By David Paxton
In Part 1 I explained why I consider the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound to have been a legitimate military action against a military target under the principle of self-defence. I suggested it should not be considered an illegal ‘assassination attempt’.
In this part, I wish to examine various reactions to the raid, including Corbyn’s, and the controversy these caused.
Tragedy and Farce
The fallout following the unearthing of Corbyn’s statements came to a peak when David Cameron alluded to it in his conference speech in October. It was a few seconds in a 1 hour speech, 100 words inside of 6500. However, he caused quite a stir and brought many people to a point of anger.
This is what the prime minister said:
And on the subject of protecting our country from terrorism, let me just say this:
Thousands of words have been written about the new Labour leader.
But you only really need to know one thing: he thinks the death of Osama bin Laden was a “tragedy”.
No.
A tragedy is nearly 3,000 people murdered one morning in New York.
A tragedy is the mums and dads who never came home from work that day.
A tragedy is people jumping from the towers after the planes hit.
My friends – we cannot let that man inflict his security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology on the country we love.
This was apparently to take Corbyn’s words out of context, to be dishonest. I have heard this directly called a lie. Some have gone as far as to make a comparison with the following picture or this link, a version of which was reported in the Mirror.
The idea being that the same could be done to Cameron. But is it the same? Obviously it isn’t literally the same as Cameron was clearly quoting somebody but is this a comparable act of bad faith?
Peter Hitchens, always keen to condemn Cameron, said the following:
Though I doubt whether Mr Blair would have had the nerve to make the deeply dishonest misrepresentation of Jeremy Corbyn’s perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden.
The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.
I attempted a discussion with Hitchens via Twitter to explain why I don’t consider it ‘perfectly reasonable and civilised’ of Corbyn. One of the questions Hitchens asked me was ‘don’t you prefer trials to summary executions?’. Furthermore, he alluded to a Boris Johnson article from 2001 which, apparently to him, to this article from the Huffington Post, this from Russia Today, and many on social media, sees Johnson getting away with what Corbyn does not.
Others have made comments about the rule of law as if the actions that night somehow worked against it. Popular secularist-blogger, Futile Democracy, said exactly that. To him the operation that killed Bin Laden was tragic because it abandoned the rule of law.
He writes with moral seriousness, he isn’t a knee-jerk anti interventionist or a pacifist and he has a firm grasp of facts and ideas, and yet, I struggled to get answers from him regarding which or whose law had been abandoned or broken.
In the episode of BBC Question Time subsequent to the raid, Lord Ashdown and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown were in fine moralising form though at least Ashdown managed to be fairly reasonable. It took Alibhai-Brown to push this tale to the levels of farce. Regarding Bin Laden’s burial at sea she literally stated that it makes us no better than the terrorists and that it would ‘set off another generation’.
In brief then, the complaints from Corbyn and others following the killing of Osama Bin Laden are as follows:
- There was no attempt to arrest Osama bin Laden. This was therefore an assassination.
- The operation has made the world a more dangerous place.
- The operation was a tragedy like 9-11 was and the invasion of Afghanistan was.
- Cameron implied that Corbyn didn’t think the attacks of September 11th were a tragedy after he explicitly said they were.
- Cameron lied, he quoted Corbyn out of context and in bad faith.
- Osama bin Laden was ‘summarily executed’ via an ‘extra-judicial killing’.
- The U.S. abandoned the ‘rule of law’.
- The U.S. government, in doing this, and especially in disposing of the body, showed they are no better than the terrorists.
- Boris Johnson said the same thing as Corbyn but received different treatment.
I believe all these to be fairly worthless complaints. Some are misjudged and some are utterly ludicrous.
I’ll go through them in a rough reverse-order and try to keep this on the brisk side of comprehensive.
Boris Johnson
In 2001 Johnson said:
Osama bin Laden… is both sinister and ludicrous at once, and a trial would expose that. If it is really true that a trial would provoke a revolt in the souks, then that is a small price for showing the souks how we in the West obey the rule of law
The piece apparently implies hypocrisy to the disadvantage of Corbyn. Johnson indeed suggests a trial is superior to abandoning the rule of law but what nobody else seems to be bothered to note is that the dichotomy he provides isn’t between a trial and an operation similar to the one which occurred and which I discussed in detail in Part 1, but between a trial and a ‘murder’.
He said:
It is Osama bin Laden, badly injured, and against all predictions, he is trying to surrender. The man who encouraged demented young men to take their own lives is making a pitiful attempt to save his own.
