It was a tragic mistake.
Jean Charles de Menezes, the man chased, tackled, and shot dead
on the floor of London’s Tube, was unarmed. What’s worse, it looks
like he wasn’t part of either London bombing plot. De Menezes was a
Brazilian electrician who ran when he should have stood still.
His death, and the hard-line policy behind it, have become a
political problem. The cat’s out of the bag that the London Police
have orders to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.
Scotland Yard officers have admitted as much (“The most effective way of
dealing with someone with explosives is to shoot them in the
head”). The far-left Stop the War Coalition is demonstrating outside Downing Street to change the
shoot-to-kill directive. But self-described Iraq war “hawk” Tim
Hames has called for the policy to be re-examined in the
Times of London. And now even renowned conservative pundit
Mark Steyn has expressed his discomfort with London’s policy.
Still, Police Commissioner Ian Blair says the policy will stand. He’s right to do
so.
There is a name for these counterterror operations:
“Operation Kratos.” Kratos, the Greek god of strength, supervised the
chaining of the Titan Prometheus to a mountain as punishment for
his transgression of teaching mortals the secret of fire.
Restraining suicide bombers, however, requires a modified
tactic.
Suicide bombers, by definition, cannot be deterred by the threat
of lethal force. But perhaps they can be deterred by the prospect
of failure — of a premature death that does not include the murder
of others. If they are shot and stopped before they detonate, their
mission will fail. What’s more, if they expect they will
be shot before they can detonate themselves, they will alter their
plans and bide their time until a better opportunity presents
itself. That is the essence of deterrence through denial.
The grim necessity of carrying out this policy is that police,
rather than aiming at the center-of-mass (as is customary for
firearms training), must aim for the suicide bomber’s head. This
will inflict an almost certainly fatal wound, but that is an
unfortunate consequence, not a recommendation for the policy. The
real reason is that head shots, when they hit, are much more likely
than center-of-mass shots to incapacitate instantly, and they offer
less risk of triggering a bomb vest packed with unstable
explosives. (See here for an illustration of the suicide vest
configuration.)
There are ground-based lasers in Washington, D.C. that will warn civilian
aircraft that stray into D.C. airspace, before NORAD scrambles
fighters to destroy them. The principle is the same, on a larger
scale: by hardening the target to the point with jets and missiles
so that a suicide attack will kill the terrorist pilot before he
can crash his plane, the jihadist must look elsewhere to expend his
single life in a valuable way. Unfortunately the D.C. air defense,
like Operation Kratos, runs the risk of a tragic mistake if an
innocent civilian plane should stray over D.C.
Still, the logic is sound, and the rule is necessary, even
though the notion of a shoot-to-kill policy is abhorrent to
Anglo-American notions of due process. But this idea of shooting
suspected bombers long predates the current war on Islamic
terrorism. A similar policy was exercised against a trio of
suspected IRA bombers in 1988.
In that case, Britain had received word of a car bomb plot in
Gibraltar. Plainclothes SAS agents were dispatched to watch for and
arrest the terrorists without allowing them to detonate their
bomb.
Apparently the British military and police retain a pool of
Oxbridge classicists to name their operations. The Gibraltar
operation was codenamed “Flavius,” after (I presume) the Roman
military historian Flavius Renatus Vegetius, who once wrote, “If
you want peace, prepare for war.”
Operation Flavius did not go quite as planned, either. According
to this account, the SAS located the terrorists’ car but
couldn’t determine whether a bomb was inside. Meanwhile, the SAS
agents tailing the saboteurs worried that they would set off the
bomb remotely, but didn’t know whether any or all of them were
carrying remote detonators.
One of two IRA members walking together spotted the SAS tail,
and made an “aggressive motion” and his partner reached into her
purse. Fearing they were grabbing for guns or detonators, the SAS
shot them down. When the third IRA man heard the shots and ran to
assist, the team shadowing him ordered him to stop. He instead
reached into his jacket pocket, and was riddled as well.
But the three terrorists were unarmed, and there was no bomb in
the car. They were in Gibraltar on a bombing mission, but had not
yet assembled the equipment to pull it off.
The subsequent inquiry cleared the SAS men in the shooting, but
to many Brits, Operation Flavius looked like a cold-blooded plot to
assassinate IRA muscle, an idea kept alive by IRA sympathizers. They even wrote songs about the dead
terrorists, for example the elegiac “Ballad of
Mairead Farrell.” (Farrell was the female terrorist shot at
Gibraltar.):
“I heard the order so loud and shrill,
Of Thatcher’s voice said ‘shoot to kill’.”
Britain’s Operation Kratos is not a brand-new policy, but one
backed by sound logic and a historical precedent in Britain’s last
counterterrorist campaign. It withstood the backlash of Operation
Flavius, and it ought to weather the storm over the tragedy of Mr.
de Menezes. If shoot-to-kill for suspected bombers was good enough
for the IRA under Thatcher, why should al Qaeda get a pass under
Blair?
I doubt it will console the family of Mr. de Menezes to think
that his death might yet prevent more deaths in the future. But if
we are to find some good in this tragedy, it is that the terrorists
now know that Britain, despite her politically correct rhetoric, is
deadly serious about defending herself.
