With all this stuff on bin Laden....thought I'd put together some thoughts on the issue......
Not the Hollywood Ending People Want It To Be
One thing I think is interesting about the whole Osama bin Laden thing is the celebratory fervor that has swept up many Americans.
I blogged yesterday on the issue of whether or not it’s okay to celebrate bin Laden’s death (check it out if you’re interested). One thing that gets me about the response to bin Laden’s death is how victorious so many people feel. It strikes me as a quintessential American response to an action movie’s happy ending. Bad guy gets away from justice a long time. Check. Good guys send in a team of highly strained special ops soldiers. Check. Good guys attack house to bring bad guy to justice. Check. Bad guy dies in battle with good guys. Good guys win! End scene. Roll credits. Raise the house lights.
We Americans sure do love our movies, our action movies in particular. The more I think about bin Laden’s death the more I expect to hear that The Expendables were the ones who did it. No, wait, maybe it was The A-Team. Huh? Oh, oh, yeah, right! My bad! It was really those Inglorious Basterds. Wait. What? Damn! I’m sorry! Of course! It was really the Mission Impossible team lead by the Ethan Hunt!
The story, as presented to Americans anyway, is just what we’d expect out of one of our beloved action/adventures. Only, the way things will end won’t be with a simple long shot of our heroes riding off into a setting sun in their tricked out special ops helicopter. Life is never as simple as we’d like it to be. Our War on Terror is unlikely to end anytime soon. In fact, odds are pretty good it will become a perpetual war funded by vested wealthy and powerful interests intent on seeing it never come to an end, think the War on Drugs redux. There will be no “happy ending” with a hero’s welcome and the giving out of medals (think the end of Star Wars) to triumphant music. The war will go on and on and on. If anything it may come to resemble that lovely bridge in Apocalypse Now, you know the one, that got rebuilt during the day by U.S. troops only to be blow up again night after night by the Vietcong. It’s highly unlikely that bin Laden’s death will translate into the Hollywood-style ending that people want it to be.
Did Obama Kill Osama?
I’m not a fan of President Obama. If you’ve read my blogs before you’ve seen some entries detailing criticisms I have of him and his performance. Lots of folks who are also not fans of the president are up in arms over the idea that “Obama killed Osama”. Did President Obama kill Osama bin Laden? Is bin Laden’s death a feather in Obama’s cap? Who gets the credit for it?
I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I’m still in mourning. As you may know, we lost to the Green Bay Packers in the most recent Super Bowl. When talking about the game it’s common usage to say that Mike Tomlin, who’d won one Super Bowl, had lost this one. Who’s Mike Tomlin you ask? He’s the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers and, in fact, the youngest coach ever to win a Super Bowl. He lost this one though, the Packers just played a helluva’ game.
But wait, did Coach Tomlin “lose” the Super Bowl? I mean, did he even play in it? Well......no. He didn’t play. He didn’t make one pass, didn’t run the ball once, didn’t even make a single tackle. He just stood on the sidelines all game long, watching. So....can we say he really “lost” the game?
Being a leader comes with some perks. When things go well you get credit. Like everything it has its downside too so that, when things go bad, you get saddled with the blame. We all know this from work as people often get credit for things they didn’t do (their underlings did) and get blame for things they didn’t do (those same damn underlings!). Coach Tomlin, to follow the strict interpretationalist view, didn’t lose the Super Bowl because he wasn’t in the game. He didn’t play! President Obama didn’t kill Osama because he wasn’t there! He didn’t pull a trigger!
Historically, leaders get credit all the time for things they didn’t really do. Lincoln won the Civil War but he didn’t fire a musket, load a cannon or lead any cavalry charges. Franklin Roosevelt won World War II but he didn’t lead any landings on Normandy, he didn’t clear out any houses in fighting in Stalingrad and he didn’t fly any bombing missions over Tokyo. John F. Kennedy put a man on the moon but he was long, long dead by the time it happened. Herbert Hoover caused the Great Depression, don’t you know, even though he didn’t really, he just had the great misfortune to be in office when it hit.
