Only in the Middle East
by George Jonas
National Post
February 20, 2010
A Hamas official was killed in Dubai last month. People who live by the sword often die by the sword, and as a senior member of what news sources call Hamas's military wing, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh appears to have lived by the sword. That's all I know about al-Mabhouh's death, except some speculation by fellow journalists who seem to know as little as I.
Who wielded the sword that killed him -- or rather the pillow, because he was reportedly smothered -- we won't know until someone decides to speak, but when a person is killed, his enemies become natural suspects. Considering that a Hamas official's day-job is the destruction of Israel, his enemies would undoubtedly include Mossad. In the past Israel's intelligence agency neither confirmed not denied killing some of Israel's terrorist enemies who met violent deaths, so it's hardly surprising that Dubai's police chief, Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, was quoted as saying at his press conference this week: "We do not rule out Mossad."
This was on Monday. By midweek, Gen. Tamim's suspicion of Israel's spy-cum-security agency jumped from "can't rule it out" to the near-certainty of "99%." Whether this rapid rise of Mossad's status as a suspect in al-Mabhouh's assassination was due to evidentiary or political reasons would be hard to say, but – to borrow Gen. Tamim's phrase -- I wouldn't rule out either. On one hand, Mossad is all but confirmed to have been involved in targeted assassinations before; on the other, there are those in the world who would dearly love to implicate Israel in an act of extrajudicial killing, whether it had anything to do with it or not.
Why so, someone might ask. Why should it hurt Israel's reputation that it maintains an agency, the Mossad, not only to gather information, but to hunt down terrorists? After all, we live in pragmatic times. The reputation of the Soviet Union was only enhanced by SMERSH (a Russian acronym for Death to Spies), the counter-intelligence departments in the Soviet Army that supposedly tracked down and eliminated the enemies of the state.
Yes, except things aren't so simple. Where is the Soviet Union today? (Well, it's gone, someone might answer, but Vladimir Putin's Russia is a pretty good facsimile.) Even so, we're ambiguous about extra-judicial violence. We're too fastidious to embrace it openly, though not fastidious enough to eschew it altogether. Our ambiguity manifests itself in the cultural concept of the "licensed" assassin. A fictional assassin is almost invariably a villain, unless it's a licensed assassin, like 007. Then he's James Bond, a hero, played by Sean Connery in the movie version.
Double-oh-seven exists only in fiction, of course, but real-life agencies engage in acts of assassination, usually on behalf of tyrannies, but occasionally on behalf of democracies, too. It's not only in the movies that James Bond embarks on Her Majesty's service. The real life James Bond may not have all the gadgets and fashion accessories of his cinematic counterpart -- he almost certainly won't have Roger Moore's savoir faire -- but he often has similar assignments. Bond commits all kinds of misdeeds from forgery to manslaughter that would be crimes if an "unlicensed" person committed them.
Needless to say, no authority can license a crime. Murder isn't a crime because it's unlicensed; it's unlicensed because it's a crime. Killing in self-defense, though, isn't murder. It's justifiable homicide, and it may be argued that the pre-emptive killing of a terrorist is self-defense.
Some voices in the media seem more upset with Mossad's alleged use of stolen or forged British and Irish passports than with al-Mabhouh's assassination as such. It's hard to see, though, how any agency could carry out clandestine acts abroad without some type of counterfeit documentation, or without offending the sovereignty of the nation where it operates.
Whether state-sanctioned assassination is right or wrong, wise or unwise, it's an unparalleled instrument for creating moral confusion. One of the most incongruous moments in the aftermath of Dubai came when General Tamim explained to the media that if Mossad turned out to be the culprit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be held personally responsible.
"[Netanyahu] will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill al-Mabhouh in Dubai," the General told Dubai's English-language newspaper, The National.
"Any arrest warrant issued against Mr. Netanyahu is likely to deal a setback to unofficial efforts to improve relations between Dubai and Israel," was the champion understatement of the week. It appeared in Britain's The Daily Telegraph.
I agree.
To re-acquire a sense of proportion, al-Mabhouh's function was smuggling weapons to Gaza from Iran. He facilitated firing rockets into Israel's schoolyards. Assuming Netanyahu did authorize Mossad to kill him, for Dubai's police chief to talk about bringing Israel's prime minister to justice for it is -- well, shall we say, cheeky? Post-modern? Bizarre? Only in the Middle East? How about bringing Barack Obama to justice for the targeted assassination of some Taliban-types?
What next? I suppose Dubai's gendarmerie might propose bringing the Queen to justice for licensing James Bond to eliminate Goldfinger.