The rules of international conduct and conflict can seem absurd. But what’s the alternative?

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 26, 2010

The article headline on a page of the Times of London from 1969 read “Plan to kill Hitler was ‘unsporting.’ ”

My students and I were using the newspaper’s online archive to research African independence movements. Next to a piece on Namibia, we found this one. The title provoked exactly the reaction its author had likely intended. Someone said, “Unsporting? Is that a joke?”

We read on. In 1938, the military attaché at the British embassy in Berlin, one N.M. MacFarlane, hatched a plan to kill Hitler. The article explained, “All that was needed, he said, was a good gunman and a properly equipped rifle. Hitler could have been shot from a window during one of his public appearances. The whole plan was worked out in detail. …”

MacFarlane’s proposal was passed on to the British government, which reportedly rejected it as “unsportsmanlike.”

Others shared MacFarlane’s concerns about Hitler before the war. Four years earlier, Douglas Miller, an American attaché in Vienna, produced a memorandum outlining the Nazi leadership’s plans to make Germany “the largest, most powerful nation in the world” and, ultimately, “dominate the entire globe.” The longer Germany was allowed to prepare, he wrote, “the more certain is a large-scale war in Europe some day.”

So why didn’t the British government jump at the chance to stop Hitler in 1938? As one student put it, “Were they really worried about breaking the rules?”

“Yes,” I said. At this point, eyes were rolling, and voices rose in protest: “Oh, come on!” “We’re talking about Hitler!”

True, but when a government acts, it’s not personal; it’s policy. What if the British had successfully carried out MacFarlane’s plan, but the Nazis had managed to retain power and continue to plot world domination? Would the British have sent sharpshooters to kill the next Nazi leader, and the next?

Would all fascist dictators be fair game? What about communist dictators?

After the war, MacFarlane said Hitler “already deserved death” in 1938. Maybe so, but would we want to authorize our leaders to make such calculations and act on them?

Though the James Bond fantasy of a good guy who takes matters into his own hands has appeal, conflicts among nations have rules – lots of them. They aren’t all agreed upon, and they are often broken, but we take them into account even when we choose to ignore them.

Article I of the U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the power to declare war. Would a state-sponsored plan to assassinate a world leader count as an act of war? Should Congress vote on it? If that seems absurd, what’s the alternative?

Covert operations also present more challenges than movies suggest. Notable among the failures were attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. By 1975, a Senate committee charged with investigating “illegal, improper, or unethical” CIA operations, primarily in Chile, had issued a report that led to the reining in of agency activities by executive orders and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980.

I asked my students whether they thought President George W. Bush, given his stated belief that Saddam Hussein represented a grave danger to America and its allies, should have ordered the CIA or some elite military force to kill him. Why didn’t he? Was he concerned about breaking the rules?

The administration’s decision to invade Iraq was presented as a necessary response to Saddam’s refusal to prove that he was not a terrorist threat to the United States and its allies. Saddam was cast as the rule-breaker – harborer of terrorists, manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction – and we were the ostensible good-guy enforcers.

Can we justify hunting down and executing al-Qaeda leaders (not to mention all of the non-combatants who die in the process) with remote-controlled drones, as the Obama administration has done dozens of times over the past year? What makes these killings different from targeting the leader of a country that supports terrorists? Do we really want to be assassins?

New threats and new technologies tempt us to compromise our ideals and set aside “the rules.” But they are all we have and though the term “unsporting” may grate, it reminds us that in this very serious game we must be our own referees.