POLITICAL MURDER

Greg Woolf, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007) ("[T]here are at least two reasons why it is wrong to see the world of liberal democracy as an embattled refuge from violence. First, liberal democracies are deeply implicated in the violence that dogs many other states. Indirectly, the success of capitalist market economies has contributed to the impoverishment of many of the parts of the world where liberal states repeatedly fail, and in others the collapse of imperial systems has created conditions in which democracy found it hard to take root. There is, after all, a grim geography of political violence today, and it is not a geography of distance from liberalism and democracy. The military dictatorships of the Far East and parts of Latin America; the poorest post-colonial successor states of the British, French, Belgian and Soviet empires; communist China and North Korea and some parts of the Arab world: in all these regions western governments have been too involved, not too far removed. Directly, the operation of the arms trade, the Cold War militarization of other societies, the deliberate destablisation of some regimes and western support for some despotic governments have combined to create conditions in which terrorism thrives. The notion of the autonomy of sovereign nations, a key tenet of liberal democratic thought, provides a convenient pretext for non-intervention. None of this excuses political murder, but it gives some reason to see these states not as under-developed democracies so much as part of a global division of violence." Id. at 56-57. "Assassination has always been used sparingly by civil societies. It is, after all, murder, and no government wishes to convey the opinion that this is more than exceptionally legitimate. Yet faced with certain kinds of threats that seem to admit no other solution, removing a key enemy by any means possible has had its attractions.  . . . Today the motivation is to remove a key dictator or a terrorist mastermind. Liberal governments try to balance the guilt incurred by one act of dubious morality against the possible good of a greater number. But this is not merely principled utilitarianism. Distance sanitises. Killing a European leader or a political opponent in the US would seem a much greater crime than eliminating the ruler of a different kind of state. Classifying terrorists as enemy combatants or Middle Eastern presidents as despots puts them conveniently beyond the moral pale. The language of wartime evokes the specter of temporary and extraordinary license. These are unusual times, we don't normally behave this way, desperate situations call for desperate measures. We don't kill people like us, and so it is important that their difference be recognized. Perhaps this reassures those who give the orders more than it does any member of the public who might discover what has been done in our name." Id. at 65-66.).