draft
There
is lots of discussion in the media and on the Internet about assassinating the leader of N. Korea, Kim Jong-Un.
Lets review some of the reasons why this is probably a bad idea.
First,
in our modern world, assassination can be hard to do. Kim, like all
good modern leaders and revolutionaries under threat, has many hardened hiding places.
If he is following standard protocol, he is never sleeping in the
same place for two nights running. He also never chooses where he
will sleep that night until the last possible moment, and as few
people as possible know. If you do decide to attack *all* his hiding
places at once in an effort to kill him, you have to attack them
simultaneously, because if he gets a hint of what is up, he will be
on the move at once and go deep.
Second,
as they say, if you attack a King, you had better kill him. If you
just wound him or miss him, you are just going to piss him or her off and you are likely to be sorry. In the case
of Korea, if Kim goes to war, Seoul is within conventional artillery
range of some of N. Korea's artillery. He doesnt even need nuclear
weapons to kill a lot of people (millions, by most guesses). Much of this artillery is hardened against air attack, and dispersed.
Third,
historically, assassination is rife with unanticipated results, so
you had better have a good plan up front and plans of this type are
likely to go bad. I am under the impression that the CIA coup in
Iran was not necessarily intended to put the Shah into power despite
what you read on the Internet. The plan was to put a military Junta
into power, with maybe the Shah as a figurehead, but I could be wrong
about this. For a more certain example in history, note that the
assassination of Julius Caesar did not really work out for either the
conspirators or the Roman Republic.
Although
I certainly think that “decapitation” is a strategy that does
have merit, it is not always a good idea and one has to be very good
at it.
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