Musings on Executive Power or Why Cutting Off The Head Doesn't Necessarily Kill the Body

Here's a quote from Caesar's apologist John Yoo in the Weekly Standard August 2003.

"Even now, finding and eliminating Saddam Hussein himself is likely to accelerate reconstruction, as followers of the Baathist regime lose hope, and the Iraqi people lose their fear of a restoration of the ancien régime. What some might call assassination, and what the laws of war deem a legitimate military attack, in the end could be a more humanitarian way to conclude the Iraq war and to conduct hositilities generally in the future."

Which is all fine and well if you're playing chess . . . and not in Iraq.

And this.

"Killing both sets of leaders is a legitimate method for defeating the enemy and bringing the conflicts to a close."

Killing as the means to an end. You would think by now with all the legitimate targets taken out in Iraq that we would be celebrating Mission Accomplished. Maybe this war thing is a little trickier. Maybe it's not all about executing the king. And actually if you look at the number of executed leaders whose deaths have ushered in civil war (that fun thing called Rwanda) you might wonder about the logic of this strategy. Of course, if it's all about Caesar alive it should be all about Caesar dead.