McLemee on the Twitter

“It sure seems like Obama’s job as secret Muslim operative imposing Sharia law on the US just got a whole lot harder.”

When your #3 man gets out of line you whack him.

How do we know he’s really dead? I demand to see the long form death certificate!

See! It was all worth it.

I was actually more surprised he was alive enough to be killed.

Holy fucking shit sums it up nicely.

Two observations:

1. How could this have happened during the tenure of a lefty, soft-on-terror cream puff like Barack Obama?

2. How long until Trump starts asking for bin Laden’s death certificate?

So how did it go down? Some Special Forces guys creep in there and turn off his dialysis machine?

Don’t comment here much (though read regularly), but wanted to say: thanks for the sanity (and humor). Reading the comment board reactions elsewhere, even say the Guardian liveblog, was getting bizarrely depressing.

Cue Newt Gingrich asking why it took so long for Obama to move on intelligence received last August in 3 … 2 …

“How do we know he’s really dead? I demand to see the long form death certificate!”

It’s six-foot something long.

I got the news in a phone call from a Latina friend, so excited I could barely understand her. “Obama’s locked in his re-election!” she chortled in her joy. Half the conversation was her laughter. So, yeah, a good day for Democrats, and most likely for the hopes of social democracy in America.

BBC Radio 5 Live was just doing some vox pops with the crowd in front of the White House. One interviewee (and ex-Marine) said “Now we can restore the rule of law and get back behind our borders”.

Chris Bertram @ #20 quotes a jar-head:

“Now we can restore the rule of law and get back behind our borders”.

Hear. Hear.

Now that OBL is dead can we declare victory in the GWOT and go home now?

More generally can we just walk away from the whole business of forcing democracy down the throat of exotic countries? Its apparent that Afghanistan Alpha-males are no more keen on the Rule of Law than American Alpha-males are on Sharia Law. So perhaps we should just let sleeping dogs lie.

They will be roused from their dogmatic slumbers all in good time, as recent experience in the ME indicates.

Since my caller’s reaction may seem outrageously partisan

I don’t think partisanship is the problem here. George Orwell wrote that war coarsens the strong, but he forgot that it just as much coarsens the weak. The coarsening effect of violence takes its tolls on its witnesses just as well as on its perpetrators.

Good day for everyone, supporters of the Democratic Party included.

But before we go can we fire a parting shot at the scheming two-timers in the Pakistan security state who gave sanctuary to OBL for the past decade. Last time I checked US National Security doctrine made the crime of harboring terrorists a capital offence.

You can see how hugger-mugger the Pakistan top-brass and the secret pin-up boy were from this link on google maps link. OBL’s “hide-out” was about a drive and fairway wood between the Army Burnhall College and the Pakistan Military Academy.

So the red tabs had the guy right under their nose whilst going through the motions of searching for him all over the badlands of Trash-canistan. All the time taking billions of dollars in US military aid and letting soldiers and civilians die in a fruitless goose chase.

This is hard proof that we have been propping up our enemy for the past decade. As we did with Saudi Arabia for the previous decade, at the other end of SW Asia. There is just no percentage in getting involved in this region and we just end up being played for mugs.

The real question is whether it will be Vin Diesel, The Rock or Sylvester Stallone that will be 1st to the box office.

Also, the Arab uprising killed the bastard before he was shot. Let us praise them for ignoring the hell out of the bastard. May they keep it up in spite of all of the other bastards.

I can just see the latest addition to the National Mall. Osama’s head on a pole a la Cromwell.

Reportedly he was buried at sea, ostensibly to satisfy the Islamic tradition that burials should be prompt. It also seems like an excellent way to wind up the wingnuts. Maybe they killed some poor tramp! It would be irresponsible not to speculate!

What a relief.

At last the Royal Wedding will be pushed off the front pages.

I was wondering what the hell was going on when I turned on Fox and saw the headlines – ‘Black man assaults, kills elderly senior citizen in his home.’

Seriously though, for some shits and giggle go check out the Telegraph blogs site. Never seen so many people trying to contain the fact that they’re more disappointed that Obama got Osama than Osama got got. Oh well.

And @30 – Well. Fucking. Said.

