The Demise of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

In the US, what with a professor murdering her colleagues, and a disaffected computer engineer deciding to wage a one-man war on the Internal Revenue Service with his private airplane, New Orleans taking the Super Bowl, and Tiger Woods delivering his tightly-scripted apology, the deliberately-engineered demise of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by an expert team of assassins has not generated much attention.

But it does deserve some thought, as we in the US are engaged in a long-term brush war against some very bad people.  How do we protect ourselves against monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?

It's not just neurotic introspection. This guy was a monster, who happily participated in the murder of a lot of innocent people. But he was a human being, and no human life should be deliberately cut short nonchalantly.

The short version of the story is, that while on a business trip to Dubai, he was tracked down and killed by an expert assassination team, who were travelling on falsified European and UK passports. The hotel security cameras caught it all, except the act of killing itself. By the time his body was discovered, the team had left the country.

Very slick, very pro. Assumed to be Mossad, but about even odds that it was another Palestinian entity.

This guy made a lot of enemies in his day, as he himself was an equal-opportunity murderer.

OldSouth is always interested when people who live on opposite ends of the left/right spectrum arrive at essentially the same conclusion. Here we have one of those instances.

Alan Dershowitz at Huffington Post, in his lawyerly fashion, explores the legal and moral questions raised.

Mohammed Daraghmeh, also at Huff Post, explores the real possibility that Mahmoud was sent to his reward by the Palestinian Authority, who bear no love for Hamas.

In either case, he's no longer with us. He can't kidnap anyone, kill anyone, or supply weapons to help others do the same. This is cause for at least a sigh of relief.

Conservative Israeli blogger Israel Matzav offers more detailed perspective:

There are two reasons why Israel would want al-Mabhouh dead, and I'm going to take the second reason first because the main reason segues into the second question. Think Munich. Remember after the Munich Olympic Massacre how Israel sent agents all over the world to kill the murderers of Israel's Olympic team? Why did Israel do that? To show that actions have consequences. Al-Mabhouh kidnapped and murdered two Israeli soldiers. The kidnappings were among the very first terror attacks carried out by Hamas. If Israel killed al-Mabhouh, it has shown that it knows how to settle scores and that terrorists should not expect to ever be able to live in peace. Al-Mabhouh knew all that - that's why he lived in exile in Syria and it's why he had a security detail.

But the second reason for knocking off al-Mabhouh is far more important. Mabhouh helped found Hamas’s armed wing Izzadin Kassam in the 1980s, was behind the kidnapping in the first intifada of two Israeli soldiers and later established strong ties in Sudan, which he used to smuggle weaponry from Iran to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He was reportedly responsible for the weapons convoy that, according to foreign reports, Israel bombed during Operation Cast Lead as it was making its way to Gaza through the Sudanese desert.

In other words, if Israel took out Mabhouh, it also took out Hamas' weapons supplier, lessening the likelihood of any retaliation from Gaza.

In the midst of all the European hand-wringing over this assassination, and the outrage expressed at Israel for invading Gaza in early 2009, we need to remember:

Israel voluntarily handed over Gaza in 2005, exchanging tangible land and assets for intangible promises of peace with the Palestinians. What they got was Hamas taking Gaza over, using it to stage rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Which led to the death and destruction of early 2009.

Mabouh was one of the prime actors in Hamas, and its weapons procurer. Sans his behavior, thousands of lives would have been spared.

So, the question remains: If we knock 'people like this' off, do we begin to become like 'people like this'?

And, knowing that a person like Mahmoud creates wholesale death and destruction, how can we fail to take advantage of the opportunity to send him to his reward?

Theze is complicated times, ya'll.