Again, I’m not a fan of Obama so I’m not arguing this out of my like for the guy, I’m just arguing this from the point of view of historical fact and the tradition of common language usage. People may not like it but from the point of view of both, Obama killed Osama.
Pakistan...The Friend of our Enemy is Our Frenemy
We Americans are a rather jaded people. Why? Because we’re lied to all the time. Lies are central to our political discourse and to the way our government works. Take our friendship with Pakistan for instance.....
We’re not friends. I think most Americans who follow current events just a little sense that and yet....smiles and back slaps abound at how we’re allies working together in the War on Terror. We Americans hate hypocrisy at work, in social settings....and we fully recognize it in our government as well. We know that Pakistan isn’t our friend but that our government can’t say that openly. No one takes the platitudes and warm sentiments overly seriously. It’s clear that, no matter how much Pakistan says, they are not our friend. Actions speak louder than words and the fact that several top al Qaeda members (not counting Osama bin Laden) have been found free, openly roaming big cities in Pakistan suggests that the country really isn’t working with us to stop terrorists.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons which makes them a very, very dangerous country. Their overall unwillingness to go after people like bin Laden really makes one wonder if they’re not the most dangerous country around. Pretty crazy stuff.
The Fallacy of Morals
Some Americans may be under the mistaken impression that U.S. forces were sent to capture Osama bin Laden. No, they weren’t.
Capturing bin Laden was not on the agenda because capturing bin Laden would’ve created a staggering amount of problems for the United States. Killing bin Laden was the goal, pure and simple. Whether we like to think of it this way or not it’s clear that the U.S. wanted bin Laden dead and went to extraordinary lengths to assassinate him.
Hey, we could’ve captured him if we wanted to right? Wrong. Capturing bin Laden would’ve been problematic on multiple levels. Right now, in the wake of his death there are concerns of retaliatory terror attacks that have driven up threat levels for U.S. forces across the world. Capturing and holding bin Laden (indefinitely) would’ve created the same problem but would have made the issue an ongoing one. We’d have had to hold on to bin Laden for the rest of his life in what would’ve amounted to American politics as a lose-lose game. It could take years and years for him to die and the entire time we'd be on a state of alert awaiting some attack.
What would U.S. options be in holding bin Laden prisoner? What choices would we have been presented with? Well, the first one would be to put him on trial or not put him on trial. Seriously? What jury on in the United States could possibly have given Osama bin Laden a fair, unbiased trial? Would you want bin Laden in a courtroom? Would you want to give him a public theater in which he could deliver his unique style of polemics against America and the West? I don’t think any American leaders gave this serious consideration. A trial would have galvanized many Islamic extremists and provided them with a rallying point. Wherever the trial was held the cost for security alone would’ve been astronomical. It’d have been a foregone conclusion that bin Laden would be found guilty. Could you imagine the uproar in the U.S. if he was tried and found not guilty?! Chaos would ensue. There’d be violence in the streets. The government would topple. At the same time, a guilty verdict would be seen by some neutral observers and pretty much all radical Islamists that bin Laden didn’t get a fair trial and had become a “martyr” to his cause. Talk about your Kobyashi Maru scenarios.
After a trial, then what? In the highly unlikely event that bin Laden was found not guilty, would he just be let go? Just released and sent on his way? If found guilty, would he be condemned to life in prison or, sentenced to death? Well, it seems to me that any government that let bin Laden walk after being exonerated in court would topple very quickly. Finding him guilty though creates a whole other set of problems. Keeping him in jail the rest of his life allows him to remain a “martyr” for his followers. “Osama is a prisoner of the evil Great Satan! Let us all fight in his name while he is a prisoner!” One could expect attempts at kidnappings all over the place in response. Al Qaeda might try to abduct a high-ranking Western official. Let’s say they got their hands on, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Then what? Would we do a prisoner swap? Would we allow some high-ranking politico to be kept hostage and/or eventually killed (probably on video) to keep our hands on bin Laden?
