AN EXCELLENT KILL
An excellent kill
By BENNY AVNI
Last Updated: 4:43 AM, February 19, 2010 NY POST
It looked a bit like a low-bud get Jason Bourne movie, but it was real: The police chief in the gulf emirate of Dubai this week walked reporters through camera footage of the Jan. 20 assassination of a top Hamas
Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim raged of the killing as “the way of the mob, not the country.” Actually, it’s one of the best ways for any country to fight the “mob” of modern terror.
Aided by time stamps on the dramatic footage from cameras at the Dubai airport and al Bustan Rotana Hotel, Tamim presented a compelling recreation of the “crime” and released pictures and names of the suspected assassins as they appeared in their British, Irish, French and German passports.
Almost everyone thinks it was the Mossad
Closed-circuit cameras and computerized personal data may make a quiet, old-fashioned killing more difficult — but the operatives’ disguises (phony glasses, beards, etc.) and fake passports seem good enough that they’ll never be caught.
Dubai is a hub of spy intrigue that some compare to Cold War-era Berlin. And while Chief Tamim is upset (the assassination comes atop a recent spate of murders in Dubai), this “victim” deserved his fate.
Mabhouh was a terror bigwig. A Hamas founder, he escaped Gaza 20 years ago after Israel tried to kill him for his role in kidnapping and killing two soldiers. He then became Hamas’ top foreign-arms dealer, securing the flow of missiles and rockets from Iran to the strip.
That, it’s generally thought, is what moved him to the top of the Mossad’s target list.
Far from “the way of the mob,” as Tamim contended, such assassinations are a legitimate way of inserting some symmetry into asymmetrical warfare.
Of course, as we saw in the cartoonish portrayal of the Mossad in Steven Spielberg
Interpol put the suspects on its most-wanted list, and Eurpopean countries demanded an explanation from Israel, knowing full well that none would be forthcoming. All of which has reawakened the Israeli debate over targeted killings, with critics calling for longtime Mossad chief Meir Dagan
Yet Hamas ignores all law and morality in its regular killings. Via guns, rockets and suicide bombs, it slaughters far more civilians — Arabs as well as Jews — than soldiers. Its leaders deserve whatever death can be dealt them.
“No tool in the War on Terror is more justifiable” than assassinations like Mabhouh’s, says Boaz Ganor, executive director of the Institute for Counter Terrorism, a leading Israeli think tank. (He says he doesn’t know who carried out the operation.) The Obama administration has itself proudly stepped up the use of drones to assassinate top terrorists in Afghanistan.
Western theorists increasingly see the targeting of top terror leaders as a vital weapon. Once an able intelligence agency identifies and locates the target, Ganor says, you can drop a bomb on his head or use a drone, for a slightly more accurate assassination.
But none of those methods is as effective as a daring operation, like the one in Dubai, in ensuring that the only casualty is the high-value target and that no civilians are endangered.
As a plus, the (unwanted) publicity Tamim brought to the case boosts the Mossad’s rep — and ensures that terror bigwigs will spend extra resources on avoiding Mabhouh’s fate.
Plus, the flow of Hamas arms is, at least temporarily, seriously disrupted. Despite the post-op complications, not bad for a day’s work. beavni@gmail.com
Comments are closed.
