Kill Bashar!

With U.S. military action (of some sort) against Syria imminent, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal offers a simple suggestion:

Should President Obama decide to order a military strike against Syria, his main order of business must be to kill Bashar Assad. Also, Bashar's brother and principal henchman, Maher. Also, everyone else in the Assad family with a claim on political power. Also, all of the political symbols of the Assad family's power, including all of their official or unofficial residences. The use of chemical weapons against one's own citizens plumbs depths of barbarity matched in recent history only by Saddam Hussein. A civilized world cannot tolerate it. It must demonstrate that the penalty for it will be acutely personal and inescapably fatal. . . .

On Monday John Kerry spoke with remarkable passion about the "moral obscenity" of using chemical weapons, and about the need to enforce "accountability for those who would use the world's most heinous weapons against the world's most vulnerable people." Amen, Mr. Secretary, especially considering that you used to be Bashar's best friend in Washington. . . .

Yes, a Tomahawk aimed at Assad could miss, just as the missiles aimed at Saddam did. But there's also a chance it could hit and hasten the end of the civil war. And there's both a moral and deterrent value in putting Bashar and Maher on the same list that once contained the names of bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki.

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, read the whole thing.

In Wanted Dead or Alive, I argued that one of the reasons strategic manhunts will continue to tempt U.S. policymakers is that:

Targeting leadership is arguably more defensible morally than is causing the widespread death of innocent civilians and soldiers and the destruction that inevitably accompany modern armed conflict. Or as Ralph Peters asks: "Why is it acceptable to slaughter -- and I use that word advisedly -- the commanded masses but not to mortally punish the guiltiest individual, the commander, a man stained with the blood of his own people as well as that of his neighbors?

Or as the Washington Post editorialized regarding the NATO intervention in Libya, "Thousands of civilians have been killed, and more are dying every day. . . . Targeting Mr. Gaddafi may be the quickest way -- and maybe the only way -- to stop this carnage."

Will the optometrist turned tyrant be the target of American missile strikes?