Going for the Top
Just like G.W.Bush today, Adolf Hitler believed he was on a divine mission, to rid the world of evil. He survived several assassination attempts. In 1939, a Communist planted a bomb at a beerhall, where Hitler was to speak. The bomb went off, only thirteen minutes after Hitler had left the building. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) pursued a top secret plot to assassinate Hitler, approved by Churchill himself, called ‘operation Foxley’. It was the SOE who provided Stauffenberg, a high-ranking german officer, with the bomb he tried to kill Hitler with. Hitler suffered only a mild injury to his left arm. “I’m immortal”, he proclaimed.
At the time, there were those among the British, who felt direct action against Hitler wasn’t very ‘gentlemanlike’. Others were convinced that killing Hitler would actually improve the German situation, because Hitler was both a control-freak and a lousy strategian, a dangerous combo, that actually hastened the end of WWII by several months. I’m pretty sure, at some point, the Pentagon was plotting to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Why didn’t they go through with it? I cannot believe they thought it wasn’t very gentlemanlike. Did they believe killing Hussein would allow Islamists to come to power?
In any case, it’s not very gentlemanlike to allow tens of thousands of people (in the case of Hitler millions) to die in ‘conventional’ warfare, when there is an opportunity to directly hit those in control. At some level of power, there are no innocents. And GWB, he’s a game bird.