As a New Yorker… I am…

-angered that he lived in a mansion an hour north of Islamabad while the Pakistani Government swore that he must have fled the country;

-concerned as to possible reprisals;

-without any illusion that this death ends the conflict;

-impressed that, in the space of a month, the US was able to collect enough intelligence to plan and implement an assault operation on a heavily fortified mansion with one figure inside as the target, that was successfully completed in 40 minutes without any loss of American lives;

-am satisfied that, in this case, though justice was delayed, it was eventually not denied.

It took him so long to act on the intelligence because he is beholden to the House of Windsor, who demanded that he delay it till just after the wedding of the heir presumptive. Forget this crypto-Muslim nonsense, he’s a crypto-monarchist, actually a bastard son of the Prince Consort.

Googling, I see Lyndon Larouche is still alive.

It’s emerging that the photo purported to be OBL dead a) is faked and b) has been around since 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-photo-fake

So maybe we should take reports of his demise as seriously as those who’ve had him dead for at number of years now.

That photo didn’t come from the US, did it? It’s the first time I’ve seen it.

A good declare-victory-and-go-home-moment.

From what I can gather, the criminal mastermind was living in a mansion in the capital of one of our “allies” in the war on terror. Ten years after the fact, this ally killed him, or the U.S. government persuaded them to kill him, seeing him more as a liability than an asset. They could have handed him over for trial in the U.S. instead, if he wasn’t dead already.

As I said on another site, this was simply too overdue. But I am curious about the timing. Why now?

Oddly enough, Strocchi has put his finger on the crux. Judging by Wikipedia, Abbotabad is the Simla of the Pakistani military. (And isn’t it odd that it is still named after a British officer.) It is not credible that ObL was not under the protection of senior generals. On the other hand, it is equally incredible that the raid could have gone forward without the cooperation of senior generals — most likely different ones, I guess, but who knows?

BTW, the TV is saying Osama was 51. Not elderly, even by Middle Eastern standards.

(And is there a source other than the CIA for the allegation that he was on dialysis? If you proceed on the assumption that the CIA lies all the time, why do you get to depart from it there?)

OBL was 54, at least according to my morning radio news. With some luck, the number of this post is a tribute to the passing away of this sorry piece of shit.

OK, apparently the Pakistanis weren’t informed of the attack beforehand. The story is still developing and its hard to get the facts straight. But the mansion was closer to the Pakistani military academy than I first thought.

One theory I will put out out is that the US government knew that the Pakistanis were sheltering Osama, but opted not to retaliate against Pakistan since its a nuclear power, and not the easiest place to invade because of the large population. This wasn’t announced because otherwise they would be admitting that Osama was essentially untouchable. But that still raises the question of why now?

That a mass murderer has met his just reward is good news. But a great patriotic victory, it ain’t. Over at Talking Points Memo, they’re calling it VBL Day without any apparent irony, but this is a far, far cry from finding Hitler dead in his bunker as the Allies take Berlin. Really, even if recent events have definitively ended the prospects for Bin Laden’s insane vision of a new Caliphate, he got a big part of what he wanted as the United States flailed uselessly across the ME and Central Asia, incurring thousands of casualties and inflicting close to a million of them and squandering more than a trillion dollars all the while. As a strategic and/or moral victory for the U.S., this rings very hollow indeed. So good news that a mass murder is dead, to be sure, but all this good news does for me is call to mind all the pointless suffering that the U.S. created on the way to this so called victory.

Because previous attempts failed? Because previous intel got compromised/turned out wrong?

Because this was the successful attempt.

Your attempt to find some secret underbelly of “the timing” and willingness to speculate without facts or with mistaken facts does say more about you than it does about anything else.

57: Before long Muammar Gadaffi will announce he actually is the oldest father of true Islamic revolution.

Elliott Abrams is already on the case:

“Mr. Obama seems to want more than that fair share the American people will naturally and rightly give him. His remarks last night were far too much laced with words like “I met repeatedly,” “at my direction,” and “I determined,” trying to take personal credit for the years of painstaking work by our intelligence community. Mr. Obama might have noted that this work began under President Bush, but as usual he did not. ”

***
“Once again here the White House appeared unable to get the messaging quite right, a failure magnified by the amateurish delay of more than an hour in Mr. Obama’s remarks. The White House told the nation at roughly 10 p.m. that the President would speak at 10.30. Had the President done so, he would have delivered fabulous and shocking news. By the time he actually spoke nearer to midnight his words were an anticlimax, for all the news had leaked. Whatever the cause of this delay—Mr. Obama editing the remarks for too long, or a belatedly discovered need to brief Congressional and world leaders—it suggested that the calm professionalism in the face of crisis shown here by our military and intelligence professionals has yet to be achieved in the White House.”

