bin Laden: Pragmatic Justice or War Crime?

VERY IMPRESSED OFH!

Thanks all for your responses to date. I've read through them all with great interest, believe me and it's helped a lot.

Whilst the dickhead in me wants to go, ‘yippee, they’ve got the bastard!’, and go back to what I was doing, something else was saying, hang on a mo, what’s really going on here… and do I approve as wholeheartedly as dickhead wants me to?

The discussion has done what I hoped it would and forced me to think about a historical event that I know will bug me without resolution for months if not years to come.

In some ways it’s a bit like the Kennedy assassination: forever who, how, why?

Anyways, here’s my take so far.

Killing people is wrong. Never mind scriptures or the law, it is written in our genes and in our consciousness. All people barring the mad and the bad know it and abhor it.

As wrong as killing may be, there are times it must be done as a means to a justifiable end. In private (ironically such as open warfare) it’s a personal matter. In public the act must be determined in some way and mitigation considered.

Bin Laden was, despite his ‘nice eyes’ as someone said earlier, both the self-confessed driver of global atrocities and clearly mad as hell in every sense of the phrase.

Obama on the other hand has already been tried in the media fuelled public mind and acquitted on the presumption that mitigating circumstances amounted to the good of all.

But was it?

Obama is no gung-ho hawkish type intent upon new world orders or thereabouts like some of his predecessors. However, his presidency has been flattened somewhat by the acerbic Washington environment's underlying reaction to a non-white president; and its negative response to his well meaning but little understood monetary and public health policies.

He’s been behind in the polls forever with electoral show-time getting closer and closer all the time. A grizzly Saddam-type show trial would be too much show - even for the Americans! He needed the credit for sorting public enemy number one but it had to be clean and square.

I worry that rather than being for the good of all, the execution of this aging and redundant symbol of evil had more to do with self-interest.

I am a big fan of Obama (it’s those charismatically authoritative speeches of his that do me every time!) but doubts are beginning to form and what’s emerging in me is a suspicion that the demise of bin Laden was more war crime than pragmatic justice.

The fact that the execution involved the trespass, if not mini and temporary invasion of sovereign territory doesn’t help change my mind any. If they can do that without so much as a by-your-leave from one of the few onside Islamic states, then it begs the question: who and where next as and when suits?

Added to all this, the sight of gleeful crowds celebrating the killing does little to suggest that the self-appointed world policeman is any less barbaric than the 14th century wahabi terrorists they’re so keen to out do.

On his own, I see a respectful communicator in Obama - someone who in the right circumstances would be a proactive and respected proponent of world peace. But America's not into all that namby-pamby stuff is it? The country was born into fronteer strife where a kick-arse approach was the only way to get what you were after...

What were we saying about bullying on the other thread?

All in all, dodgy business in a well dodgy world...

 

What a great summation Brixton nice one! and thanks for throwing that one into the Hornets board!

 

Echoing Norway...

 

A) At the moment they are not trumpeting about anyone else in the manner they did about bin Laden;

B) It took them ten years to find him.

I'm not expecting a repeat performance anytime soon.

 

Interesting thread and good summary - thanks Brixton

 

On a tangential point - when on Sunday it was announced that "That Wedding" honeymoon had been postponed I wondered why - as the day before it was big news - I had a suspicion it was for security reasons - maybe someone had found weher ethey were going - but now it is fairly clear that the powers that be decided now was not a good time for him to be "at risk"

 

Thanks all. All I can say is that when your head gets screwed by world events, Watford, no matter how remote or aging Watford may be, is a sure solution!! Believe you me, I'm no spring chicken meself: I remember Scullion and Endean like it was yesterday... it WAS yesterday wasn't it? (Who's that lad Blissett you've got up front - looks well promising!)

The only thing I can't stand about Watford is having to play against them - the only thing that's ever predictable about that fixture is its a tough ask and never predictable!

If you don't mind, I'll be sniffing around this board again in search of some proper entertainment during those long dry summer months!!

 

You are very welcome BR

 

I look forward to it BR!

 

With regards to martyrdom - it probably would not have made much difference if he were taken alive. He will always be viewed in such a way by some.

I was living in the US on 9/11 (still do) and to see the effect on people was just so shocking. Most were walking around in a daze that such a thing could happen. And it closely affected a friend of mine at the time as well.

So while I don't subcribe to the chanting of 'USA, USA' outside the White House (let's not forget that 9/11 sparked some pretty wild celebrations elsewhere), I did take a quiet satisfaction that with the blood of over 3000 people (likely many more) on his hands - he got his comeuppance.

I'll be flying back and forward between here and there over the next few months - but I generally worry more about visiting Mexico - which is only a 20 minute drive away. I counter this worry by usually getting tipsy while I am there. But they ain't too keen on drunks on planes these days.