Preemptive Manhunt: A New Partisanship

"You idiot!" said the turtle. "Now you will die too! How could you do this?"
"My nature," shrugged the scorpion.

We are familiar with press descriptions of some of the search operations carried out by Task Force 121 and other special forces (including the Pakistani Quick Reaction Force) to track down Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Baathist Party.¹ All of the aforementioned are, or were, leaders of countries or partisan factions with which the United States is formally at war. Their capture can be thought of as a necessity of war in the traditional sense. But we are less familiar with what, according to Seymour Hersh, Pentagon advisers are calling preemptive manhunting,² a term they use to characterize a specific kind of operation entrusted to those forces. Manhunt is a term that Donald Rumsfeld apparently uses to designate the kind of military policy commensurate to the task of ending the Iraqi insurgency and other terrorist threats. Hersh quotes "an American who has advised the civilian authority in Baghdad" as saying, "The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission."³ Preemptive manhunting would seem to refer to an unconventional, guerrilla, or partisan style of warfare deployed by regular combatants in the allied coalition.

Hersh compares this new policy of targeted assassination to the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program, through which at least twenty thousand "targets" under suspicion of being Vietcong collaborators were liquidated. But the Phoenix Program was not preemptive in nature (although it may actually have been so in many cases). What seems new now is the Bush administration's use of special forces to engage in preemptive strikes against guerrilla operations months after the conventional war was declared over.⁴ There is an important precedent, however: the notorious and highly effective Israeli Mist'aravin commando units, which specialize in the assassination or capture of "potential suicide bombers along with many of the people who recruit and train them."⁵ American Special Forces seem to be following the Israeli model. A recent report in the Guardian Weekly, after mentioning that urban warfare specialists from the Israeli Defense Forces had been training U.S. forces at Fort Bragg, NC, states that "U.S. special forces teams are already behind the lines inside Syria attempting to kill foreign jihadists before they cross the border, and a group focused on the ‘neutralization' of guerrilla leaders is being set up."⁶

We are in murky waters. Even if the clear (but covert) mission of these forces is to search out and destroy potential insurgents in the Baathist party and in other militant Iraqi or extra-Iraqi sectors, it is not clear that we should be content to call these missions assassinations. "When the Special Forces target the Baathists," a former intelligence official said, "it's technically not assassination—it's normal combat operations."⁷ Or, one could say, perhaps a preemptive assassination is not an assassination at all, since everything depends on the political valence of the term preemptive. We are in American science-fiction author Philip K. Dick territory, about which more will be said later.

In his book Partisan Theory, Carl Schmitt, after stating that partisan theory had become "the key to recognizing political reality"⁸ (he was writing in 1962), devotes a few pages to the French general Raoul Salan, the head of the OAS during the Algerian rebellion against French colonial rule. In Salan, Schmitt says, "an existential conflict is exposed that is decisive for the partisan problem, one that arises when a conventional combat soldier must endure not only occasional but constant war with a fundamentally revolutionary and irregular fighting enemy."⁹ Under Salan, the OAS "carried out premeditated terrorist actions against the...