Articles
Audacious Dubai Hit Was A Morally Justifiable Success
25 February 2010
The recent killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by agents using forged passports has provoked indignation from the British establishment. The prime minister has promised a full investigation while the media has lined up to condemn Israel.
But while some have voiced understandable concern at the misuse of passports, others have criticised the operation itself. In the Daily Telegraph last week, Alasdair Palmer said that it was a "sinister development" if assassination was now "an accepted tool of foreign policy".
But to denounce all extra judicial killings as illegitimate is somewhat facile. In recent years, Al Qaeda operatives and insurgents in Pakistan have been killed by the use of American unmanned drones. According to CIA Director, Leon Pancetta: "It's the only game in town in confronting and trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership."
The point is that those who are killed are enemy combatants and therefore legitimate targets in the ongoing war on terror.
Al-Mabhouh fitted into this category. He was a senior operative for Hamas, an organisation whose depraved cult of death glorifies the killing of Jews and Israelis worldwide. He recently confessed to being involved in the killing of two Israelis in 1989 and, at the time of his death, was reportedly on a mission to transfer rockets from Iran to Gaza.
If Mossad carried out the operation - and this has yet to be proven - Israel had every right to regard al-Mabhouh as an enemy combatant with blood on his hands.
The fact that he was dressed in civilian clothing and operating on foreign soil would not have given him immunity from attack.
Liberals are uneasy with extra judicial killings because they involve, by definition, punishment outside the law. But the option of arrest and due process was simply unavailable on this occasion.
Whoever killed Al-Mabhouh knew that he had been living in Syria, a country that provides first class protection for a horrifying variety of terrorist godfathers. With Syria unwilling to hand over al-Mabhouh, the option of arrest inside Dubai was similarly impossible.
With the arrest option unavailable, countries can either give terrorists carte blanche to continue their operations or eliminate them altogether. Had al-Mabhouh been left untouched, he could well have brought a lethal cocktail of Iranian weaponry into Gaza, endangering the lives of countless thousands of Israelis.
This might have satisfied liberal European opinion but not Israel's own government which has no interest in committing national suicide. Some argue that killing militants is ineffective in the long run, given how easily they can be replaced.
Terror groups are like the mythical hydra, we are told. If you kill a few operatives, several more emerge to supplant them. But it is never easy for a terror network to replace experienced commanders and bomb makers, many of whom have been trained for years at considerable expense. At the very least targeted assassinations buy democracies time while their enemies are forced to regroup.
Extra judicial killings are also designed for the purpose of deterrence. Al-Mabhouh's assassination will remind all terrorists and arms smugglers that their operations are under constant surveillance. They will not sleep easily if they know that their movements are being tracked by foreign intelligence and they may become permanently distrustful of others.
Of course not all extra judicial killings are legitimate. Several South American regimes used death squads in the 1960s to crush left-wing opposition while the Soviet Union was notorious for state-sanctioned murder. Autocratic regimes routinely silence peaceful dissidents in the most barbaric fashion, citing national security as a pretext.
But Al-Mabhouh was in a wholly different category. He chose to be part of the global jihad that is currently assaulting Western interests across the globe. In particular, he was an active participant in Iran's unrelenting war of terror against Israel.
That was why, despite the liberal intelligentsia's sanctimonious bleating, his assassination was both audacious and morally justified.
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