Pat Robertson, 007

Televangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a week ago (story). Some compared his comments to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death for his book Satanic Verses in 1989. The analogy does not hold, as Khomeini did not apologize for his comments two days later, as Robertson did, and Chavez has done far worse than mock and insult a great world religion, as Rushdie did.

Others said encouraging assassination was an incitement to an act of terrorism. Perhaps it is--but the US is actively trying to assassinate Osama bin Ladan, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and a host of other terrorists. The US avoids the word "assassinate" and instead talks of capturing or killing in the course of a more or less declared war. But it amounts to almost the same thing. When is assassination a legitimate act of war and not an act of theocratic terrorism?

Perhaps when there is a war going on, to start with. Robertson's defense--and the Korean War veteran and Yale Law graduate did have one--was to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian executed by the Nazis for conspiring to assassinate Hitler. Surely, assassinating Hitler would have been an act of just warfare, like the US's successful assassination of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, planner of Pearl Harbor. Robertson apparently believes Chavez falls in the same category with those famous war criminals. However, to state the obvious: the US is not at war with Venezuela.

Robertson seemed to be calling for a covert assassination like the US notoriously tried to undetake against Castro in the 1960s, perhaps arguing Chavez was a Hitler-in-the-making, and it is best to take him out now. If so, his argument was sorely lacking in development, nuace, or tact--and even then it is doubtful a preemptive murder can really be justified.*

But Robertson did more than mistake justice in war for justice writ large. Chavez is bad--very bad, probably ruining constitutional democracy and the rule of law in a once-stable country. But he has not yet emerged as a war criminal (perhaps for lack of a war), and Robertson's comments now make Chavez look like a victim and distracts attention from the very serious issue of Venezuela's political stability.

Human Rights Watch summarized the situation earlier this year:

"President Chávez and his supporters in the National Assembly continue to take steps to undermine the independence of the country’s judiciary and to threaten freedom of the press... Extrajudicial executions of criminal suspects by both state and municipal police forces are common and all too often go unpunished. Cases of torture continue to be reported. Violence and anarchy prevail in many Venezuelan prisons. Refugees from neighboring Colombia, in areas close to the border, face legal insecurity, difficult living conditions, and sometimes threats to their lives."

Chavez is a thug and a tyrant in the making. But the US does not and should not go whacking heads of state just because they are thugs. It should loudly and consistently condemn their injustices and work to isolate them internationally, and fight them when war is required. Pat Robertson's thoughtless remarks take into account none of those responsibilities and distract attention from the evils of which Chavez is truly guilty--and brings disrepute on those of us who strive hard to bring to bear an intelligent religious perspective on contemporary issues.

*See "Managing Covert Political Action" in the Journal for the Study of Intelligence for the beginnings of a discussion of Just War Theory as applied to covert action.