If he got shot in the chest and eye, he can’t have turned much ;)
Also Jeff’s post 1062 is artwork…and I would love to hear what he has to say on my irritation that pepsi and coca cola cannot be sold in the same restaurant…
Or that my spell checker insists that pepsi is spelled wrong while coca cola isn’t…
Self-pleasuring helicopters sound AWESOME.
Ignoring the fact that everyone on the internet is now apparently Tom Clancy, the issue at hand isn’t that the US didn’t take him alive but that they ran the operation at all. This sort of shit used to be controversial but apparently it isn’t any more and that’s something that should give us all pause. When a country that professes to uphold the rule of law and be a shining beacon of democracy reverts seamlessly to Old Testament style justice then that’s a step backwards and it’s a step on a road that leads to bad places.
Sure OBL ‘deserved’ it. He indisputably did terrible things but other people do terrible things as well and our enlightened society has ways of dealing with that developed over centuries of trying to be better than savages. To see all that swept away for some emotional gratification while people cheer is unnerving.
I guess I disagree, and maybe this makes me a horrible savage, but I don’t think Slobodan Milosevic’s final days where he got to preen and posture in comfort for the media at the ICC served as any sort of justice for the siege of Sarajevo, or the massacre of Srebebnica, or the thousands of dead in utterly senseless tribal wars.
Sometimes our enlightened society is too enlightened.
I wish ambien affected me this strongly. ;)
On subject:
Was it a step that lead to bad places when we shot down Yamato? When we killed al-Zarqawi? When we droned AQ Third-in-Command #47 into the bad place?
This is “justice” in the cosmic and common sense rather than in the legal sense. I don’t feel the same need to cheer as some folks do but when I watch the footage of the Towers burning a part of me wishes he was still alive and bound when they threw him off that board into the sea. Let the vent their decade of anxiety over the name OBL; While the threat lives on, the cloud of dread hanging over all American people is a little brighter and lighter today. The sooner that passes, the sooner we will be done with situations like the two imams getting left at the airport.
The phrase “swept away” implies that you believe there was some other path that some other, more enlightened previous American (footnote 1) administration would have taken. Making the simplifying assumption that a President single-handedly decides American foreign policy, please indicate which President you think would not have authorized this operation, given our ability to do so. I will then explain why you’re wrong.
Footnote 1: Really, you could run this experiment and replace “President” with “leader of any country, ever, since time began” but Nelson Mandela fucks up the curve. AS USUAL.
I can understand that but society as a whole is supposed to be above the immediate base urges of people in the singular. What I am seeing is that a line is being drawn, some arbitrary scale of evil where if you fall on a particular side of it then rules no longer apply. As I pointed out earlier, when this sort of thing happened before, there was significant controversy surrounding those events, now though it seems that if the person is wicked enough, it also releases the rest of society from their obligation to behave as civilised human beings. That shouldn’t ever be true.
As a society we have justice systems capable of handling enormously wicked people including individuals whose crimes are on an even greater scale than OBL’s. The idea that we can turn that on and off by fiat is not a comforting one. We just witnessed a high-tech lynching in another country’s sovereign territory and the only excuse given is US exceptionalism.
I think that any US president would have authorised it (although McCain said he wouldn’t IIRC). That doesn’t change my stance that this was the wrong thing to do.
Great, then we’re in agreement, you just don’t realize it. My central point is that our enlightened society has developed, over the centuries, a very effective way of coping with fascists: we fight them, and then we kill them. Killing Bin Laden, as the organizer of one of the most particularly harmful strains of Islamofascism, is not a regression of Republican-era enlightenment: it is an expression of that enlightenment.
If the US has anything to be ashamed about vis-a-vis our involvement in Afghanistan, it is the many years we spent allowing the Taliban to rule because we felt that that particular outbreak of fascism wasn’t our problem.
As I pointed out earlier, when this sort of thing happened before, there was significant controversy surrounding those events, now though it seems that if the person is wicked enough, it also releases the rest of society from their obligation to behave as civilised human beings.
I don’t think you can actually come up with an example of such an obvious evil being killed and there being “controversy” about it; would you have been on the sidelines when Ceaușescu was overthrown, urging people to have a sit down and a nice cup of tea instead? No; Ceaușescu’s killing was both necessary and an unquestionable good deed, as was the killing of Bin Laden. As George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the right (and unfortunately, losing) side would have been able to explain, part of the obligation of behaving as a civilized human being is the obligation to fight when your opponent is wicked enough.