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2011/05/02/bin-laden-obama-and-the-arab-spring/

All good points Jim. Still it is nice to see someone getting their just desserts.

It’s better that OBL is dead than not, but someone will take over Al Qaeda, probably less competent and charismatic, though you never know. As an organization, its operational abilities seem to have been seriously degraded long before this, but somebody will probably be able to pull off something. And somebody always will. Actually fighting terrorism, as opposed to beating one’s chest about it, is a long, hard slog of what is, essentially, international police work, where smarts and intel are what matters. And somebody, somewhere, will get through sometime no matter what. But maybe with OBL’s head figuratively on a pike, we can now be adult about what needs to be done — and what does not need to be done.

OBL’s plan was to enrage the US sufficiently that it would bankrupt itself with an over-reaching war, way to go GOP making sure that OBL’s plan worked.

“(And to Jim who said upthread that OBL was an “old man”: he was born in 1957. If you think that is ‘old’, you are wrong.)”

God, he was only 54? I would have put him closer to 70. The beard really did make him look older.

This still far from over – I mean, we still have to find Ayman al-Zawahiri. Perhaps we should bomb Costelloabad?

Just slightly OT but – it appears that information on the courier, including his name appeared in the GTMO Wikileaks files. I find the prospect, even if slim, that Assange’s crew could have conceivably blown the entire op to very, very disturbing.

Together with the recent success of the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunesia, this makes the future of radical islamism look somewhat bleak, I think.

I think I’ll take marc’s bait (@69) and piss and moan a bit. First, about the virtually total lack of intelligent discussion in the mainstream in the 10 years since 9/11 about its causes. If you want to prevent some crime or catastrophe from recurring, the intelligent thing to do is to figure out what caused it and address that. Bin Laden’s statements and interviews told the world over and over again what caused 9/11 (and in fact, what was about to cause it, since he was saying the same thing for many years beforehand): not hatred of Western freedom and democracy (he denied this explicitly: “Why, then, did we not attack Sweden?”); not a desire to revive the Islamic Caliphate, which he almost never alluded to; but revenge for American foreign policy: specifically, for US military interventions in the Middle East, support of repressive regimes in Muslim countries, imposition of the murderous UN embargo on Iraq, and financing of Israeli violence and expansionism.

Now, it was never necessary to agree with Osama’s view of American foreign policy (though there’s much to be said for it) in order to at least acknowledge that that view is what produced Islamicist terrorism. All that was necessary was elementary honesty. An honest government and intelligentsia would have said either “Osama is mistaken: that’s not a true view of American foreign policy, and here’s why (viz., either we didn’t do those things or we did them but they were justified) ” or else “Osama is correct; and while that does not excuse his crime, we should change our policies, not because Islamicist terrorism inconveniences us, but because those policies are immoral.”

Of course neither of these responses appeared in the mainstream. The prevailing explanation was theologically-based zealotry, compounded with fanatical anti-Semitism. Osama’s many addresses to the American people were not — as one might have expected in a free, or even a minimally prudent, society — disseminated and discussed at least as carefully as John Boehner’s lachrimosity or Scott Brown’s voluptuousness. Even though the security of an individual or group depends primarily on intelligently assessing the danger(s) to that individual or group, hostility to America cannot be intelligently assessed, it must be howlingly, full-throatedly, and continuously denounced. You would think that our masters — who are not unintelligent, after all — actually care most about something other than our security.

The second thing worth pissing and moaning about is that, having said the above — or perhaps even before saying it — it is necessary, in the still-inflamed atmosphere of American political discussion, to repeat that 9/11 was a terrible crime, for which Osama and all the other perpetrators deserved to be brought to justice.

<iI find it disconcerting that so many people seem to consider a bullet through the head by special forces — without trial — following a supposedly heavy battle in which no US forces were injured — to be ‘justice’.

