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How to Get Rid of Bad Guys
We make a huge mistake when we corner Bad Guys, eliminate all good options, and force them to fight. It is much better to take out the leadership than to have a war. And if you fail to kill foreign leaders, but just increase the risk that someone from their own team will take a shot every time they stick their head up, you have driven the leadership underground and greatly reduced their power.
So here is the simple proposal:
- Standing offer to any Recognized Bad Guy that if he shows up at Embassy Q, he will get a guarantee of protection and a lifetime of luxurious isolation in St Helena. He can keep his stolen wealth, his life, and his family. Make this as ironclad as possible.
- Tell any Recognized Bad Guy that unless and until he turns himself in as per #1, then there is a million-dollar bounty and US citizenship papers (for the entire family) of the person who kills said Recognized Bad Guy. Make it public. Guarantee it with Swiss bankers and pictures of gold bullion. Advertise it on the internet and dropped leaflets.
You may not like the idea of rewarding evil, but taking it off the board so that good may prevail is much more cost effective than, for example, the wars that have destroyed countries in recent years.
Published in General
Excellent.
This is designed, of course, to ensure that the Recognized Bad Guy is always paranoid and looking over his shoulder.
@jonahgoldberg keeps talking about issuing letters of marque. I believe the Constitution specifies this as a legal thing for the federal government to do.
Probably not exactly the same thing as your idea–but probably an overlapping thing.
Am I wrong? Someone set me straight if I’m wrong, please!
If I’m not mistaken, a letter of marque is issued to a private individual to allow them to take military action against a foreign power as an agent of the state that issued it. They were what separated privateers from pirates during the age of sail.
Letters of Marque relates to using 3rd parties to assist you in acts of war. At the republic’s founding that would have been privateers and attacking enemy merchant shipping but it is not as easy a system to use, in the traditional sense, now given how much military power has centralized into the standing militaries of modern states, it would probably only work against 3rd world nations in the traditional sense.
Goldberg tends to mention it in relation to using hacker/programmers/Silicon Valley in competing with China for supremacy of the Internet.
I’d just go with number 2.
I strongly disagree. The bad guys should be slaughtered like rats whenever they’re cornered. Buying them off simply encourages their replacements to be villainous enough to earn the same treatment. Slaughtering the evil ones along with their minions simultaneously advertises the wages of evil and thins the pool of future adversaries.
Your suggestion is horrifyingly wrong.
As would I. If there is the possibility of luxurious wealth and safety, then a new Bad Guy will pop up hoping to replace the retired Bad Guy. But if there is nothing but the possibility of being forever hunted by even one’s family and friends (because they will be rewarded), then maybe the next Bad Guy in line will think twice before assuming the job.
I love this idea, but I’m not sure we could offer anything to get any dictator to step down. They know they’re dead if they do no matter what we say. Offering rewards? I don’t know. I wish we had the capacity and will to cause deniable accidents to these leaders, but I don’t think we do. To do so we need embassies in places like Iran and normal relations and wed have to create a secret apparatus to do so, but we’d get scared of it and ultimately prosecute its members. Remember half of our politicians are Democrats. I’d rather us just deny visas to anyone who works with, supports, is relatives with, says good things about, these hostile regimes or anyone associated in anyway anywhere with terrorists or terrorist promoting organizations, groups, families. We always under estimate the power of a clean US visa and hence the threat of never having that outlet. We probably could do this without explicit legislation. But then what do we do about the Saudi royal family, the money they put here and around the world supporting extreme Islam.
The problem is that we end up destroying whole countries for the sake of this principle!
Was it worth it to destroy Syria because we would not give Assad an escape hatch?
Was it worth it to invade Iraq for the same reason?
Are we really willing to risk a nuclear conflict with North Korea and/or Iran rather than find a way to remove them as players that allows them to retire?
To me, sending our men and women into harm’s way when it can be avoided is horrifically wrong.
You must understand they will not quit. Penochet is the only dictator in my life time to step down and he had freed his country from an oppressive administrative state but was harassed to death. There is always somebody offering an escape but they’re safer staying in power and doubling down.
Hillary Clinton’s triumph over Kadaffi didn’t work out to well for the US or for Europe… or for a lot of people in North Africa and points south.
#2 is ordering a hit. Not saying they don’t deserve it. They do.