I can’t tell if you’re purposefully misreading Iain’s point, or if you sincerely believe that there’s a magical fascism litmus test that invalidates what he’s arguing. If the US has anything to be ashamed about it’s that we made the mistake of invading Afghanistan as if we didn’t have decades of solid experience in why invading Afghanistan is a stupid idea from the other side of the table. As a wholly separate country, the threat from the nation state itself has to be pretty significant to justify diving headlong into the graveyard of empires. While it’s going to be consigned to the alternate history dustbin, there’s every reason to believe that pursuing bin Laden and AQ as an international police action would have been a far more cost effective and just means of eliminating AQ as a threat. At this point, there’s no reason to believe that our actions in Afghanistan in terms of halfassed nation building will do much to preempt further surges of Anti-American terrorist organizations there. Unless you have a fondness for puppet expatriates and their charming embezzling, there’s really no good function we are serving there in American national security terms relative to the costs involved.
And if you’re really clinging to the fascism moral argument, well, why isn’t any place in Africa up for consideration? Why was Saddam not fascist until he invaded Kuwait, at which point he was fascist enough to be kicked out of Kuwait but insufficiently fascist to be topple-worthy?
You had me until you declared Owen Wilson was a secret Muslim.
Any operation we undertake is limited not just by the moral justification, but also by our ability to project power and accomplish our mission, and also by our willingness to accept the consequences that follow. I personally would argue that despite Saddam’s behavior giving us a clear moral justification for years, our most recent Iraq invasion was a strategic error because it absorbed so much US military capacity that it reduced our flexibility to respond to other threats around the globe (put another way, if your military is engineered, as ours is, to be able to engage in two regional conflicts at once, then you don’t start the second one unless you literally have no choice).
The conflict in Afghanistan, contrariwise, was necessitated by the war that was thrust upon us. If Sudan began flying airplanes into our skyscrapers on Thursday, then, yes, I would expect us to be inserting troops there by Friday.
EDIT:
But: this issue that you’re raising, Lizard, is all in the realm of realpolitik, and reasonable people can disagree about it: maybe we can kill the fascists safely, and maybe we can’t, depending on the situation. What I’m primarily interested in responding to is Iain’s claim that killing fascists is some sort of moral wrong. It’s not. It’s a moral good.
I don’t really think identifying the Taliban as fascist really requires a “magical fascist litmus test”. If you really need to go down the bill of attainder, we can, but it would save us all a lot of time if you’d just come across and agree “OK, yeah, these guys were clearly fascist.”
Not to mention any number of murderous dictators the US decided to prop up instead of assassinating through the years because they were seen as opposition to a greater evil.
I’m more than willing to agree that when the US does this, it’s engaging in a moral wrong. My point is not “whatever the US does is right.” My point is “Killing fascists is ethically and morally right.”
This is a monstrous statement.
I am not sure what this is such hard statement to accept. Killing Bin Laden, Saddam, Mullah Omar is morally right. These are all extremely evil men and the world is much better off when they are dead. I’d add to this list of folks including Mugabe, Burma leaders, Kim Jong Il, that also deserve killing. I’d argue that Qaddafi, Assad, Khomeini have enough blood on their hands that killing them would be a moral good thing, but their maybe enough doubt that a trial would be preferable course of action.
It is an entirely separate discussion is it wise for the US to perform an military or diplomatic action. The wisdom depends on many factors, a cost benefit analysis of the action, the opportunity cost of using our troops in one area and other real Politic actions. Finally and probably most important a difficult and error prone moral calculus. I’d argue that is morally right for the West to kill 50,000 Libyans to prevent Qaddafi from killing 100,000. However, I understand why many people are very queasy
about these type of actions and certainly the ratio of lives taken to lives saved is much too close to advocate such an action.
The killing of Bin Laden isn’t even a close call morally. On the bad side of the ledger, the man didn’t get a fair trail, and we violated Pakistan’s airspace and probably killed woman or two who probably didn’t do anything that deserved killing. On the positive side, we prevented the death of twenty odd woman and children, who in almost any other scenario airstrike, or Pakistani military raid would be killed. We captured valuable intelligence which will probably save many innocent lives in the future. We provide justice/vengeance to for many American and to Bin Laden’s victims all over the world. Finally we rid the world of an evil man.
