Khamenei's killing renews questions about U.S. assassinating foreign leaders

The opening strike of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran was a highly sophisticated operation that dealt a major blow to the Islamic Republic, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in his office in central Tehran.

“Khamenei's killing renews questions about U”

NPR

The U.S. and Israel used an array of high-tech intelligence and military hardware to pull it off—a stunning display of power and lethal precision.

NPR

But lost in all that modern wizardry is a fundamental moral and strategic question: Should the U.S. be in the business of assassinating foreign leaders?

The piece traces a long and shifting relationship in U.S. policy toward killing foreign heads of state.

It highlights the Church Committee investigations in the 1970s, including an interim 1975 report that found the U.S. was implicated in plots to kill foreign leaders and argued that assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order and morality and should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.

NPR

In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning the U.S. government from engaging in political assassinations.

Colleague and historian Timothy Naftali is cited as saying the era’s consensus against assassinations grew from public dismay over the imperial presidency after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

The article notes the impact of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. on elite attitudes.

It recounts the 1986 bombing of Libya and, in the 1990s, U.S. strikes on Saddam Hussein’s palaces, with Brent Scowcroft reflecting on whether the operation intended to kill Saddam.

Naftali argues that those actions were military operations targeting command and control facilities, not assassination plots, and that presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton found ways around the assassination ban.

It also describes the post-9/11 shift when Congress authorized all necessary means to go after the perpetrators of 9/11, expanding the toolkit beyond traditional warfare.

Those sophisticated capabilities make it increasingly easy to target foreign leaders with a high likelihood of success, according to Naftali.

“Khamenei's killing renews questions about U”

NPR

He says that this shift did not exist in the Cold War or early post-Cold War periods, and that it may lower the threshold for deciding to engage in political assassination.

The effect is that the United States becomes more vulnerable as well as its adversaries.

He argues that mutual vulnerability can deter in some cases, but can also provoke existential angst and instability.

He urges a national conversation about how rare such killings should be and to keep the threshold for violating this norm very high.