Remote killing? Remoteness, covertness, and the US government’s involvement in assassination

ABSTRACT

The recent assassinations of General Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh have renewed debates surrounding governments’ use of assassination. Some commentators have interpreted these episodes as an escalation in practices of “remote warfare.” Recently, the literature on remote warfare has expanded to include multiple activities at – and below – the threshold of war. From its original focus on geographical distance, “remoteness” now encompasses the “political” distance of deployments of force. In this understanding, “remoteness” has blurred the line separating the methods used to deploy force and the ways – overt or covert – in which they are deployed. Having highlighted the role of covertness, this article establishes that assassination should be included in the “remote warfare” canon. A study of the US government’s involvement in assassination permits us to elucidate the interplay between remoteness and covertness. The article shows that a deeper engagement with the assassination as a tool of US foreign policy provides two main advantages. First, it permits us to better historicise the “opacity” and “political distance” of practices associated with “remote warfare.” Second, it helps unveil the origins of the legal, political, and technological infrastructures that currently sustain much of the US government’s global “remote wars.”

KEYWORDS:

• Remote warfare
• covert action
• assassination
• US foreign policy
• drones

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At times, assassination attempts have been considered tantamount to “armed attack” and, hence, sufficient to justify a use of force in self defence against the initiating state. This was the case for the US government’s 1993 missile strikes against Iraq defended as an act of self-defence against the alleged Iraqi assassination attempt against former President George H. W. Bush (see among others O’Connell 2018).

2. For an exhaustive and detailed overview of this scholarship see Merrin (2019).

3. See also (Coker 2004).

4. Riemann and Rossi (2021a) have also suggested that “remoteness” has temporal connotations (that is, the targets of violence are considered “remote” or primitive).

5. According to the definition provided by the Church Committee, a “foreign official” can be understood as not only an official of a foreign government but also to an official belonging to an insurgent force, an unrecognized government, or a political party (US Senate 1975, 283).

6. While beyond the scope of this article, assassination and targeted killings historically played a prominent role in both insurgencies and counter-insurgency campaigns conducted or supported by the US. Assassination – as a method of counterinsurgency and repression – has also featured heavily in manuals used by the United States in its training of military and intelligence forces of allied and friendly governments (Calhoun 2018; McClintock 1992).