THE PROBLEM BEING THAT YOU CAN'T MAKE A MORAL CASE AGAINST IT....:

How murder became an accepted tool of foreign policy: The apparent consensus that assassination is legitimate is very sinister (Alasdair Palmer, 20 Feb 2010, Daily Telegraph)

David Miliband says it is "outrageous". The French foreign ministry has expressed its "deep concern". Even the Americans appear to be gearing up for a major diplomatic protest. And the cause of all the outrage? Not the murder, almost certainly by the Israelis, of Mahmoud
al-Mabhouh in Dubai. Rather, it's that the murderers used forged British and French passports – or in America's case, that they used a US credit card to book flights to Dubai for six members of the hit squad.

Forging passports is certainly a bad thing – but is it worse than murder? To judge by the international reaction to the killing of al-Mabhouh, it is much worse. Yet it was not all that long ago that it was thought to be, well, indecent for a government to go around assassinating its enemies. When the Government sent a group of SAS officers to murder suspected members of the IRA on Gibraltar, there was an enormous international outcry. Britain was hauled before the European Court and severely admonished. Would there be such a response today? Only if the killers forged their travel documents.

...it was just a matter of personal convenience for leaders to oppose it. But how are you going to convince democratic electorates that it is morally legitimate to kill several hundred thousand oppressed Iraqis through "peaceful" sanctions but evil to whack a few Ba'athist henchmen?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 20, 2010 1:44 PM