The more I think about the decapitation strike that started this war, the more disturbed I become. Is it really legitimate to target a foreign leader? The DoD has variously said that a) we're fighting a war against the leadership of Iraq, not the people; b) strikes in the first hours of the war were designed to destroy the Iraqi leadership; and c) Saddam is a legitimate military target because he's the supreme commander of the Iraqi military.
The problem with this is that George Bush is the supreme commander of the American military. Do we really consider him a legitimate target? I think Americans (and certainly the DoD) would be outraged if an Iraqi strike against Washington killed or incapacitated our leader.
People will respond that George Bush is an elected leader in a representative government, so that somehow makes differentiates him from the Iraqi leader. But this raises an even bigger and more disturbing prospect: that the American people, with their representative governemnt, somehow bear the final responsibility for their government's decisions. Wouldn't that make the American public a legitimate military target, by the same logic?
I need to research this a little more, but my sense is that our rules of war - along with our moral outrage over needless civilian deaths - come from a time when wars and governments looked a little different than they do today. But either way, I think this policy of decapitation strikes against foreign leaders has some disturbing and possibly unexpected implications.
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