So do I

Geo,
Certainly OBL resented the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia in proximity to Islam’s holy sites, opposed US support for the Saudi regime, opposed other aspects of US foreign policy (though there is some evidence, I believe, that his concern for the Palestinians was a rather late addition to his list of concerns). I think however that the “causes” (in quotes to avoid lengthy discussion of the meaning of causation) of 9/11 are more varied than you suggest. Any discussion of causes would require some attention to the history and pre-history of al-Qaeda itself, ISTM, and this in turn would get one back to the personal histories of OBL and Zawahiri, the impact on the latter of being tortured in Egyptian prison, and so on. (Wright’s ‘The Looming Tower’ is pretty good on this.) US foreign policy mattered, but it wasn’t the only ’cause’. After all, one can strongly oppose US foreign policy in the ME without embracing al-Qaeda’s ideology and worldview. There’s an ideological dimension I think you are missing. That said, I agree that the reaction of some of the US political class to 9/11 (“they hate our success,” “they are hate our freedoms,” etc) was rather childish and hysterical, to say the least, and did not help anything in the short or long run.

@40
Harry,
Actually, on a more serious note I kind of wish this had happened on Friday, if only to show the Windsors that the world does not indeed revolve around them and their sartorial choices.

correction to 82: remove “are” in 3rd line from bottom

From the Wikipedia account of the 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia, to punish Tewodros:

The widowed Empress Tiruwork and the young heir of Tewodros, Alemayehu, were also to be taken to England. However, Empress Tiruwork died on the journey to the coast, and little Alemayehu made the journey alone. The Empress was buried at Sheleqot monastery in Tigrai among her ancestors. Although Queen Victoria subsidised the education (at Rugby) of Dejazmatch Alemayehu Tewodros, Captain Tristam Speedy was appointed as his guardian. He developed a very strong attachment to Captain Speedy and his wife; however, Prince Alemayehu grew increasingly lonely as the years went by, and his compromised health made things even harder, and died in October 1879 at the age of 19 without seeing his homeland again. He left an impression on Queen Victoria of England, who said of his death: “It is too sad! All alone in a strange country, without a single person or relative belonging to him… His was no happy life.”

This was more than a century ago, although in very circumstances. But it does seem that we have barely improved since then.

It is quite obvious that none of you saw Obama’s birth video last night. I keep saying to my producers, the people. The people. It is unfortunate that they are the deciders. They are ignorant. They are the idiots. Not me. He just does not get.

I mean, way up there, isn’t that an award winning script. Imagine, if both Diesel and Stallone starred. Both would have got an Oscar for Best Actor!

You folks are not only hopeless, you are mirthless. Celebrate! The purpose of public nudity is no longer extant. Rejoice!

LFC, fair enough, you didn’t say anything there that I would disagree with, and I’m not exactly deep-throatedly screaming about some hypothetical unfairness of what happened; I’m on record here at CT supporting covert assassination to a full-scale war operation if forced to choose between the two, so, eh…

But I am damn sure going to give a dumbfounded cringing look to anyone who says, “Dear Lord, people. This is good news, period.”

As a kid my cousin had a dog named Molly, who could run around free on their rural farmland. Some kind of shepherd mix, cute but ornery. Some demented kids apparently got the idea to feed her a rabid squirrel carcass they’d found, or maybe she found it herself — that part’s not clear. You can predict what happened. She damn near bit me, because I was young enough not to recognize the disease and know to get the hell away from her. My uncle put her down with a .45 to the head, and then the sun set. There may have been an hour in between. We all knew that’s what had to happen, and in light of the circumstances at that time, I suppose you could say the prompt and effective assassination was good news, period. But none of us were smiling.

The way I feel this morning is reminding me of the way I felt that evening.

LFC: You’re right that there’s unpacking to be done in the “causes” of 9/11.

But this:

“…the reaction of some of the US political class to 9/11 (“they hate our success,” “they…hate our freedoms,” etc) was rather childish and hysterical, to say the least, and did not help anything in the short or long run”

also needs some work.

There is certainly room to think that some parties involved were helping themselves and others, quite at “our” expense, with that and related rhetoric. I doubt it would have persisted so well if it weren’t serving to help someone(‘s bottom line.)

I am puzzled by the American response to the killing of Osama. What were those young people thinking by the White House and in lower Manhattan? http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/05/osama-bin-laden-thoughts-and-questions/

What were those young people thinking by the White House and in lower Manhattan?

Hey, liberals are entitled to some nationalist ‘jouissance’ too, like everybody else.

