Dispiriting

[poliphilo]

Actually, I find it a bit dispiriting when the President comes on TV and says "I just had this guy killed" and there's dancing in the streets and the President's chances of re-election rocket.

Was it really out of the question to arrest Bin Laden? Did he have a gun in his hand when he was shot?

And why was the body dumped so quickly? What was there about it they didn't want us to see? I've read the wounds were in the back of the head, but I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure.

 

Wouldn't it have been better to have put him on trial? Who does it serve that Bin Laden never gets to tell his story?

 

Geoffrey Robertson in the Independent (I'd link but LJ won't let me this morning) reminds us of an important fact about the Nuremberg trials. Apparently the Brits wanted to string up the nazi leaders within six hours of capture and it was President Truman who insisted on due process of law, because lynching the bastards "would not sit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."

 

I don't really buy all that greatest generation guff, but it's sobering to remember there was once a time when a US President believed his public would appreciate him acting like a civilised man and not some fucking cowboy. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

"The first thing a principle does", said Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey, "is kill somebody", and I think that true of your otherwise laudable idealism, here. I reckon that, if this does succeed in securing the next presidential election for Obama, or at least gives us a fighting chance, then the number of lives saved thereby will justify Usama Bin Laden's apparent summary execution.

I reckon that the fact of UBL's death, and the dumping of his body into the Arabian Sea, will be more likely to demoralize his organization than encourage them to rally around his martyrdom, therefore in all likelihood again saving more human lives than were taken.

I reckon that hitting a hardened al-Qaeda safe house in Abbottabad, with US special forces like this, sends a clear and unequivocal message to AQ's supporters in the Pakistani ISI, thereby again probably saving more lives than were taken.

They call Obama the "Spreadsheet President". As a sometime idealist, I find the totting-up of lives taken vs the number saved a most distasteful business and am glad I don't have his job. But I honestly cannot see how any other course of action would have led to a more desirable outcome, your personal feelings aside, of course.

Juan Cole has written the best essay on the event that I have read so far. I recommend it highly to any interested party.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Not just my personal feelings. A lot of liberals- inside the USA- as well as outside- are arguing along similar lines.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Tony, I expected better from you than just pointing at the other kids and protesting that they are doing it too. And it isn't just 'liberals', either, since jihadis and right-wing extremists are also wringing their hands and singing more-or-less the same sad tune.

The reason is simple: ideologues of whatever stripe value how they feel about themselves more than than they do the lives and limbs of other people. Hopefully, as the Boomers die off, progressive politics will become a lot less narcissistic, but I fear it will be a long, hard, uphill slog.