When President Obama reported that elite US soldiers killed the notorious terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, most Americans breathed a sigh of relief: America's biggest bogey man was now laid to rest. Finally, we can get on with our lives.
Numerous right-wing pundits leaped on this news with 2 different schools of opinion:
One school argued that the death of Osama Bin Laden was a good thing, but it was really a victory for the previous president, George W. Bush; after all, Bush established an anti-Osama Bin Laden group, and numerous "enhanced interrogation" protocols which (perhaps literally) squeezed the necessary intelligence from enemy combatants. This school is wrong on multiple counts: Bush disbanded the anti-Bin Laden group, and the anti-Bin Laden intelligence did not come from "enhanced interrogation."
The other school argued that the death of Osama Bin Laden was a bad thing. They argued that Bin Laden should have been brought in for questioning, charged with his crimes as appropriate, then prosecuted in a court of law. Surely those soldiers who raided Osama Bin Laden's secret compound should be tried for gross incompetence in this killing, and Barack Obama should be held accountable.
I want to examine this second school for a moment.
In a more perfect world, this might have been the right way to deal with Bin Laden. In fact, I argued that in 2001 our first step should have been to approach the Afghan government with charges against Osama Bin Laden, and demand extradition to the US. Afghanistan was under control of the Taliban, and there are lots of reasons to despise the Taliban, but the US government had a functioning relationship with them, and the US was giving them loads of our tax dollars in foreign aid to assist in their efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's opium production and exportation; it turns out that the repressive religious zealots running the Taliban don't like it when people get high, just like the repressive religious zealots here don't like it when people get high. Afghanistan might have responded positively to the opportunity to maintain the relationship, and the implicit threat that if they do not yeild Osama Bin Laden, that things would get very bad for them.
However, George W. Bush only barely attempted this approach, and never presented the Taliban with evidence against Bin Laden, who was a local hero for helping expel the Soviets. Instead, Dubya sent in the military, which invaded and conquered Afghan's organized military in short order. Afghanistan was effectively destroyed, leaving the US with a monumental restoration project, and a lot of Afghanistanis are still angry about America's presence there. A lot of people continue to die on both sides as a result. We supposedly invaded in order to capture Bin Laden, but we never did find him there.
Of course, they say you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. But what if you drop the eggs on the floor, and you need to mop them up, and nobody gets any omelette? Everybody loses! Doesn't that mean the whole operation was a colossal screw-up?
Periodically, the Bush administration would proudly report that they had killed Osama Bin Laden's second-in-command. This was universally greeted with warm fanfare; proof that we were making progress. Certainly nobody complained that the second-in-command didn't get a fair trial, even if he never got the chance to surrender before he got blown up by US ordnance. In fact, entire wedding parties were massacred, but the right-wing press never peeped that the military should have done anything differently.
But now many right wingers complain that Osama Bin Laden should have been brought in alive. Why?
Many Barack Obama supporters argue that this is proof of either partisanship ('right wingers complain about President Obama because Obama is a Democrat'), or racism ('right wingers complain about President Obama because Obama is partly of African descent'). But these Barack Obama supporters are forgetting something:
Osama Bin Laden was wealthy. Bin Laden was heir to the Bin Laden oil fortune. And right wingers believe that wealthy people deserve preferential treatment; even if Bin Laden would be found guilty of mass murder, he should serve his sentence in some kind of 'Country Club' prison for wealthy embezzlers, or his sentence should be reduced to 'Community Service' or something, where he lectures teens not to turn to terrorism. Certainly a man as wealthy as Bin Laden shouldn't be shot dead like a rabid dog or a peasant.
Sure, you can kill lots of Number Twos without anyone raising an eyebrow; because they're just the help. You can wipe out entire cities, because they're all worthless poor people. But a black man killing a rich man? It simply isn't done! Imagine Thurston Howell in his palatial mansion, upon reading the news in the Wall Street Journal: "That ruffian Obama executed Bin Laden for killing three thousand people, but my chemical holdings poison millions every year! Good heavens, what's Obama planning to do to ME?"
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