There are times when the very real, very evil individual (I can’t bring myself to call them “humans”) do something so utterly evil, that they must be punished – quickly and ruthlessly. You have to hit – and you have to hit them HARD.
This March, Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland directed aides to include “ideas that one official described as well outside the mainstream”. We now know what some of these options are: they include everything from reintroducing nuclear weapons to South Korea as a show of force and deterrence to the regime change via assassinating Kim Jong-un and his top commanders.
And I have only one thing to say – about bloody time!
There was a time in the past when assassinating a foreign leader was an integral component of America’s national-security toolkit. During the Cold War, rogue and/or pro-Soviet leaders were targets for removal. Fidel Castro (Cuba), Patrice Lumumba (Congo) Rafael Trujillo (the Dominican Republic), Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala) were all on the CIA’s hit-list at one point in time, and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was a frequent target due to his sponsorship of international terrorism. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan authorized an air strike on Qaddafi’s compound in the hope that he would be in the building.
No so long ago, in fact, several days prior to major military operations in Iraq, Washington lobbed cruise missiles at Saddam and the Iraqi political leadership in the belief that perhaps further war could be avoided. So the will and the means for doing it are still here. The only question I’m asking you here is – who should be a target?
Pursuing a policy that would lead to, e.g, the assassination of Kim Jong-un and the decapitating of the North Korean leadership wouldn’t therefore be a big reversal from the standard U.S. policy. Policies, of course, can change and presidential directives and executive orders can be modified or rewritten – that’s why, lately, this practice was not so prominent. But it is still feasible. And there is no statutory prohibition that would prohibit the president of the United States to order a hit on a foreign leader. Although 18 U.S. Code, Section 1116 could be used to prosecute a U.S. person who attempts to kill a foreign leader, this statute only applies if the crime is committed in the United States or the leader is targeted “in a country other than his own.” If any POTUS, even Trump were willing to amend current executive orders on the books, his administration would presumably target Kim Jong-un and not be penalized under the criminal code. That’s a fact.
With this cleared, i.e. that there is no crime really in the act should it happened, the only question remains – whom? The US has both the means and the will to do that. The only question is, who should be the target?
Despite the MSM propagated hysteria, I’m not distracted by Fat Boy Kim’s antics. No, he and his regime while despicable and abhorrent are not prime targets. What is of more immediate concern are resurgent Iran and Russia, filling the vacuum left by US withdrawal from the ME under Obama and following the ISIL short lived surge there.
But I’m also interested in the opinions of fellow members of Nation States board.