As Peter said this isn’t controversial and has been going by countries with the military capabilities to do so for hundreds if not thousands of years. Great Britain routinely ignored the sovereignty of other nations when pursuing first pirates, and the later slave traders for hundreds of years. Israel has pursued Nazi. American Presidents since the 20th century have not hesitate to send military forces to rescue captives, pursue bandits, go after drug dealers, and hunt criminals.
The logic “they are evil so they deserve to be killed” is exactly the same logic used by terrorists, but somehow I don’t think you’d be so nonchalant if, for example, a group of Iraqis sneaked into the US, executed Dick Cheney, and proclaimed a great triumph over oppression.
I think you misunderstand your audience here (I’m joking, but you should really use a better example, like Clinton :P)
Moral issues are useful when rationalizing to your domestic audience, or when trying to string together a series of unintended consequences as an overall categorization of policy over time. They should be and are mostly irrelevant to the overall picture of decisionmaking in any pluralistic government, where only a tacit or explicit notion of self interest or preservation can hold sway across domestic divides. The low points of policy, in fact, tend to be when that straightforward albeit cynical math is hijacked by true believers, whether we are talking about American Anglophiles in the first world war or the neoconservatives that surrounded Bush. The fact is, American self interest (beyond the occasional megacorporation) has not been clearly served by most of the wars we’ve participated in, and it’s typically taken the irresponsible handling of a shocking act of real (9/11) or imagined (The Maine) terrorism for irresponsible politicians to run with it. That’s a problem.
So the moral issue does play a role, but it is not a positive one, and it’s especially problematic because it conveys an artificial level of certainty in the tautologies it generates. They may be fascist. They may be communist. They may even be an ugly hybrid of authoritarianism and other things that has outlived its usefulness as a convenient means of securing resources in that country. But that does not auto-generate a rationale for war or assassination, only self-interest can do that.
The conflict in Afghanistan, contrariwise, was necessitated by the war that was thrust upon us. If Sudan began flying airplanes into our skyscrapers on Thursday, then, yes, I would expect us to be inserting troops there by Friday.
How do you find that a transnational organization such as AQ amounts to the Afghan nation and people attacking the US as if it were a conventional war? Most of the hijackers were Saudi, bin Laden himself was Saudi, and the radical brand of Islamic extremism that he favored is largely funded and distributed from Saudi Arabia. Why doesn’t that amount to Saudi Arabia attacking the US on 9/11 (note: that’s not my position, I’m just illustrating the problem I believe exists with yours).
But: this issue that you’re raising, Lizard, is all in the realm of realpolitik, and reasonable people can disagree about it: maybe we can kill the fascists safely, and maybe we can’t, depending on the situation. What I’m primarily interested in responding to is Iain’s claim that killing fascists is some sort of moral wrong. It’s not. It’s a moral good.
I don’t really think identifying the Taliban as fascist really requires a “magical fascist litmus test”. If you really need to go down the bill of attainder, we can, but it would save us all a lot of time if you’d just come across and agree “OK, yeah, these guys were clearly fascist.”
I’m indifferent to whether they are fascist or not. Plenty of people are fascist more overtly, and plenty of people adopt traits that are distinctly fascist. That is not a death sentence by any legal framework that operates on criminalizing deeds rather than thoughts, which ours is supposed to with very specific exceptions.
That doesn’t mean I’m bent out of shape that bin Laden’s dead; I don’t think I can imagine an American president not taking the shot when he had it given the political picture here. I don’t particularly believe that legalistic frameworks are all that useful outside of specific treaties in foreign relations. But the US talks that talk, so I’m not going to be upset either when other people call us on it. More importantly, I think it’s really important to discourage the sort of inverted fatwa that you are proposing in your anti-fascist crusade: it’s sloppy and dangerous, and you should rethink it if only because that kind of thinking is perilous to the United States’ actual interests.
Oh god, not Islamofascism again.
Fascism is a term properly applied to specific political movements in Europe in the 20th century. Applying it to current Islamic militant groups is deeply silly.
What’s deeply silly is debating the morality of killing Bin Laden. See also; Comparing terrorist mastermind to Vice President of the United States.