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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
I have no moral qualms with targeting heads of state, or even encouraging “bad guys” to do the deed through bounties/letters of marque.
But this proposal is trying to pretend the world is a much simpler place than it actually is.
The underlying problem in most countries ruled by dictators is the not the dictator himself, it’s the fact that the people of that country are too disorganized/divided/uncivilized to establish a better system of leadership on their own. That problem can’t be solved with car bombs and sniper rifles. So taking out an undesirable leader just creates a vacuum for the next undesirable leader, and for us to sanction his assassination, followed by another dictator, etc. Wash, rinse, repeat until you have a truly failed state.
And in most cases, a tyrannical dictator is preferable to a genuinely failed state. Bashar Assad is a horrible human being who probably deserves to die, but he’s still better for US policy than a Syria ruled informally by ISIS. The reason Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden set up shop in Afghanistan was because it was also essentially a failed state after numerous leaders were deposed by the US or the USSR.
Of for perhaps the best example: the reason we’re still unable to pull out of Iraq is because it’s not stable enough to exist without us. Our troop presence in the country over a decade after Saddam’s death is essentially an admission that the country was much stabler with him than without him.
Since several people have mentioned Jonah in this thread, this is a good place to point out the basic hypothesis of Jonah’s book:
Namely, that our (relative) peace and prosperity in the West is due to fundamental structures and principles of civilization that took centuries to slowly and painfully build up. The silly conceit at the heart of the second Iraq war was that we could short-circuit those centuries of arduous and painful learning by simply imposing the lessons we had learned onto the Iraqi society from the top down.
While @iwe post obviously doesn’t call for that approach, it would actually lead to a world which would be even more dangerous by further destabilizing countries which are already inherently weak and unstable.
I am not suggesting we put a bounty on everyone’s head… Just the guys who are really terrible. Think of the threats from Iran, North Korea, ISIS etc.
There will always be another crazy person who wants their gig, even with the risk. Generally, they become most wanted because they’re lunatics. Power attracts them.
Or do you think Saddam didn’t have people other than the US trying to kill him, and he had millions, and he could have scooted out safely at any time, all on his own?
Also, I’d like to argue for, once again, transferring all of our oversight and power to The Jedi Council. I really can’t see the downside to letting the smartest, most force-powered people make decisions that impact our very lives.
Won’t the behavior of the retired bad guy, if it’s well known he sold his followers out, make future potential followers skeptical about following the next bad guy ?
I think rewarding bad guys would only work if it’s done while people are still following the bad guy willingly. The problem is it’s almost impossible to recognize the real monsters in embryo—the ones who start out with people following them willingly and become like Lenin later. The other problem is that genuine bad guys want to be worshipped, and/or look forward to having coercive power over others, more than they want safety and wealth. So the bribery wouldn’t net the really dangerous people.
Might be a good idea. Will never, ever happen.
If anyone would try it, it would be Trump.
We can’t shouldn’t and hopefully wont do it. These foreign systems are far beyond our understanding and control including what happens when the guy at the top who we think is the cause, is gone. JFK with popular approval from our media helped toppled Diem. We encourage toppling of Kadafi, Saddam Hussein, helped with the Pasha of Iran, and actually helped the Sandinistas fill in behind the vacuum left by Somoza, and let’s not forget Cuba.
I’m continuing to comment on this thread because I was involved in relevant situations too complex to relate that cause my skepticism and make me not want to give the Federal Bureaucracy nor our politicians more power than they already have.
“Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot.” Dirty Harry – Magnum Force.
We could put all the bad guys AND their families on a single island. Then, unbeknownst to them, the island, having way more people on it than normal, would probably tip over, drowning all the bad guys and their progeny.
Here’s an island paradise we could send the bad guys and their family to, the North Sentinelese Island:
The local native population seem very enthusiastic to meet new people:
I have to agree with @mendel that this proposal assumes a simplistic understanding of foreign relations. It is way too materialistic, in the monetary sense. Tyrants that exist, like the Supreme Leader in Iran or Un in North Korea, are not satisfied by money. They are satisfied with “power”. The men who surround them and have the capacity to kill them or assist in his assassination are men that are also interested in “power” and have ideological commitments that preclude wealth. In most cases these men are also fabulously wealthy because of their positions. So they can’t be bought nor can they be assassinated that easy.
The incentives you propose are quite weak because of this. But if you did succeed, by some luck, the resulting chaos would not necessarily be to our benefit. Perhaps an even worse group of men might arrive on the scene and acquire and use weapons in the possession of the former tyrants, killing our own.
This is why nation-building, while unpopular, is the safest and surest bet because it is a long-term strategy. It doesn’t satiate short-term desires about asserting “strength”, which tend to be driven by emotion rather than reason, but long-term concerns (like stability).
Its worked before, Germany and Japan are good examples, but it takes time and resources and that tends to not go well with the fickle desires of the populace.
Sun Tzu advised to always give a cornered enemy an escape route (of your choosing).
In battle. Not in war.
For years there was a $25 million bounty on Osama Bin Laden and nobody took it.
Which either speaks to the loyalty of those around him or to the prescription of the value of the reward. For the record – there is nobody in my life, that I wouldnt turn in for $25 million.
Hank, is that you?
I think the reason it worked with Germany and Japan is that the Allies essentially destroyed each country. (I had a conversation with a veteran who landed on Omaha Beach and made it all the way to Frankfurt. He said he and his XO climbed the largest pile of rubble in the city, and for 360 degrees they saw nothing but rubble.) The Germans and Japanese knew they had been totally defeated. We came in and ran each country (well, the US/British/French sectors of Germany) until the systems we put in place “took.”
In our current conflicts, we have not done this. Iraq was not totally destroyed (at least not by us), nor was Afghanistan. (Though I’m not sure even this would work with 3rd world nations; how much more ruin could we have done to Afghanistan?)
You can call me Johnson.
a) Both Japan and Germany were sorta kinda given a choice (of sorts) when it came to occupiers. They could be occupied by the US/Britain/France alliance, or they could be occupied by the USSR. Which political ethos would you prefer shape your country after being conquered? Iraq didn’t really get that choice, since the US made it clear its goal was to withdraw from the country as quickly as possible.
b) The US didn’t have to create whole new systems ex nihilo. Both Japan and Germany had constitutional civil institutions already. The occupiers’ primary political objectives were to root out the “bad apples” and to help guide those existing institutions towards a better path whereby they ruled with the consent of the governed. Germany had been under Nazi rule for “only” 12 years and Japan had been under military dictatorship for “only” 13 years. The post-war institutions were (arguably) a return to a previous governance paradigm. By contrast, Iraq had never known anything other than 35 years of fascist rule, 20 years of absolute monarchy, and centuries of foreign imperial occupation.
c) Even with their previous experience with constitutional government, West Germany didn’t get to elect its own government until 1949, and West Berlin was still formally under Allied occupation right up until 1990. In Japan, the Allied occupation didn’t end until 1952. In Iraq, by contrast, they held their first elections only two years after the fall of the Baathist regime, and the US withdrew troops only six years after that. That was not enough time to build a new nation ex nihilo.
Lybia.
Ukraine.
The US does not have a good record of following through on its promises of protection.
True. And that terrible reputation needs fixing in any case.