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The Repercussions of an Assassination Policy
Russia is on the cusp of breaking apart, with each region/nation/tribe going its own way. The country’s army has been exposed, and its finest assets dashed on the Ukrainian rocks, leaving a thin veneer of central government authority backed with no real threat of military power. It stands to reason that more independently-minded regions will cut ties with Moscow.
There is really only one thing keeping any would-be secessionist leader from breaking away: Putin’s track record of murdering any who oppose him. His policy of assassinating dissenters of all kinds has been extremely effective, because it is clear to any Russian national (in or out of Russia) that even voicing the wrong opinion can lead to polonium in your coffee or unhealthy deceleration after a brief encounter with unrestrained gravity.
On the one hand, I abhor murdering people for merely exercising their power of speech. But from a strategic and historic perspective, it is intriguing: murdering people really seems to be working for Vlad and his goals.
Sure, there are downsides in the long run for Russia: anyone who can get out, does. This has been broadly true since 1990, with a burst of 2022 acceleration in emigration and flight. The long-term drain on human resources will doom Mother Russia in the end. But is that end 2023, or 2030, or later?
So is assassination a legitimate/productive policy for a government? I have long advocated the US targeting leaders instead of foot soldiers: if we could, for example, take out Iran’s leadership in one strike it would seem to have all kinds of net benefits. I still think this is true — but only for very specific and evil foreign enemies.
Yet I fear an American government that is capable of targeting individuals overseas is also capable of following Putin’s lead and murdering our own citizens. We have plenty of targeting already going on (the IRS, FBI, etc., are all demonstratively capable of political witchhunts). We would not sleep better at night knowing that federal agencies might keep going down this path of illegal targeting of civilians.
What think you?
Published in General
So you are assuming that people living under Saddam Hussein really wanted him to stay in power? My cousin did three tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army and went in on the first day of the war. He told me that Iraqi’s revered George Bush, nicknaming him “The Liberator.”
I’m impressed! He understood when they said this to each other in Arabic! But my point stands. Women in Baghdad today are less free, in their day to day life, than they were under Saddam.
If it’s any consolation to you, Americans are less free in their day to day life than they were 20 years ago, too. I’m so glad you advocate for Iraqi women. I really don’t know much about their day to day existence, but I’m sure they and their loved ones are not in fear of being raped, fed into paper shredders, or gassed with sarin and cyanide. I haven’t heard any calls for a return to the days of Saddam.
No, they’re at greater risk of being killed if they don’t wear Hijab.
Well I guess that what you hear is all that there is is. Game!
Edited to add:
Not to mention Iraqi Christians. Better off under Saddam or today in Iraq?
Things may not be perfect in Iraq but you are going to have to go a long way to convince me that they were better off being massacred under Saddam. Does the fact that 25 million children are starving in India today mean that they should go back to the days of colonial rule?
Are they? Really?
How many starved under the British?
How many women in Iraq were unsafe because they didn’t wear a Hijab under Saddam?
I are evidently mentallyc challenged, so let me explain it in terms that even you might understand.
I support the Minsk peace process. The United States didn’t and it was a smoke screen all along that neither the west nor the newly installed government in Kiev had any intention of following – by the admission of the Ukrainians, Germans and French. Instead it was a means for buying time to prepare Ukraine for war to take back territory it had lost.
Ukraine is not some homogeneous country. It should have a federal system rather than a centralized one that is dictated from Kiev.
I support not having the United States government overthrow a democratically elected government in Ukraine as the American deep state has done. I don’t support pos politicians like Lindsay Graham or other neocon Republicans who seem like characters out of Dr Strangelove.
I don’t believe the lies our government constantly feeds us about Ukraine – which evidently you do.
I don’t support going into a situation we cannot win with the incompetent military we have.
I don’t know those facts. The whole point is that you are irked that Iraq is doing better without a murderous dictator because it somehow upsets your worldview. There is no way in rational heaven that you can justify life under Saddam.
Well, maybe you support the Minsk peace process, but Vladimir Putin certainly doesn’t, so I guess the U.S. position is moot:
https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-says-minsk-agreements-eastern-ukraine-no-longer-exist-2022-2?op=1
Is that your justification for Russia invading and killing thousands of people?
The United States overthrew a democratically elected government in Ukraine?? Are you just making this up??
Please tell us one of these lies so we can discuss it.
Who is advocating for military action? Alex Jones?
The 500K dead is a well known fiction created by Saddam, which you love to keep repeating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimates_of_deaths_due_to_sanctions
Well your statement you are mentally challenged sure clears up a lot…
So any country that isn’t homogenous grants Russia a blanket right to invade & dismember it?
Military competence is a relative thing & almost No military appears as incompetent as the Russian military. Many more “smoking accidents” like the one at the Crimean airbase & they won’t have much of an air force left.
So why make those comments?
On the contrary. Without personalising it I think there are world views that can’t accept that the US occupation of Iraq made life worse for Iraqi women and for Iraqi Christians.
Sure, and I’m not trying to. But everything that came after him was not automatically better.
You are trying to cherry-pick anything you can find that might be worse now than under Saddam in order to undermine the whole idea that toppling the Iraqi regime was either a mistake or immoral. Am I right?