For the record: “brought to justice” doesn’t mean “assassinated.”

Citation needed. The man had confessed his guilt for the murder of thousands and was killed in a firefight.

MPA: Attention needed. The next sentence begins: “If OBL was assassinated … “

Nice speculation by Jim Harrison @ 85: that sounds credible, and clever.

@105: Do you have a point? If you’re trying to claim that Bin Laden was justified, say so. He planned the killings of a lot of completely innocent people and was continuing to do so.

It’s as if someone used the existence of housing discrimination in the US to deplore the execution of a serial killer; it’s possible for the former to be present and the latter to still be just. If you want to argue against, say, capital punishment on principle that is a different matter; but if that is the objection to killing Bin Laden, say so. Don’t raise foreign policy matters.

There’s one in every crowd, isn’t there.

Shucks, Marc, that cartoon you’re looking at only bears the most tangential resemblance to what I said. Thanks for telling me what I can and cannot believe, though — useful information, and few gatekeepers are quite so explicit in their rulemongering. But didn’t you just say a moment ago that you were going to ignore people like me, rather than chase after us chidingly? I liked that. Let’s go back to that, now.

Hmm, well, #105 indicates Marc’s not interested in bowing out of this peaceably, having made his point.

You keep making up more and more rules on what we can and cannot say, Marc. “Don’t raise foreign policy matters” seems a bit inapt, here. I don’t think a whole lot of us are going to take you up on that one. You might go try to police somewhere where you have some authority.

Maybe it’s too early for this, but I come to CT because it reliably offers intellectually serious commentary on matters of public ethics. Instead I find an atmosphere of celebration bordering on giddiness.

I need help thinking through the following question:

If the killing of bin Laden was an act of justice (Pres. Obama calls it this, though perhaps he doesn’t really intend that phrase to be taken at face value), how can one possibly support this form of government-directed killing, and not support the death penalty (which only occurs after a long and public legal process)?

#112: That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I’m seeing a seamless conflation of a lot of resentments in this thread, and I’d expect this crowd to at least be able to properly separate out different ideas. You can make a pacifist argument – fine. You can say that the US is “bad too” (apparently common here) – and you could make exactly the same argument about any powerful nation at any time in recorded history. Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and all of the leaders involved in WW I, to pick random examples, could certainly be classified as “war criminals” by the creative (or even mildly so); soldiers are killed in war without due process. What of it?

It’s completely possible to recognize that a large nation can *both* be doing a lot of cynical power moves *and* sometimes do something else which is justified. We may be able to pull out of Afghanistan now with a “win”; it may be possible to relax the excesses of the security state; and on balance it makes it less likely that lunatics will win elections here. These are all practical positives. The attack by Bin Laden *preceded* the unjust invasion of Iraq and caused the just (in my view) invasion of Afghanistan – you can’t excuse the one by invoking the others without violating causality.

The main animating force here appears to be reflexive anti-Americanism. If that’s how you get your kicks, go to it. Just don’t expect a receptive audience.

* I agree that on the face of it this is wonderful news, and worth celebrating. It’s like 1000 death row prisoners wired up in parallel and convulsing in perfect synchrony. (Assuming that none of those prisoners has confessed or had their guilt established.)

* So well done to Obama for finding time to mastermind this operation, or at least answer questions like ‘we’ve found UBL – shall we go in and get him?’ or ‘we’ve killed UBL and disposed of the remains beyond retrieval. Would you like to announce it?’

* Though I must confess to a niggling lack of any confidence that any given part of the various narratives is actually true.

* I suppose we can at least infer that there will be no trial nor interrogation of UBL (though we were in a pretty good position to think that already). Pretty much the final part of the comprehensive destruction of evidence relating to the 11 Sep 2001 events.

* The announcement also presumably means no more tapes though. Or at least none presented as authentic by US officialdom. Or at least not unless the story is going to change, which seems pretty unlikely, since it’s unlikely to have been made unless UBL is actually known to be dead.

* After all, they killed UBL.

* They did not of course however end the GWOT. All the usuals have been quick to emphasise the likelihood of reprisals – we must be vigilant, so be on the lookout for any terrorismy-looking stuff, folks!

* One of the plot elements I heard on the radio was that UBL had been ‘shot in the head twice when he refused to surrender’. And now he sleeps with the fishes. Apparently.

