The Scottish Mail on Sunday

WHY KILLING BIN LADEN MAY HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE

Day Of The Assassins Michael Burleigh Picador £25 ★★★★★

- Simon Griffith

Assassinat­ion has never changed the history of the world.’ This was the verdict of Benjamin Disraeli, speaking in the House of Commons after the murder of Abraham Lincoln. But was he right? Possibly not in this instance, thinks Michael Burleigh, for the policies of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, left a legacy of racial division that still haunts the United States today. The course of history was also affected by the most famous assassinat­ion of the ancient world. Brutus and Cassius murdered Julius Caesar to save the Roman Republic, but instead they ushered in the age of imperial dictatorsh­ip.

In a broad sense, however, Disraeli was right. Take the Byzantine Empire, which, over a period of more than a thousand years was ruled by 107 emperors. Of these no fewer than 65 were assassinat­ed, but did any of those murders leave more than a faint tear in the fabric of history? Burleigh suggests that even the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, usually described as the trigger for the First World War, was not in itself decisive because Austria had already decided to fight Serbia.

One of the great pleasures of reading Burleigh, a man never afraid to speak his mind, is the matter-of-fact way in which he dissects and disposes of sacred cows. Take, for example, his analysis of the War on Terror. A cornerston­e of American strategy is ‘decapitati­on’, the belief that killing the head of a terrorist organisati­on will fatally weaken it. Burleigh thinks that the opposite is probably true, not least because older and more establishe­d leaders are more likely to negotiate than the younger hotheads who usually replace them. A case in point was the 2006 killing of the Jordanian-Palestinia­n

jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hailed at the time as a triumph. You may not have heard of al-Zarqawi, but you will know the name of the entity fashioned by his successors – ISIS.

Another problem that is never addressed is the methodolog­y of these so-called ‘targeted killings’. The face-to-face shooting of Osama Bin Laden (left) was exceptiona­l, because these days the usual method of despatch is by remote-controlled drone. Drone attacks are always painted as surgical strikes, but there have been too many civilian deaths for this to be plausible. Killing old women and children only stirs resentment and makes the recruiting of fresh militants easier, but drones are regarded as such high-tech wonder weapons that the strategy is never questioned. ‘When you have a hammer, every problem becomes a nail,’ as Burleigh acidly observes.

Burleigh’s criticism of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is particular­ly withering. Killing can become contagious, and he is concerned that assassinat­ions carried out by the West and its allies rob us of the moral high ground, a point that has been gleefully seized upon by Vladimir Putin. Burleigh’s analysis of Putin’s Russia, incidental­ly, is a brilliant and timely reminder of the danger of taking things at face value. Our world today is as dangerous and mixed-up as it has ever been. Luckily we have Michael Burleigh to help us make sense of it.

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