Exhibit One:  Robert Baer, former CIA officer, looks at the the evolving world of organised assassination.

Exhibit Two:  Professor Kenneth Anderson praises President Obama’s efficient use of Predator strikes in and around Pakistan:

… of all the ways it has undertaken to strike directly against terrorists, this administration owns the Predator drone strategy. It argued for it, expanded it, and used it, in the words of the president’s State of the Union address, to “take the fight to al Qaeda.”

* * * * *

Once upon a time wars were sort of personal. A King or Emperor would be peeved at the temerity of another King or Emperor or Duke in challenging his authority or grabbing some land. A mass of hapless conscripts would be rustled up and led off to battle.

That went on for a long time. Civilians were there to be looted by foraging armies as they passed through the countryside. 

Then it all got big and impersonal, as Machine Age wars emerged – vast armies slugging it out, with startling levels of casualties, all because of rivalry between states or ideologies. Civilians supporting the war effort became targets themselves as the notion of ‘total war’ took hold.

Now war is shrinking again, almost to nano levels. Technology is allowing individual opponents to be targeted and hit with something close to unerring accuracy. 

This poses important policy and legal questions.

Once a state declares war, new rules kick in. See Wikipedia on the Laws of War for a gallop round the main points. Kenneth Anderson has a learned blog on the subject. 

Basically, once war is declared (and assuming that that itself is done lawfully – see the Chilcot Inquiry) violence on a significant scale is justified (including collateral damage) as long as the force used is reasonably aimed at the rights targets with as much proportionality as might be mustered, plus reasonable efforts made not to harm civilian targets, and so on.

The invention of new hi-tech weapons is changing all that. Why blow up large numbers of combatants when it is relatively easy to zap specific enemy leaders and/or their senior henchpersons?

Why indeed? Hundreds of Serb squaddies were killed when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998. Yet Milosevic was not targeted. Something seems not quite right there.

In short, Predator killings are the most humane form of war ever invented.

But once war moves into that sort of phase it starts to look much more personal, and lose the ‘impersonal’ implacable quality of larger-scale choreographed hostilities.

In fact it starts to look more like assassination. Or even common murder, but done in a ‘cowardly’ way by remote control from far away, a ghoulish video-game experience for an amused operator. 

If a state thinks that only a tiny number of enemy leaders are the real problem, is it not better or even right for civilian police to be used to arrest them? Who gives any leader the right to order such ‘extra-judicial killings’? Isn’t that sort of thing a tiny step away from murdering an opponent in a Dubai hotel?

Of course, a busy predictably progressive campaign to delegitimise this sort of warfare is well under way. Kenneth Anderson’s excellent article above describes in great detail how it works, and how it is gaining traction at the UN and elsewhere. He bemoans the Obama Administration’s failure to step forward and strongly justify the policy:

What the United States says regarding the lawfulness of its targeted killing practices matters. It matters both that it says it, and then of course it matters what it says.

The fact of its practices is not enough, because they are subject to many different legal interpretations: The United States has to assert those practices as lawful, and declare its understanding of the content of that law.

This is for two important reasons: first to preserve the U.S. government’s views and rights under the law; and second, to make clear what it regards as binding law not just for itself, but for others as well…

… upholding the American view requires more than simply dangling the inference that if the United States does it, it means the United States must intend it as law. Traditional international law requires more than that, for good reason.

The U.S. government should provide an affirmative, aggressive, and uncompromising defense of the legal sense and sensibility of targeted killing. The U.S. government’s interlocutors and critics are not wrong to demand one, even those whose own conclusions have long since been set in stone.

This is the nub of it – what self-defence means in the modern world:

A broader legal category than “armed conflict” (a subset of it), self-defense might consist of tiny strikes using, for example, covert CIA actors against terrorists, yet not rising to the full level of sustained fighting that crosses the legal threshold into “armed conflict.”

It might be invoked in places and ways outside of traditional theaters of armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq. The president’s legal advisers should be elaborating the legal arguments for self-defense, and not solely armed conflict, as the proper international law “frame” of the president’s statements.

As previously noted, this is a classic Amazon Space issue:

The best (if not only) way to deal with individual terrorist formations lurking in foreign lands – if the governments of the states concerned are unable or unwilling to do it – is not to invade the place and create all sorts of new tensions and contradictions.

Instead it is to proclaim them to be enemies and then hit them before they hit us. 

Thus a new international law precept starts to emerge.

Every country in our networked world benefits from the network. So every country has a responsibility to do what it can to defend the global network from attacks by criminal extremists trying to wreak wider havoc.

If a country can’t or won’t suppress extremists on its territory, it necessarily forfeits its sovereignty to the extent necessary to allow others to defend the network by taking such action as they see fit, with minimum intrusiveness and respectable proportionality.

The great advantage of this approach is that it keeps the issue of war where it belongs – at the level of states and state sovereignty. States are given a positive incentive to deal firmly with extremists on their soil, since failure to do so will lead to their sovereignty being temporarily qualified as others step in to do so.

If by contrast a state is clearly unable or unwilling to take action against our enemies lurking in its territory and known to be plotting violence against us, that is in effect an unfriendly act against us by the state concerned. It is then our right and duty to respond at the state level with all possible proportionality and care to deal with the problem.

In other words, with a well-aimed Predator.