What do you do? Do you blow him away? You could sort of accidentally squeeze the trigger and pow, no more bin Laden; and if you did, there is hardly a person in the West who would condemn you.
To be sure, there would be long editorials in the Guardian, denouncing the shoot to kill policy of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, and John Pilger would accuse you of being a war criminal.
….
No matter how angry you might feel, and how vividly you recalled the events of September 11, you might think, as you raised your rifle to point at his chest, that British soldiers are not taught to murder unarmed people in the act of surrendering.
This isn’t just word games or a lawyer’s quibble, Johnson described a specific situation. He described a murder. Osama bin Laden wasn’t in the act of surrendering. What occurred in 2011 was not illegal. The rule of law was not abandoned. In a military raid they had every right to shoot him.
Nobody is arguing that you cannot prefer a trial. Nobody is making an accusation from Corbyn’s doing so. It is the rest of what was said that is being compared and the rest is different from what everybody else has said.
If people really wanted to pick at Johnson’s words on this subject they would be better going after his piece of 2011. In this he says more interesting things:
This was an assassination, a liquidation, an extra-judicial killing and a termination with extreme prejudice. Whichever way you look at it, President Obama has carried out one of the most effective whack jobs ever seen, and if he doesn’t get re-elected I will be amazed.
…
In so far as President Obama has a duty to protect America and Americans, he almost certainly has the necessary legal cover, provided by Congress, to remove bin Laden from the scene by any means at his disposal, and that is what he has triumphantly done. As an argument, it is not without its difficulties. If America is to go around indulging in extra-judicial liquidation of anyone who poses a threat to American interests, then we are entitled to wonder where it will end. We may be worried that the enemies of America may be spurred to symmetrical retaliation and that we will be caught up in a cycle of killing and counter-killing.
But it is at least plausible, and emotionally convincing, to say Osama bin Laden was a clear and present danger to America; he had it coming, and the president had him killed. All I ask is that we stop pussy-footing around about “hostile acts” and accept that this was an execution.
So why don’t we all just cut the cackle and admit the groaningly obvious. It is perfectly clear why the US will not release the video footage they were all watching in the White House, and that caused Hillary to press her knuckles to her mouth. There was no firefight.
It’s a confused piece and, in parts, dead wrong.
There was a firefight:
…As he started toward the stairs, which were directly in line with the door, AK-47 rounds tore through the glass above the door, narrowly missing him. I rolled away as the bullets cracked just inches over my head.
Owen, Mark; Kevin Maurer (2012-09-04). No Easy Day: The Only First-hand Account of the Navy Seal Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden (p. 220). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
The SEALs didn’t have live helmet-cams or the like. The video feed being watched was from the drone circling overhead. According to Mark Bowden in The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden it was the helicopter crash visible via the drone which was responsible for Clinton’s expression.
If, as Boris says, Bin Laden was posing a threat then this isn’t an ‘execution’ but a military strike on a military target. They can simply kill him.
That’s the general threat. There is also the idea of immediate threat which is relevant if this was not a to be considered a military action. The U.S. discussed what a reasonable course of action a suicide-bombing advocate who loves death would have to take to not be considered an immediate threat. It sounded fair to me and Bin Laden didn’t take that course of action. Therefore, the ‘pussyfooting around’ is no such thing.
Either way, Johnson did not say what Corbyn said. As confused as his second piece is he never chose to describe the killing of Bin Laden, or even his missing out on his day in court, as a tragedy comparable with the attacks of September 11th 2001. This forms the basis for a sensible guess as to why, other than hypocrisy, they were treated differently.
The Body
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s protestations were so pathetic that I was tempted to leave them where they lay. However, I think her effort serves to highlight a trait that runs through many discussions of this type. One which I describe as ‘sophistication-via-masochism’. The making a fetish, which by definition is illogical and unreasonable, of blaming the West.
Her discussion on Question Time went thus:
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
The rules of war say, and Paddy [Lord Ashdown], I don’t know, can confirm or deny this, when people are killed in battle their bodies are given to families to bury, properly. This did not happen. He’s no friend of mine but they should have done that.
…If we say we are more civilized then we have to act. And it’s difficult. What do you think is going to happen now? People ‘A’ won’t believe he’s dead, ‘B’ and the lady’s completely right this wasn’t done according to proper rites. It will just set off another generation.
