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David
Petraeus, the former American army general who served as the commander of the
Central Command and later as director of the CIA,
said that the killing of Qassem Suleimani was “more consequential” than the
killing of Osama bin Laden or of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Economist writes that while few bemoaned the
demise of the jihadist leaders of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, the killing of
Suleimani on 3 January has sparked a debate over the legality, effectiveness,
and impact of his assassination.
The Economist notes that
the campaign against international terrorism falls in the grey area between
policing at home and waging war abroad, with few of the well-established laws
and norms that attempt to govern them. The Pentagon’s latest rulebook, for
example, lets armed forces operate as they do in conventional war zones and hit
terrorist targets at will in places designated “areas of active hostilities,”
including parts of Yemen, Pakistan, and Niger, and all of Somalia. The
Americans have unleashed hundreds of drone strikes, air strikes and
ground raids.
The Economist adds:
In
many ways, America is following the precedent set by Israel, the state that
over the past half-century has surely most actively pursued a policy of hunting
down and killing foes abroad—not least when it sought to exact retribution
against those responsible for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympics in 1972. According to Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist whose
history of the subject, Rise and Kill First, was published in 2018,
Israel’s security services have carried out some 2,700 assassinations. The
killing of Palestinians suspected of planning or perpetrating violence against
Israelis has been relentlessly conducted also in the West Bank and Gaza,
territories controlled by Israel that seek to become an independent
Palestinian state.
The
Israelis were at first criticized by Western governments for violating
international and humanitarian law. But after al-Qaeda’s attacks on America in
September 2001, the American administrations of both George Bush and Mr. Obama,
and more recently the British and French governments, followed their example in
tracking down and killing enemies abroad, sometimes including their own
citizens, by using drones.
In
the past decade or so, the United States and Israel have sought to apply more
elastic rules, while broadly invoking the principle of “self-defense against
non-State actors on the territory of another State,” arguing that due process
cannot be applied when trying to prevent an imminent attack or when the capture
or extradition of a suspected enemy is not feasible.
.Source: Homeland Security News ピーク ファンドリア