500k dead is actually an improvement over the one-million dead claimed by Ossama Bin Laden and repeated automatically without critical examination by people like Dennis Kookcinich and Joe Biden. The Iraqi Death Count Project (I don’t remember the precise name), which made an attempt at an actual body count, came up with about 100,000 people by the end of the war, if I remember correctly. Opponents just love to throw out ridiculous numbers because it sounds so devastating (not that 100,000 deaths is anything to celebrate.)
I disagree on assassination as a foreign policy, because that’s essentially what it is. What’s good for the goose will be good for the gander, and so you will have ramifications. Plus, other countries will look at this with disgust, and there will be economic and foreign policy retribution not just from our enemies but from our friends. Life is s complex fabric. You don’t pull on a string and not affect the material.
As to Putin getting away with it, well, strictly from his hold on power it has worked for now. But that kind of attitude is what has made his country essentially third world and a decrepit place to live. Even his military, which was supposed to be its strength, is dysfunctional. If the head is foul, the whole body stinks.
IIRC one of the reasons the CIA stopped trying to assassinate Fidel Castro (besides all the failures) was they finally realized that the guys below him were just as big a bunch of bastards, so they wouldn’t solve anything. The same is most likely true for many rogue regimes.
Everything has ramifications. Invading a country and killing hundreds of thousands of people must have at least as much ramifications as assassinating the leader of that invading army. May I ask you about the Adolph Hitler example? Was it a good thing for people (or a government) to try to assassinate him?
Is it really a concern what others think of us? That is all I heard from the left when George Bush invaded Iraq – that we were not liked by the rest of the world. But isn’t doing the right thing more important than being liked?
The more … diplomatic … way of putting it, of course, would be to say that the US “merely” had a hand (kinda like a “guide on the side” and such) in the removal from office of the Russia-friendly duly elected President of Ukraine at the time (i.e. Yanukovich) and the therefore subsequent triggering of a Presidential election that … abracadabra! (“abracadabra!”?) … led to the election of a … lo and behold! (“lo and behold!”?) … US/NATO/EU-friendly President of Ukraine (i.e. Poroshenko).
The second one is easy to respond to. I never said nothing about what other countries think of us. I said there will be economic and foreign policy retribution.
As to Hitler, do you mean assassination prior to he starting wars? I would be against that, yes. You wouldn’t have foreknowledge of what he intended to do. Unless you have a crystal ball. Now once you are in a war against him, then obviously he is fair game.
Well, you did say “other countries will look at this with disgust.”
I did mean assassination after he started his wars. So if you are okay with assassinating Hitler, why are you against assassinating anybody else?
No surer way of getting elected in Ukraine like being a total Putin suck-up like Lukashenko is in Belarus.
That they will look at it with disgust is not the motivating factor for the US. It’s the economic and foreign policy implications that leads me to say no.
I am against assassinating anyone we are not at war with. If we are at war with them, that’s a different story. I thought the question was for peace time assassinations.
Many/most of the usual suspects (especially the usual list of RINO types etc) seem to think it’s always off-limits even during wartime.
And while it’s not the one I remember them making, I can see the point that if the people of the country think their leader is over the edge or whatever, THEY can deal with him/her. Why should we do their dirty work for them?
Fair enough. I had clarified assassination during wartime earlier than the comment you responded to.
Post Saddam. Christians in Iraq were wiped out.
Well, that sounds a little over-the-top. I looked into it a little bit and found that Iraq used to have a Christian population of about 1.4 million (6% of total population) and about 3/4ths of them have moved out of the country. A large part of that seems not to have been due to the Iraqi government, but due to the Islamic State which conquered the northern part of the country and occupied it between 2014 and 2017. With help from the U.S. military, Iraq finally ousted the terrorists. It looks like Christians may be making modest gains recently. The Iraq Parliament recently made Christmas an official public holiday, and they invited a visit from the Pope in 2021.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2021-03/iraq-apostolic-journey-church-christians-history.html
Zelensky, elected in 2019. Not a Putin suck-up.
Poroshenko, elected in 2014. Not a Putin suck-up.
Yanukovich, elected in 2010. Not a Putin suck-up at the time. Ousted in 2014 … for turning into one.
Yushchenko, elected in 2005. Not a Putin suck-up.
Summary: Your knowledge/understanding of Ukrainian politics could do with substantial improvement.
Those numbers are laughable.
The estimate of people like Douglas MacGregor is that the Ukrainians have lost something like 160000 dead to the Russians 20000.
The same people who lied about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya are the same ones telling us the losses in Ukraine.
I have spent 25 years of my life studying military history. You and others sound like Baghdad Bob.
Russia is more unified in its history than at any other time than the second world war. Their propaganda tells them that they are fighting the same Nazis their grand parents fought and died against. This has been amplified by the stories of Refugees who spent the last 8 years fleeing Ukraine and bombastic announcements by people like Poroshenko who bragged about murdering children on national tv.
As to Putin supposedly assassinating the opposition. We are told this by the same types of people who openly hell bent on dismembering Russia since the 1990s.
Did you seriously cite a wikipedia article as a source?
Your not allowed to do this high school for grade papers.