Douglas Murray:
….What Yasmin is doing… is holding America and our allies to such a uniquely high standard that no society could ever live up to it. That even the worst enemy of a society has to be buried according to the customs that they would want. I can’t raise it in me, Yasmin to think that whether or not the customs around his burial were perfect in your eyes is the most important thing in the Bin Laden story
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
Then you are as barbaric as them… you’re no better.
For Alibhai-Brown it will be the outrage arising from outrageous outrages, such as giving Osama Bin Laden an Islamic burial at sea, which will ‘set off another generation’. Those potential jihadists who were previously on the fence about a life of terrorism will apparently be motivated to kill random civilians due to events such as this. And presumably, once again, this would all be our fault. It’s incredible the number of things we need to do to ensure we don’t make these perfectly reasonable people angry.
Her attempt to criticise U.S. actions as part of a ‘cycle of violence’ argument echos Corbyn’s comments. I shall discuss this later.
From Mark Bowden:
After much discussion and advice, it had been decided that the best option would be burial at sea. That way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s misguided followers. So the body was washed, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson cruising in the North Arabian Sea.
As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”
Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier. The body was wrapped in a white shroud with weights to sink it.
The last sequence of color photos in the death album were not grotesque. They were strangely moving. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in the weighted white shroud. The next shows it diagonal on a flat board, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water with a small splash. In the next it is visible just below the surface, a ghostly torpedo descending. In the next shot there are only circular ripples on the blue surface. In the final frame the waters are calm. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.
Bowden, Mark (2012-10-16). The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden (p. 264). Atlantic Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
You will recall that Alibhai-Brown, to her shame, said “Then you are as barbaric as them… you’re no better.” I ask you to consider the events and decisions described above and then choose whether these are the reasonable actions of a serious and civilised nation or more in keeping with the barbarism of Jihadist murderers?
Let us grant Alibhai-Brown the presumption that she knew nothing of the U.S. contact with the government of Bin Laden’s origin, the home to most of his remaining family, and that the U.S. had already correctly speculated what that government would say. Let us also assume she was smart enough to have realised that the U.S. had, after considered thought, decided this was the most beneficial course of action. This wasn’t something they would have forgotten so simply bunged his body off the side of a ship. It should be obvious that they thought it safer not to create a shrine and a cause for future problems. Serious people concluded that this was the preferred option. I suspect it was more than Bin Laden would have hoped for.
The U.S. government have a duty to the safety and security of their own citizens. Alibhai-Brown tells us that ignoring that duty in favour of her sanctified process of dealing with the mass murderer’s corpse is not only right and moral but to do otherwise makes you barbaric. And more, as barbaric as the mass-murderer himself.
Does it not seem like this was a final, desperate, complaint she clawed from the bottom of the barrel? The remaining chunk of mud to fling at what she described on the program as the ‘ugly American’? And does this not speak to a deeper problem?
What she said is daft. More than daft, it is perverse. When no logical explanation can be provided for somebody’s argument then one is forced to search for the ad hominem. In this case, a fetish is all I have.
Only somebody utterly compelled by their fetish would appear on television to discuss matters of great import yet choose to shower us with the effluent of their proclivity.
This is your brain on sophistication-via-masochism. We should perhaps be grateful to Alibhai-Brown for providing us with such clear example.
If the masochism she publicly indulges wasn’t so widespread she would have been mocked and jeered by the television audience. Instead, alas, there were plenty there who heartily applauded.
Abandoning The Rule of Law
They didn’t and Part 1 explains why, so I’ll breeze past this. I will simply note that anybody suggesting that the United States government did abandon the rule of law, and who wishes to be taken seriously, needs to at least explain which law was abandoned and in what way.
If the law is so important to you and you think the raid broke it when it killed Bin Laden, why would you support his kidnapping for trial from a foreign country? What is it that makes the latter legal but the former an abandonment of the rule of law? Is the rule of law something that gets broken in degrees?
Word Games
Hitchens called the killing of Bin Laden a ‘summary execution’. Johnson called it an ‘assassination’. Part 1 of this explains why they are both wrong.
Both of them also described it as an ‘extrajudicial killing’, as have countless others.
The former government lawyer, Carl Gardner, wrote an excellent piece on the trouble with this term. In it he uses Orwell’s Politics and the English Language to demonstrate why the word is so shifty. As the title of his piece demands, ‘if you think it murder, say so’. He wrote:
The phrase extrajudicial killing is indeed spreading and corrupting thought. Judicial killing not being fine, “extrajudicial” adds nothing and means nothing. All that these critics are actually saying is that killing’s to be feared, or always wrong: something that’s either banal or plain inaccurate, since killing can be justified in self-defence or war, or even out of compassion. But what are they trying to say?