* I wonder whether this means those US garrisons relocated to Qatar will nip back over the border into Saudi again? Probably not, as UBL would probably have guessed assuming he was alive long enough to see the withdrawal. So he did not die in vain.

* It is possible (I’ll just repeat that for those who tend not to notice such terms: possible) that this announcement, and whatever contemporary events underly it, has been made at this time rather than any other so as to distract from NATO’s latest curt rebuff to a ceasefire offer from Gaddafi. This one seems to have been reported slightly less dismissively and in more detail than all the previous ones, on BBC Radio 4 anyway. Or further, to distract from an imminent addition of more NATO fuel to the flickering embers of the armed insurrection they’ve kindled.

This is however a throwaway bit of speculation since I don’t think anyone seems particularly concerned to try to deflect NATO from killing (or – just possibly – ousting) Ghadafi and his close heirs. That has always been an obviously ineluctable consequence of the ‘intervention’, and there doesn’t seem much appetite for challenging it in any influential quarter. There isn’t any very clear basis for objecting in any case, as long as any army on the ground is fighting or peacekeeping, rather than actually occupying – unless a new regime might request the continued presence of troops of course. Assuming of course that a new regime will be in the pockets of the NATO powers, which somehow seems quite a good bet.

Tim @118: the comprehensive destruction of evidence relating to the 11 Sep 2001 events

Would you elaborate?

if you shoot back at the people trying to capture you then the use of deadly force is morally and legally permissible

Even if it was the Chinese police (say) doing it in Washington DC?

Marc @ 116: You’re the one who’s doing all the conflating. No one here is saying that Bin Laden’s beliefs about American foreign policy justified 9/11. We’re just saying that they caused 9/11, and that the steadfast refusal of the government, press, and public to acknowledge that fact — even to the extent of denying any merit to BL’s grievances — is both dishonest and a very bad way to go about enhancing Americans’ security.

And more: no one is saying that if the official story is true — that OBL was killed in a firefight during an attempt, sanctioned by the Pakistani government, to apprehend him — the US government acted wrongfully. We’re just saying that if they executed him without trial and then tried to cover that up, they acted wrongfully.

It’s admirable that you’re venturing into a hostile forum to defend your passionately held beliefs. But please get your opponents’ arguments right.

(Sorry, blockquotes were supposed to end before the link)

H, at 114: If the killing of bin Laden was an act of justice (Pres. Obama calls it this, though perhaps he doesn’t really intend that phrase to be taken at face value), how can one possibly support this form of government-directed killing, and not support the death penalty (which only occurs after a long and public legal process)?

I’ll raise at least one point (which I mentioned earlier, but less explicitly, at 89). bin Laden had not only publicly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for many acts of terrorism (including, but not limited to, 9/11), and done so from a perfectly secure location where there is no reason to think he was under any duress, but had also expressed an eagerness to cause more such incidents. As I understand it, it’s very rare for a capital punishment case to involve both such a forthright admission on the part of the defendant, and also such large-scale crimes and an explicit intention to repeat them.

I oppose the death penalty because it seems to me that most cases involving it leave at least some room to question either the involvement of the defendant, or the possibility of one day rehabilitating the defendant as a positive contributor to society. But war crimes, large-scale terrorism, and dictatorship often don’t have these worries, and may be enough to open me to the possibility that the death penalty could be justified in such cases.

I could be convinced that this sort of thing should also be forbidden, but I’m pretty certain that it’s at least less bad than the ordinary death penalty. It’s almost certainly wrong to call it an “act of justice”, but it may have been justified.

(It’s probably also worth comparing this to the other main sorts of government killing – in addition to the death penalty, there are ordinary acts of war, and police killing in self-defense. As some others mentioned above, this situation shared aspects of both of those situations as well. They both make me quite uneasy as well, but as I mentioned above, the death penalty has worse features. Do you disagree with any of the reasons why the death penalty is worse?)

Let’s put aside the kids chanting “USA” in front of the White House; these (somewhat tasteless and predictable) atmospherics are not relevant to the main question here, which I take to be whether the killing of OBL is something to be welcomed — not celebrated but welcomed — or not.

