promotion of American hegemony. The openness of these targeted US attacks on Hussein and Gaddafi calls into question the strength of the prohibition on murder and undermines its normative framework from within a liberal international order in which the usual safeguards against direct acts of violence against sovereigns no longer apply. Most importantly, these attacks set dangerous precedents for a growing liberal-imperialist moralism in the use of violence.

Since Trump opposes assassination of the USA as a national policy, I am probably immune. The irony kills me.