The convenience of extrajudicial killing is that it implies wickedness vaguely connected with the law, without accusing anyone of breaking it; and its repetition suggests to the mind unspecified wrong by sending thought to sleep.
If this is an ‘extrajudicial killing’, and we can probably assume from his use of it it is a bad thing, then what sort of killing isn’t?
Entering the Bataclan theatre and killing the terrorists inside?
Shooting a Nazi machine gunner at Normandy?
The killing of Yamamoto?
What does Hitchens think he means? Is it different if under the rules of war? Is this an attempt to say ‘targeted killing’ that went awry? Is any killing bar judicial-execution, which Hitchens advocates, unacceptable?
Once again, this was a military strike against a military target. Either Bin Laden was murdered or he was legally killed. If Hitchens wants to call it murder he really should. If he doesn’t he should not be hinting at wrongdoing without owning the accusation. Does he not know what he’s talking about or does he not care?
Justice
Perhaps much of the trouble people have had with the raid stems from the sense of it being an act of reciprocity or revenge. Bin Laden carried out acts and this act was done in return.
The killing was announced to the world with the language of ‘justice being done’. It was billed as being a relief to the families killed in 9-11.
The question then is can a military assault under self-defence also be considered an act of justice? I don’t see why these are to be considered mutually exclusive. In Part 1, I used the killing of Heydrich as an analogy. Am I unable to deem his death both a military act in an ongoing war and a righteous act of justice? I say I am able. Either way, this doesn’t render the killing of Bin Laden illegal, barbaric, or anything negative.
Just because in our society, and to our citizens, justice involves courts and juries I do not see why taking military action against an active enemy, outside of our jurisdiction and control, cannot be described in the same way. Both take the most civilised form which it is practicable to undertake in the circumstances we find.
Context
Any quote or excerpt is, by definition, out of context. The moral component comes with the question as to whether the exclusion of context deliberately changes the meaning. But if the context is important let’s have the full context.
Jeremy Corbyn was appearing on Press TV, an Iranian government channel of low repute and one on for whom he has been a presenter. The editorial line of that channel, which they stick to, seems to go against all the principles Corbyn professes belief in. But they are deeply anti-West.
They also pay. Corbyn’s parliamentary register shows the contractual (not to say lucrative) nature of the relationship, with four payments totaling up to £20,000 between 2009 and 2012.
The particular program in which he was appearing when he made his comments was titled: Why is Obama Reluctant to Show the Final Moments of Osama bin Laden’s Life?
The title hints at the conspiratorial ramblings so popular on Press TV. The entire text of all Corbyn’s contributions of that episode are to be found here after being lovingly transcribed by myself. Here is another transcript provided by the Daily Mirror. In them is plenty of context. For example:
…the president has to explain why he’s not confirming evidence of the death, why the burial at sea, if there was indeed a burial at sea and if it was Bin Laden. Because Bin Laden may well have been dead a year or two for all we know.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the “if there was indeed a burial at sea and if it was Bin Laden”. It reminds me of South Park’s Johnnie Cochran and “ladies and gentleman of this supposed jury”.
There is more context:
Well, I can’t answer the question of why, we can only guess there is something fishy here.
And yet more:
Right and the next stage will be an attempted assassination on Gaddafi…
This is the context of Corbyn’s ‘perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden’. He was on the propaganda network of the Iranian regime spouting conspiratorial bollocks. For money. Though, before it seems like I’m suggesting he said it JUST for money, let me be clear: It’s worse. He believes it.
The context of his ‘tragedy’ remark does not help him. If he has been taken out of context he should be thankful for it.
Still though, there is the question of whether he said the lack of a trial was a ‘tragedy’ or Bin Laden’s killing/death was.
He Said It
I’ve heard this a lot:
Corbyn didn’t say killing OBL was a tragedy, he said not putting him on trial was.
Sure, but it’s the same thing. If not achieving Outcome A (a trial) = Tragedy then Outcome B-Z (not a trial) = Tragedy. There’s not a lot you can do against that. If Jeremy Corbyn said that not putting Bin Laden on trial is a tragedy then all other outcomes are, to him, a ‘tragedy’. This saves somebody like Cameron from the accusation of a ‘lie’.
