I don’t think we talk enough about state sanctioned murder. I really don’t. I’m not talking about those primitive countries who still impose ‘death sentences’ on naughty people, that’s just the result of unevolved, primitive societies, like America, where the ‘eye for an eye’ mentality overrides the ‘thou shalt not kill’ bible thing but only on demand. I’m talking about international hit squads going into other people’s countries and ‘taking someone out’.

Like the Saudis did with the journalist Kashoggi in Turkey because they didn’t like him. Like Kim Jong Un did with his own step-brother in Thailand. Like the Russians do pretty much every week with someone or other, Skripals, Navalny, Litvinenko…

All messy, all shabby, all a bit… amateur. Though you kind’a have to think that with the Russians, if they wanted you dead, you’d be dead. If they want to give you a ‘nudge’ or a warning, they just put you on the brink of death on life-support for a few months as a casual ‘reminder’. In case, like, a text message wouldn’t do the job. But if Carlsberg did executions, they’d be Israeli.

They went to Iran, they executed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and they came home. Probably had to quarantine, take a test, blah, blah, blah. I’m not saying I condone the action, if I was Fakhrizadeh I’d  be understandably pissed off. But we’re not (currently) talking about the ethics (mainly because there aren’t any), just the mechanics of the event. Because this man was not some random Skripal wandering round Salisbury looking for a pizza. This was the head of Iran’s nuclear everything. A man surrounded night and day by security, who travels only in convoy, who is protected completely 24 hours of every day by his own little army.

The Mossad studied his every action for 8 months. Meanwhile they smuggled into Iran (how hard can it be?) a massive robotic machine gun. Thing weighs a fucking ton. Literally. So they smuggled it in bits. Little, bite-sized bits. And eventually, they had enough of it there that it would probably work. So they strapped it to the back of a flat bed truck and, getting between the man’s car and his lead vehicle, deployed their weapon in a somewhat aggressive manner. Firing 13 shots into Mohsen’s car.

And here’s the amazing bit. The target person was unsurprisingly killed, or we’d be talking about the price of eggs right now instead. But his wife, sitting 10 inches from him, was unhurt. Physically at least. As were the security men riding in the car with him. Which in my mind makes this ‘the hit of the year’, and wins a golden… golden… bullet? gun?? coffin??? Whatever. Because they didn’t blow up the car with all inside. They didn’t rocket his office building. There was no ‘collateral damage’. They just took him out.

And it was wrong. On many levels. The only mitigation being like the old question: ‘if you could have murdered Hitler in 1930, would you?’ Because Fakhrizadeh was not some scientist searching for renewable energy to save the planet whilst warming his population. He  had one aim. To build a nuclear bomb. Which in turn had one aim. Which was at Tel Aviv. Overtly stated and oft expressed. Iran wants to nuke Israel and Fakhrizadeh was the man responsible for making that happen.

Would you have murdered Hitler? 

Happy morally equivocating Friday

A xxxx