An Eye for an Eye

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

MADRID — Back in 1976, a Chilean hit squad assassinated former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague in Washington. Letelier was one of the most prominent opponents of the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

A rough equivalent today would be China orchestrating the elimination in the United States of a prominent Uighur opponent, or the Russians assassinating a leading Chechen on a Georgetown street.

Needless to say, the U.S. government would be outraged at such extrajudicial executions on American soil. We don’t want to live in a world where nations blow up enemies, or smother them with pillows, in other countries with which they’re not at war.

But nor, of course, can we do less than everything possible to avert another 9/11, and that’s where things get murky.

(More here.)