The killing of Osama bin Laden has become a battlefield of its own, pitting effete, hand-wringing talking heads against square-jawed, decisive columnists.Read the rest here.
Amongst the hand-wringers are old campaigners for moral equivalence. Celebrity human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson (yes, the one who wanted to jail the Pope) immediately declared that taking out OBL was a perversion of justice. "Justice means taking someone to court, finding them guilty upon evidence and sentencing them." he said. "This man has been subject to summary execution, and… it may well have been a cold-blooded assassination."
Predictably, radical warhorse Noam Chomsky argued that deaths of thousands in Iraq were far more evil than crimes for which OBL was allegedly responsible. “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”
For such scruples and assertions of moral equivalence, the machismo team has nothing but scorn, beginning with President Obama, who thought it was one of the most satisfying moments of his presidency. "Anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined."
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was sounding a lot like a shotgun-toting frontier housewife in a TV Western than the über-liberal feminist she is. Her response to the news that the murderer of hundreds of New Yorkers was dead was stridently patriotic: “I want memory, and justice, and revenge… Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest. We have nothing to apologize for.”
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I think the real problem with this situation is that our country has exposed, in the last decade in particular but really it's been going on for half a century, that there is no standard of justice.
ReplyDeleteWe'll say that Osama was killed (or that Libya was attacked or that Hussein was deposed) to prevent or avenge the death of innocents. But far more innocent people have died at the hands of the American government than most other governments or most terrorist organizations in this situation.
Then the justification becomes that the people who have died at our hands did so, not in the pursuit of a radical totalitarian agenda, but for the greater good. But the "greater good" is so ill-defined and inconsistent that it's hard to accept that reasoning. Are staged elections and pseudo-democracy "the greater good"? Is the imposition of Western values on people who haven't chosen that for themselves any more than they've chosen Islamofascism "the greater good"? What is the greater good, and who is it good for?
Finally, it seems, we fall back on saying that it's a clash of cultures, that we represent enlightened and beneficent liberalism, while they represent tyranny and destruction and oppression. But I think we're kidding ourselves a bit if we really believe that we're actually doing ourselves or the world a favor by dumping trillions of dollars and throwing away thousands of lives just to get one guy who did something ten years ago, all while our own government in our own country says it has the right to arrest Amish people for selling raw milk to voluntary customers, or that florists can't sell flower arrangements without the approval of the cartels they compete with.
I think most people would like to see our government put at least as much effort into tidying house in America as we've apparently put into "getting our man" Osama bin Laden. At the very least, I think our esteemed leaders might not clap themselves so heartily on the back for such a minor achievement when the whole country is plummeting into economic oblivion.
As much as we like to kid ourselves that we have standards about warfare and the reasons we fight, we don't. I never thought I'd be the one to say it, but particularly of late, I almost long for the days when western societies chose to justify their useless meddling in the affairs of enemy nations with the battle cry, "For God and Church and Country!" At least then it was clear what the purpose was, and as far as I'm concerned, it might have been the worthier justification.
It was a thought-provoking article, but it did not change my view that the ethics of the killing of Osama bin Laden are pretty straightforward: we are at war; he was an enemy soldier and commander; we killed him. That is what nations at war do.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the question of whether or not "enhanced interrogation techniques" constitute torture is arguable; I tend to think that they skirt close to the line but remain on the correct side of it, but I should be willing to be persuaded otherwise. But that does not change the fact that bin Laden was a legitimate military target in the course of a just war.
Medvedev used the term "liquidation" in his favorable characterization of America's action toward Bin Laden. It's fine with me, too.
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