THE Jerusalem Post reports:

[Israel's] Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) on Tuesday said that the killing of Osama bin Laden bears witness to the fact that the US has adopted the Israeli strategy of targeting terrorist leaders. In an interview with Israel Radio, Mofaz said that the strategy was originally employed by Israel following the murder of nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mofaz called on the government to increase targeted killings of Palestinian terrorist leaders. The former defense minister said that targeted killings have been successful in curtailing terrorist activities.

Evidently the killing—some would say assassination or "targeted killing"—of Osama bin Laden is seen as legitimatising other countries' pro-assassination policies.

Moreover, celebrity legal eagle Alan Dershowitz argues that the non-response to Mr bin Laden's assassination from governments with a record of condemning the practice reveals the shady substance of these objections. Noting that "a US national security official has confirmed to Reuters that 'this was a kill operation' and there was no desire to capture Bin Laden alive", Mr Dershowitz correctly infers that "those who have opposed the very concept of targeted killings should be railing against the killing of Osama Bin Laden". But they aren't.

Among others, these critics include officials in Britain, France, Italy, Russia, the EU, Jordan, and the United Nations. [Jack Straw, the former British foreign secretary] once said, "The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive." The French foreign ministry has declared "that extrajudicial executions contravene international law and are unacceptable." The Italian Foreign Minister has said, "Italy, like the whole of the European Union, has always condemned the practice of targeted assassinations." The Russians have asserted that "Russia has repeatedly stressed the unacceptability of extrajudicial settling of scores and 'targeted killings.'" Javier Solana has noted that the "European Union has consistently condemned extrajudicial killings." The Jordanians have said, "Jordan has always denounced this policy of assassination and its position on this has always been clear." And Kofi Annan has declared "that extrajudicial killings are violations of international law."



Yet none of these nations, groups or individuals have criticized the targeted killing of Osama Bin Laden by the US. The reason is obvious. All the condemnations against targeted killing was directed at one country. Guess which one? Israel, of course.

But surely Israel's is not the only government that will make the most of President Obama's seeming embrace of assassination and the other governments' implicit approval. Isn't this a problem? At one level, I agree with Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University, who has argued:

In my view, targeting terrorist leaders is not only defensible, but actually more ethical than going after rank and file terrorists or trying to combat terrorism through purely defensive security measures. The rank and file have far less culpability for terrorist attacks than do their leaders, and killing them is less likely to impair terrorist operations. Purely defensive measures, meanwhile, often impose substantial costs on innocent people and may imperil civil liberties. Despite the possibility of collateral damage inflicted on civilians whom the terrorist leaders use as human shields, targeted assassination of terrorist leaders is less likely to harm innocents than most other strategies for combating terror and more likely to disrupt future terrorist operations. That does not prove that it should be the only strategy we use, but it does mean that we should reject condemnations of it as somehow immoral.

If, for example, NATO's actual goal in Libya is to get rid of Muammar Qaddafi, it seems better to directly kill the guy than to kill a large numbers of other people, including blameless civilians, by dropping a bunch of bombs. That seems right.

Nevertheless, this leaves me pretty uncomfortable. At another level, it's hard to see the principled distinction between a "terrorist leader" and a head of state who has given orders that have led to the killing of thousands of civilians. This is not to say that casuists are unable to draw intelligible distinctions, only that such distinctions are unlikely to prove compelling to the families and friends of civilians incidentally slain by American or French or British bombs. Those undertaking killing missions invariably believe that their ends justify their deadly means. That al-Qaeda was persuaded of the justice of its tactics leaves those who loved al-Qaeda's victims utterly unmoved. Those who loved the collateral victims of the "global war on terror" are equally unmoved by our conviction in the righteousness of this cause.

Whether or not there is a moral equivalence here (and I'm not claiming there is), there's undoubtedly a psychological equivalence. People are people. Loss is loss. Grief is grief. Longing for retribution is longing for retribution. The deep question is, given the universality of grievance and the urge to avenge, who among us has the final authority to classify a violent act of retribution—a "targeted killing", say—as a truly scale-balancing instance of retributive justice rather than an instance of gratuitous vengeance, an additional crime crying out for additional punishment?

Concern about this question I think underlies my discomfort with Mr Somin's sensible argument as well as the widespread official condemnation of "extrajudicial" and "unlawful" targeted killings. As Hobbes taught, if private reason is authoritative—if each is left to judge for herself what is right—we are left with a chaos of conflicting claims. In that case it seems that "justice" boils down to Thrasymachus' slogan: "Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger".

Because America is generally "the stronger", many Americans are pretty satisfied with Thrasymachean international justice. In a Thrasymachean world, America's authority to declare, as Mr Obama did declare, that "justice has been done" through American assassination is based ultimately upon America's superior strength. A civil global order would require that private reason be subordinated to public reason—that national judgment be subordinated to international law. The aspiration to an order of global public reason expressed in the quotations offered up by Mr Dershowitz often is, as Mr Dershowitz argues, cynically opportunistic. But it is just as often admirably authentic.

The silence of the usual critics of "illegal", "extrajudicial", targeted killing in the wake of America's killing of Osama bin Laden might reflect hypocrisy, sure. But this can be tough to distinguish from resignation to the fact that Mr Obama didn't submit his case for executing Mr bin Laden to some global civil authority because there isn't one and he didn't have to—because America's the biggest kid on the block and, ultimately, what America says goes. And, if it comes down to it, Britain, France, Italy, Russia and other powerful governments hope America will indulge their own kill-squad adventures with similar approving silences. Of course, if some aggrieved faction in the future seeks retribution through the targeted killing of one of these countries' leaders, that will be raw vengeance, that will be terrorism, that will be an international crime, because, like it or not, that's how it works.

(Photo credit: AFP)