Dead or Alive

Osama bin Laden is dead. I did not like bin Laden. He was an awful man and deserved to die for his misdeeds. At the same time, I do not like killing and am not happy about any of it - including the killing of bin Laden. I am not saying that, if I could have done anything about it, I would have let bin Laden continue to cause the kind of trouble that he has for this past decade or so. I admire the professionalism of the intelligence effort that located bin Laden and the Seal Team that implemented our President's order and congratulate them on a very successful military mission. It is with the formulation of the objective of the Seal mission that I might quibble. If it had been up to me, I would have instructed the Seal Team to bring bin Laden back alive.

Maybe the Seals were ordered to capture, not kill, and the situation that unfolded on the ground did not permit it, but I suspect not. It is my understanding that this debate has been going on for quite a while, and President Obama is not in favor of capturing these kinds of folks, but rather wants to kill them as quickly as possible. His increased use of drones to attack other terrorist leaders is an example of this policy. My suspicion is that Mr. Obama's reluctance to capture rather than kill is motivated by humanitarian considerations. He does not want to capture a "high value" terrorist and then be faced with the prospect of having to use harsh interrogation methods to obtain the information that would permit him to go after other high value targets. Killing them seems to be the simpler choice.

America is still living in a dreamworld. We are being forced to slowly wake up to the dangers of the real world that are all around us - with the operative word being "slowly." Our enemies are really very bad people and they mean to destroy us. We are the best country that I know of, but our virtue will not protect us from the likes of bin Laden. It is important to note that the information that led us to the courier that ultimately brought our Seals to bin Laden's compound was obtained through the harsh interrogation methods that Mr. Obama prohibits. The argument that we make to each other is that we are better than that, but if that is so, please explain to me why, in humanitarian terms, our assassination of bin Laden is any different than Stalin's assassination of Trotsky.

America still thinks that Islamic terrorism is just another foreign problem that we will eventually deal with successfully just as we have so many others in our past. I suggest that it is fundamentally different because of the presence of nuclear weapons in an increasing number of unstable countries. We had better get very serious about it because it is literally a matter of our survival as a nation and perhaps as a people.  My fear is that we will not do that.