Like most people, I reacted with revulsion,
not shock, to evangelist Pat Robertson’s suggestion that we
assassinate Venezuela’s president. Robertson, after all, has
a record of saying things that thoughtful folks wouldn’t.
That’s why he’s largely ignored
— most media organizations tune out the rants of TV preachers
and most talk-show hosts. In this case, however, Robertson became
the latest man to bite a dog, so his comments became news.
We don’t expect founders of Christian
groups to tell us to ignore one of the Commandments. That’s
like hearing about law-and-order talk-show hosts who score drugs
illegally or preachers who have children out of wedlock.
And yet, before we move on to the next
national hypocrite, let’s thank Pat Robertson for raising
important matters.
First, Robertson managed to turn our
attention, at least briefly, to a nation in our own back yard.
Robertson’s riff on President Hugo
Chávez comes as the Bush administration exerts heavy pressure on Venezuela. Chávez, the
democratically elected president of the oil-rich nation, has complained
that he is a target of U.S. efforts to destabilize and overthrow his
government — and, given our record in Central and South America,
it’s hard not to take him seriously. Chávez, you may
recall, was briefly dislodged a couple of years ago by a coup that had
our government’s support.
Our actions in Venezuela should provide an
honest gauge of whether our government really does, as President
George W. Bush avers, embrace the “global spread of
democracy.”
Second, Robertson deserves thanks for
speaking candidly about how to go about the business of dealing
with our “enemies,” because, as it became quickly
apparent, his views — no matter how ill-considered they
seemed — are consistent with those held by many Americans.
And about that we need to have a frank
national discussion. For too long now killing has been seen as an
appropriate foreign-policy response — and it hasn’t
mattered whether the administration is Republican or Democrat.
For example, in 1998, after two of our
embassies were attacked, President Bill Clinton ordered retaliatory
cruise-missile strikes on Osama bin Laden’s camps in
Afghanistan and a purported chemical-weapons plant in Sudan. Dozens
of people were killed and injured. Clinton’s people said that the U.S. had dealt a serious blow to
bin Laden’s organization. They were wrong.
Back then, most of us were focused on the
president’s dalliance with an intern, few of us weighed the
consequences of the escalation of hostilities, and none of us
expected what came three years later. “The battle has not yet
started,” a bin Laden spokesman promised in 1998. He,
unfortunately, was right.
People who subscribe to Robertson’s
view of the world would argue that had we killed bin Laden in 1998,
9/11 wouldn’t have happened. These are the same people who
think that we could have remade Iraq by killing Saddam Hussein,
prevented the genocide in Cambodia by killing Pol Pot, or ended
World War II by killing Adolf Hitler.
This business about killing foreign leaders
bubbled up a generation ago, when a Congressional committee
confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency planned, or was
involved in, attempts to kill foreign leaders, including Patrice
Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo
Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and Sukarno of Indonesia. Most
Americans were horrified and ashamed, and, in 1976, President
Gerald Ford, a Republican, issued an executive order banning
assassinations by U.S. agencies.
It’s worth noting that in each of these
cases in which there was a successful assassination, instability and
repression followed.
But we’re a nation that forgets. Last
week, a prominent American preacher said that it would make sense
for his country to “take out” Chávez rather than
become embroiled in another Iraq-type war. “I don’t
know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks
we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought
to go ahead and do it,” Robertson told his viewers.
“It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. . . .
”
Sure, killing just one person instead of many
does seem easier, does seem less expensive. Problem is,
it’s never just one.
The argument pushed by people such as
Robertson presumes that the list of people whose values are at odds
with our national interests is a finite one. The reality is, there
are many such lists, and they vary, depending on who does the
compiling. Pat Robertson’s name, for example, would be on
mine. Would ridding the world of all of these people make our
country any stronger?
Like Robertson, I don’t know about this
“doctrine of assassination,” but I think it’s
time we talk about new ways of dealing with our enemies.
We can’t kill them all.
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2005.