Executing him would be another option of course, but that would make him even more a martyr in the eyes of his followers than keeping him locked up forever. Then there’d be the whole question that U.S. forces just had to deal with regarding how to handle his corpse. Of course, a dead bin Laden would be a problem even minus execution. Bin Laden wasn’t going to live forever, so, even if the U.S. didn’t execute him (an honorable death in the eyes of many) when he did finally die the U.S. would come under inevitable criticism and scrutiny for not doing everything it could to keep him alive, for submitting him to terrible conditions while imprisoned, there’d be likely accusations that the U.S. withheld needed medical care....the whole thing would be a huge mess.
Course, no trial was necessary. Many al Qaeda members are being held without a trial and without hope of one, imprisoned indefinitely. Instead of giving bin Laden a court to show off in, he could’ve been smuggled to some secret jail somewhere and held for the rest of his life in quite on the down low. That would’ve been hard to do, of course. Guards would be awfully tempted to talk. Sooner or later there’s a strong likelihood that world would get out and the world would look to the U.S. for answers on why it never said anything about having captured bin Laden. Then you’d have the scandal issues of a blown secret and return to the problems of what to do with him while you have him that I’ve listed above.
The problems of capturing bin Laden alive, as I’ve listed, are many. Much simpler to just kill him. There’s little reason to think that U.S. forces ever intended to capture him in the first instance and every reason to assume that killing him was always the goal. Killing him was going to be much cleaner, much simpler and far less of a headache. But what are we to make of that? What are we to make of the morality behind whacking Osama bin Laden? My take....it’s the American way.
We Americans like to kill other people. Don’t believe me? Have you ever seen an American film before? American movies don’t go in much for conversation and working problems out. Real American films involve bad guys getting killed and good guys winning the day.
The Truth About What Happened
One final thought on all this Osama stuff, this time dealing with the truth of it all. As expected, some news stories have already come out about people around the world doubting Osama bin Laden’s death. People are like that, after all. Even with lots of video evidence to support it there are some people out there who believe strongly that the moon landings never happened, that it was all a set-up, a con done on sound stages in Hollywood. So far (at least, as I write this) the White House hasn’t released any evidence to support President Obama’s statement that bin Laden was killed. In fact, the official story has already changed more than once:
I don’t write this to challenge the credibility of President Obama or the White House version of events but, rather, to point out that what we have is a very one-sided narrative. Life teaches us to be open to people’s stories but also to be skeptical, especially where only one side is involved.
Was Osama bin Laden resisting? Did he use a wife as a “human shield”? Did a helicopter get disabled due to a mechanical failure? Were other countries involved and/or alerted ahead of time about the raid? What is the “truth” of what happened on May 1st in that compound in Abbottabad?
We may never know the answers to all the questions I’ve just posed. Then again, we may. And even if we do, the answers given may never satisfy everyone. That’s just the way it goes, really. Some will believe the official narrative while others question certain aspects of it while still others will dismiss it all together. Just as some people to this day believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, even after all the evidence that has been presented to suggest otherwise, there will be some who believe that Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed or, at least, wasn’t killed in the way the U.S. government says he was.
This is one aspect of the bin Laden story I find most interesting. What is the truth? How do we find it? Do we know it when we see it? How do we deal with our own doubts when we have them?
What interests me is that in a society where privacy increasingly doesn’t exist and where we seem to more and more about just about everything we occasionally run across an issue or an incident in which determining the truth is a challenge. We’re smarter than we’ve ever been, we know more than we’ve ever known but still sometimes we’re confronted with things we may never know. Sometimes we are faced with situations where all we can know is what we are told and we’re asked to move on from there. I think that’s interesting. For all we know, sometimes we’re just destined to not know as much as we’d like