On that question, I think that Marc @103 has it pretty much right. Geo claims that US foreign policy caused 9/11 but (a) the issue here isn’t primarily about that, and (b) US foreign policy was not the sole ’cause’ of 9/11, as I’ve already argued above. Stras wants to bring in every evil the US has ever committed abroad, all the innocents killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and in drone strikes, etc., and say that b/c these actions supposedly dwarf Osama’s crimes, OBL is what … innocent?

OBL and Zawahiri are (well, past tense for the former) fanatics who, long before 9/11, thought nothing of launching two (partially bungled) attacks on embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, one of which killed a fair number of people and blinded lots of others (mostly Africans btw) via flying glass. They set out to kill civilians, they don’t have any concept of ‘collateral damage’ b/c that is their aim. Unlike e.g. the drone strikes, which I mostly oppose but whose aim is not the killing of civilians. I think I have said enough on this thread, but I don’t think this has been one of the CT commentariat’s finer hours.

LFC: Geo claims that US foreign policy caused 9/11

No. That is definitely not what I’ve claimed. What caused 9/11 was Bin Laden’s (and his followers’) anger over American foreign policy. He told us this again and again. What any rational government and society would have done is to have acknowledged and discussed the terrorists’ complaints, not merely as a matter of justice but as a matter of simple prudence, since understanding what threatens you is a necessary prerequisite to protecting yourself. It’s possible that, after discussion, we would have decided, as a society, that Bin Laden and his followers were mistaken, that our foreign policy in the Middle East either was not as they described, or was but was quite defensible. But we never had that discussion because our government and media were not willing to encourage a discussion of Bin Laden’s complaints, which would have embarrassed them gravely, since many of those complaints were valid. Of course, valid or not, they did not justify terrorism, and the hunt for Bin Laden could perfectly well have proceeded in tandem with an attempt to get at the truth of his charges against American policy. But our government and opinion leaders preferred to portray Bin Laden and his followers as mere theological fanatics, who hated all that was good about America and aimed solely at establishing a global theocracy, rather than as theological fanatics who had indeed seen their societies oppressed, exploited, and humiliated by the US and its allies.

And no, no one is claiming that Bin Laden shouldn’t have been killed. The question is whether he was or should have been killed extrajudicially, unless it was a matter of military necessity, as our government says (possibly truthfully) it was.

It’s depressing enough that the public (one expects nothing better of government and the intellectuals) can’t seem to make the necessary distinctions between understanding the causes of terrorism and excusing terrorism, and between punishment under law and violence outside the law. But that even some CT readers seem uninterested in these distinctions is almost terminally depressing.

whether the killing of OBL is something to be welcomed —not celebrated but welcomed—or not

When my cat brings me a dead mouse^1^ that it caught, I don’t punish it or complain about its behavior or really do much of anything. It did what cats do. I’m not going to get the cat to stop being a mouse-hunter, which is markedly lower on my priority list than getting the cat to stop killing Pakistani and Iraqi civilians by the thousands pissing on my visiting friend’s duffel bag. Well, ok, I suppose in the event of a moussassination I would ‘welcome’ the discovery that there’s one more dead mouse in the apartment and one less live one. I mean, sure, I don’t want mice in the apartment, a dead mouse is better than a live one, a dead mouse can’t coordinate terrorist attacks raid the pantry. And this particular mouse masterminded 9/11 had a litter of mice back in 2003 or so, which means it really really deserves to die a super-extra deathy death. So… yay? It got better than it deserved? After seven years of bungling expensive traps, something finally got ’em? I guess I can rustle up some muted enthusiasm? But mostly I’d be staring at the mouse corpse dejectedly and think, well, ok, time to scoop it up and haul it to the bathroom and ‘bury it at sea.’ The moussassination probably didn’t fix the mouse problem, or even contribute more than symbolically to solving the long-term mouse problem. But it’s not a bad thing, on balance. It’s better than nothing, probably.

…gah, fuck it, whatever, shibboleth shibboleth shazam, I am totally fucking stoked that Elizabeth May got elected somebody killed Osama bin Laden seriously though, people for whom Global Warming for Dummies is just a reference work now have representation in Canada whooo.

I will be way more excited to learn we got Obama’s computer and his email login passwords and stuff, which would be unambiguously doubledoubleplusgood and might possibly win us the future. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn OBL and/or his associates spent the last few minutes of life frantically clearing iPhone browsing history files.

^1^Admittedly, this has never actually happened and I don’t think my apartment even has mice; I’m extrapolating rather loosely.