My concern is, if we start this, when will the hit be ordered for me because I don’t conform, or say the wrong thing. If we eliminate due process, none of us are safe from the government.
Being that kind of dictator is pretty much of a riding the tiger or eat or be eaten situation. IIRC, in Africa, the latter expression can be a literal description of succession struggles.
An exit guarantee could be devised and promoted. Instead of making it at the whim of any one nation, it could be an independent chartered organization, answerable only to its charter.
It could be done. I think it should be.
Foreign policy is not subject to due process. I am talking about a Most Wanted list of foreign leaders or terrorists. If the US would order a Predator strike, I am OK with putting a price on their heads. We just have to make the price high enough to ensure the target seriously considers the early retirement option.
It’s certainly worthy of discussion. The ways we have waged war for centuries are clearly a struggle to implement in this era.
I have always loved Jonah’s idea of reinstituting letters of Marque for cyber warfare.
What about bad guys who are heads of State? Wouldn’t putting an official hit out on them trigger the kind of confrontation between our nations that your idea seeks to avoid?
I think your idea of targeting bad guys is good. But I don’t think there should be an option 1 nor should we make it known to them that we are trying to kill them.
The known history of the US playing this card runs from failed exploding cigars (Castro) to the successful assassination of the POTUS’s old college roommate and allied South Vietnamese head of state (Diem). The political blow back was humiliating for all involved and predictable. And three weeks after Diem’s assassination Kennedy and the wife went to visit Dallas.
Of COURSE the prime targets are bad guys who have declared war on America.
By all means: put a price on the heads of the worst guys in Iran and North Korea. Do it yesterday. They already would kill Trump if they could.
Option 1 truly will save lives. Lives of good people.
And making it known that the bounty is there is what makes it work – everyone down the chain might be gunning for the leader.
Foreign policy is subject to political and diplomatic pressures. When defending provocative actions to allies you can have all the covert collaboration processes and liaisioning you want, May and Macron and Merkel will gnash their teeth and rend their garments and roll their eyes at American cowboys and contrast responsible statecraft with whatever bizarro world exploits Washington and Langley are cooking up.
Providing comfortable retirements to third world tyrants was a bit of cottage industry until the press finally toxified the practice as the capstone to murderous careers as a CIA puppet.
And once relocated, under no circumstance should they be allowed to communicate with the world. No Internet, no phones, no cameras,….
What’s it to me what it is to you?
Ah, yes! Thanks for the reminder. It was for hacking work, not violent work.
But, Goldberg aside, letters of marque do overlap with iWe’s proposal, but neither is reducible to the other; or am I mistaken?
(No doubt I am, about many things. Is this one of them?)
I’m not sure there are military letters of mark; just naval.
This seems to be a clever variant of what I call the Angelo Codevilla approach, since I first heard it in an essay he wrote for Claremont Review. He opposed the approach of W and others of fixing the societies from which terror and other problems emanate in order to solve our problems with terrorists, etc. Instead, let the local thugs do whatever they want to their own victims, but the second they or anything they do harms US, then bomb their house, their friends, etc. Whereas now we tend to cosy up to the elites and try to influence them to moderate, his approach is, like yours, to make sure it is in their personal interest to protect our interests.
I thought the estimable Professor was taking a clue from the Mafia. And that approach works. I think it is called realpolitik. But we are a Puritanical/Romantic/Idealistic sort of folk, and as soon as we see a picture of one of the victims of said thug we (certainly I) will get moved to DO something about this evil, and the plan will be abandoned, and boots will be on the ground, if only as “advisors.”
Or their aspirin factories. All that is old will be made new again.
The problem with option #2 is that the guys with access to the bad guys, are often bad guys as well, or at least bad guys apprentices.
Do you want to give them all and their families entry?
Yes but… The whole reason that Kadaffi had to go was his hold on some 320 billions of dollars of gold bullion, which according to whom you talk to, was coveted by the French, the Saudis and Qatar officials, or else the Clintons. The money is gone now, but someone somewhere has it. (And I suspect that Hillary got a finder’s fee for it.)
Anyone who does not keep their nose clean under this program can be deported back to their original hellhole to face the wrath of their countrymen.
I doubt people who want to make trouble. Think of Nigeria, where the ministers steal everything for a short period, then flee to London to try to live the rest of their days as quietly as they possibly can.
What happens when they get ronery, so ronery?