Is that too lawyerly? Too sneaky? Perhaps you think in accusing him of calling the killing a ‘tragedy’people are allowing the uninformed audience to assume that Corbyn was lamenting the death of a close chum or something. This would mean we were being asked to think Corbyn felt the absence of a living Bin Laden was the tragedy rather than Western civilisation’s missed opportunity in putting the man on trial. In this regard I wonder if Cameron have been less criticised if he had said ‘the killing’ of Bin Laden rather than ‘the death’?
Regardless, if this is the case it is, at worst, a bit of sharp practice. Though I for one never thought that this is what was meant or insinuated and nor was it why Corbyn’s comments angered me. I need no strawmanning. What Corbyn said is worthy of condemnation when steelmanned. It sounded bad when Cameron and so many others said it because it is bad.
If you do object to an apparently misplaced implication in the criticism of Corbyn, if that is the basis of your defence of him, then it demands us to ask ourselves what he did in fact mean.
Tragedy Upon A Tragedy Upon a Tragedy
Here’s the rub, Corbyn didn’t just call the absence of an ‘attempt to arrest him’ a tragedy. He called it a tragedy like 9-11 was. Therein is where all known defences of Corbyn fall to shit.
He said:
This was an assassination attempt and is yet another tragedy upon a tragedy upon a tragedy. The World Trade Center was a tragedy, the attack in Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in Iraq was a tragedy.
How exactly is the result of the raid on Bin Laden a tragedy like 9-11? If they are all tragedies then what is the tragic strand that unites them? What is the underlying and consistent theme of tragedy?
This needs to be answered by anybody stating he was taken out of context. If you have no reasonable explanation for this you are best to keep quiet when tempted to say you understand what Corbyn meant and that the rest of us are being unfair to him.
Hitchens’ ill-considered stab at Cameron provides us with a nice point to work around. And, for what it’s worth, I think Cameron was being clever.
Hitchens said:
The false and cheap suggestion that Mr Corbyn does not regard the events of September 11, 2001 as a tragedy – when he specifically said that he did – was a disgrace for which Mr Cameron should quickly make amends.
Ok. But Corbyn called them both tragedies. Cameron suggested 9-11 was a tragedy because of human reasons such as:
A tragedy is nearly 3,000 people murdered one morning in New York.
A tragedy is the mums and dads who never came home from work that day.
A tragedy is people jumping from the towers after the planes hit.
There is a choice. Did Corbyn call Bin Laden’s death a tragedy due to the sadness and horror of the act or did he call a 9-11 a tragedy due to the ‘perfectly reasonable and civilised objection’ to its lawlessness? You can have one or the other. And I suggest you want neither.
Cameron knew what he was doing. The 9-11 reference wasn’t ‘false and cheap’, it was a move of wit and sophistication from a politician making a political speech. It spoke a truth about Corbyn and it left open the chance for people, who were so keen to have a crack at Cameron they couldn’t be bothered to consider what Corbyn actually said before they leapt to his defense, to be reduced to spouting nonsense. Further analysis ends up making him look worse and his defenders silly while all the while keeping the conversation on Corbyn and security.
You may have preferred if Cameron had taken the time to lay all this out at length and in depth. But he was making a podium speech to his troops which excuses brevity and some level of simplicity. Does it excuse lying and falsehoods? No. But I think I have demonstrated that that simply didn’t occur.
In short – Corbyn said Bin Laden’s death was a tragedy like 9-11. If he thinks it was a tragedy in the way Cameron describes 9-11 then he wasn’t being misrepresented or taken out of context, smeared, or slandered. He is guilty as hell and all the shit slung his way was well deserved.
Cycles of Violence
There is but one way in which Corbyn’s comments have a semblance of coherence. Though it isn’t one his defenders seem to acknowledge as his actual intention. I don’t blame them.
Corbyn often speaks in terms of cycles of violence. It’s the most sophisticated thought he has and he applies variations of the logic wherever he can. You know the drill, if we don’t want nuclear war the West must give up their missiles because our enemies only want theirs because of us. Peace by bending over. Our inaction will invite their inaction. If we prefer fascists to stop murdering their way through the Middle-East we must resist shooting at them so they will embrace folk guitar-music. Or something.
The U.S. attacked Bin Laden and killed him. This is an outrage which will feed the cycle, as were the attacks on September 11, 2001, the war in Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan. He lumps them together because each to him is a missed opportunity to be unilaterally peaceful and thus spontaneously usher in multilateral peace.