Most everyone agrees that the death of Usama Bin Laden will not end the war on terror. It will not result in the rescinding of extraordinary powers given to intelligence agencies, the police and the military. It will not end the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the military intervention in Libya. It will not put a stop to the activities of Al-Qaeda.

And yet, there’s a push to extract some kind of measure of good news out of this death. The chanting crowds seem a perverse, regressive, “tribal” celebration of the death of an enemy (I think of the chanting crowds in Afghanistan burning US flags triumphantly over the ruins of embassy houses a few weeks back), but it makes one point clear: that Americans have been desperate for something, some kind of release for their patriotic feelings, something to replace the disturbing feeling of impotence.

Prior to the death of UBL, the War on Terror was perceived as being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, or at least grinding to a stalemate. There was talk in the military establishment of power-sharing agreements with the Taliban. Now the perception has changed entirely. The facts on the ground remain the same, but the war is now seen as being won. A temporary injection of pride in an aching, tired body. I find myself unable to partake of this pride. Rather, the emotion I feel is sadness. Not because UBL “deserved better”, or because I sympathize with him, but because it’s all too little, too late. It will not bring reparation to the victims of 9/11; for a long time now, it hasn’t been about 9/11.

Also, even though I understand it was meant in a light-hearted way, I find the comparison between Arabs and mice (and US soldiers to cats) viscerally disgusting. The denial of human agency that goes with it is just… icky to me.

Geo @132: You’re conflating the short clips of rhetoric from political speeches with all of public conversation. There have been numerous, expert analyses of the motives of Bin Laden, of AQ, and of its various personnel, affiliates, and related organizations. The idea that we just “never had a conversation” about Bin Laden’s motives without reducing them to caricature is false.

As to the rest:

There is room for reasonable debate about how far the boundaries of a war against AQ should be pushed, but surely we can agree that Bin Laden falls within those boundaries. This is war. Bin Laden is a military target. He was killed in an audacious raid that apparently produced a single civilian casualty – a woman reportedly used as a human shield by one of Bin Laden’s men. Proportionality is clearly met.

I see no reason for Bin Laden to have been offered a trial. We have a judiciary for many reasons. Protecting hostile foreign military leaders isn’t one of them.

Geo @132: I did state your position about the relation between US foreign policy and 9/11 too loosely; I should have been more precise. On everything else, however, I stand by what I’ve already said.

This is war.
I find the comparison between Arabs and mice (and US soldiers to cats) viscerally disgusting

Who was comparing Arabs to mice? Sheesh, the intended equivalence was mice = Al Qaeda (or organized terrorists more generally), mouse = bin Laden. I can’t blame you for being viscerally horrified if you thought it was a comment on Arabs; I’d have much the same reaction. (Although my influence over the D0D/military is probably far less than my influence over my cat, and the D0D/military is fundamentally predatory, so I sort of stand by the Navy Seal Cat bit of facetiousness.)

This is war.

No, it’s not. It’s absurd to call whatever the hell it is we’re doing a “war on terror” and it’s absurd to extrapolate from that as a premise. (Absurd may not be the best word. I was searching for a mild adjective, and may have failed in my search.)

However, that’s not to say anything you said after that sentence is false. To assert “bin Laden was a military target” and extrapolate from that seems reasonable enough, so I won’t argue with it. My stance remains “well, it would have been nice to capture him alive and put him on trial for crimes against humanity, but I’m not exactly mourning — I feel pensive and stunned and maybe even a bit disassociative about what feels like the end of an era that encompassed my adult life to date — bin Laden and 9/11 and the response to 9/11 were the defining feature of the environment in which I’ve lived since the age of majority, and this is an unexpected and stunning denouement.

Of course probably almost everyone else on CT has at least a decade on me, so this probably feels to them like the closing of one chapter in the middle of many, not the end of Volume I.

but that was Building 7, which I assume you are not suggesting was targeted

I probably shouldn’t be suggesting *anything* as it was just a strikingly nonchalant citation-free observation I heard on the radio; I’ll maybe go read more about this Building 7 some other time.

It’s definitely welcome news that all the hard drives and tech stuff on the compound were recovered. That picture of Obama in sunglasses floating around the Internet should read Sorry it took me so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate — I was busy acquiring the cell phones and hard drives of Al Qaeda’s top guys.