Can’t we learn some lessons from this, that we’re just going to descend deeper and deeper…
…and so it will go on and this will just make the world more dangerous and worse and worse and worse…
This is Corbyn’s foreign policy mantra. The reason jihadists are a bit coarse and boorish is because of us. It’s all reaction. If we were only willing to talk, to show that we care, the death cult would start talking and we move onwards and upwards in cycles of peace. It is a coherent idea. The only problem with it is that it’s bollocks.
Jaw jaw might well be better than war war and one outrage might well begat another. But it doesn’t mean one side’s perpetual unwillingness to take military action will bring peace. I’ll spare you the full explanation of this because you know it already, it’s a triumph of slogans over experience and who but a few fringe-hippies still believe this nonsense?
It’s bollocks in general terms and as a prescription but it gets worse when you consider it in this particular context. Here it is another example of what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown ejaculated into debate.
It’s been 5 years since Bin Laden’s camouflage alarm call and how many jihadists have listed “the Sheik didn’t get his day in court” on their grievance list? Would this have made the murderously angry any the less murderous than keeping him in a U.S. prison?
I doubt even Bin Laden was offended by the manner of his death. Though somehow Corbyn is on his behalf. He insists that shooting a man famous for ordering civilians killed without trial will lead to more violence and that it is part of a descent into barbarism like 9-11 was. I struggle to believe that people sawing heads off on HD video, which they publish as an advertisement for their way of life, are truly to be riled in this way.
This is such an unreasonable proposition that mere stupidity isn’t a good enough explanation. It is that squalid fetish once again. To follow it is to essentially render us powerless to take any action in our own defence which has its own immorality and, perhaps worst of all, it sets up a ready-made exculpatory analysis for future terror. If anything were to follow it it would be our fault again and not that of the fascist thugs.
This is your brain on sophistication-via masochism.
Conclusion
The negative reactions to the ‘tragedy’ comment were quickly written off by Corbyn admirers as almost any criticism of him is. But I also found lots of fairly impartial people did the same. Even before Cameron mentioned it. People were instantly convinced he had been smeared and that closer examination would reveal nuance that exculpates him. I looked at the nuance and it doesn’t.
The comedic ramblings of the 62 year-old adolescent should have remained ignored in the depths of YouTube, but somehow 250,000+ people, apparently intent on us virtue signalling our way to impotence and defeat, elected him leader of a great political party. It becomes worthy of attention.
Corbyn has some detailed explaining to do. His appearance on such a show and on such a channel is a problem anyway but his specific comments were shameful. The childish moral wailing, or as Peter Htichens describes it, the “perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden”, were sandwiched between low conspiracism and worthless conjecture.
To have a public attack of the vapours when a man who declares war on the United States, who murdered thousands of her citizens, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of others around the world, who still planned attacks, who claimed to love death, who begged to fight, lived to fight, and then eventually got a fight and lost… is perverse. It is pure masochism.
Shooting Bin Laden may not have been your perfect outcome and I won’t begrudge anybody for wishing he currently sat stateside in a supermax prison. But his killing wasn’t a descent into lawlessness or barbarism or anything close. The children in the compound lived and the minimum damage was done to complete the task. In hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden the United States demonstrated something laudable.
They showed that justice will catch up with you in one form or another. They showed that diligent, thorough, hard working people were willing to dedicate a good portion of their careers, on civil service wages, to tracking down the culprit and the threat. Then they showed they were willing to take physical and political risks to move the task to completion. Perhaps a trial would have shown something better on top, perhaps a different conclusion might have been preferable. But wildly so? At what risk is this advantage to be achieved. Should they retrain troops to the point that their lives are worth less than the public relations potential of putting a man, who didn’t want to come quietly, on trial? How many trained and willing soldiers should be risked? What punishment would we suggest after the first one or two are shot the third kills the target?
A man who worshiped death, killed countless and swore he would never surrender was dispatched. And if you think I am getting to close to sanitised euphemisms, he was dispatched by a bullet cracking open his skull and emptying the contents onto his bedroom floor. Force is ugly. But this was no tragedy and nor was it a further descent in cycles of violence. It was a disciplined, professional, controlled and considered act that was sensible, proportionate, necessary and had no credible alternatives to it suggested. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that those stating otherwise are one of the following: anti-American, masochistic, foolish, naive, working to an agenda, sympathetic to terrorists, or in the tragic case of Jeremy Corbyn, most of the above.
The Gerasites 