The bin Laden home video hysteria was but one piece of the demonization campaign revived by the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants upon their target’s demise. Labeling an enemy as “evil” is a powerful propaganda weapon that most often turns back on you like a runaway torpedo. Invoking “evil,” like subscribing to any other intangible, leads to muddled, superstitious thinking, and that inevitably leads to defeat.
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| "My fellow jihadists..." |
Lamentably, in contemporary America, even the supposedly sharpest, most skeptical minds in the public for a have fallen into this trap. John Stewart of The Daily Show has taken to calling bin Laden “the world’s most evil man,” and it doesn’t sound to me like he’s kidding when he says that sort of thing. Firebrand Maureen Dowd lapsed into mouth-breathing insentience with a May 7 ditz diatribe titled “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil”
When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans (UMM, whatever else you might want to call him, Osama was NOT a mass murderer; we have too many examples, based on present day usage, of such sick creatures - Gary Speck, Gary Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc; It actually sounds more as if MoDo is pissed because Osama "bragged" about it, and I can't ever remember Osama "bragging" about the killing of innocents) and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response. (And why in God's Holy Name must this be the ONLY civilized and morally sound response? How about have him tried by a jury of 12 Muslims who sentence him to life in prison, in solitary confinement, to live out his days contemplating Allah?)
We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again (pathetic Dowd - equating the kililng, the execution of a tall skinny bearded guy for a "clear-cut military victory" -- SADLY she is not wrong when she apends, 'a win that made us fell like Americans again - ITS A FUCKING KILLING!! AN EXECTUTION) — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day occupations. (What the fuck is this? OF COURSE it has cost us hundreds of billions of $s, has gotten us trapped in multitrillioin-dollar Dog Day Occupations -- this are undisputable facts, and the viper queen, dismisses them out of hand ... MAUREEN DOWD: ARE YOU HITTING UP THE LIQUOR AGAIN? DID YOUR LESBIAN LOVER LEAVE YOU AND TAKE THE VIBRATOR?)
But within days, Naval Seal-gazing shifted to navel-gazing.
There was the bad comedy of solipsistic Republicans with wounded egos trying to make it about how right they were and whinging that George W. Bush was due more credit. Their attempt to renew the debate about torture is itself torture.
W. preferred to sulk in his Dallas tent rather than join President Obama at ground zero in a duet that would have certainly united the country. (Don't impute motive - that's RUDE)
Whereas the intelligence work that led to the destruction of Bin Laden was begun in the Bush administration, the cache of schemes taken from Osama’s Pakistan house debunked the fanciful narrative that the Bush crew pushed: that Osama was stuck in a cave unable to communicate, increasingly irrelevant and a mere symbol, rather than operational. Osama, in fact, was at the helm, spending his days whipping up bloody schemes to kill more Americans. (Unlike we Americans who waste no time whipping up bloody schemes to kill more innocent civilians - we just fucken KILL EM!!!!
In another inane debate last week, many voices suggested that decapitating the head of a deadly terrorist network was some sort of injustice. (And who would these "many voices be?"
Taking offense after Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said he was “much relieved” at the news of Bin Laden’s death, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted the Twitter message: “Ban Ki-moon wrong on Osama bin Laden: It’s not justice for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.” (And Roth gets it right!)
in which she justified the killing of bin Laden by characterizing the al Qaeda leader as a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.
Neither Mo Dowd nor anyone else needs to justify killing bin Laden. But calling him evil because he killed thousands of Americans with a shoestring operation that should have been stopped by our law enforcement agencies long before any hijackers boarded an airplane is a masterpiece of rationalistic moralizing.
Bin Laden is responsible for the death of thousands all right, but he did so with a new twist on an old, old tactic called an “air raid” as the first strike of a war that he openly declared a good five years before Sept. 11, 2001. The last time we bothered to actually declare war before we attacked was in 1941.
Those “thousands” of Americans he killed as part of an act of declared war seem like a paltry casualty count compared to the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed and maimed and the untold millions of lives we have destroyed since we had him pinned down at Tora Bora in Dec. 2001 (we only let him get away out of kindness, I suppose). Killing him finally, after nearly a decade doesn’t redeem the swath of destruction we created between then and now.
And calling him “evil” carries no more or less moral weight than he and his followers and the rest of the world that wishes we’d take a flying tackle at a rolling donut calling us “the great Satan.” In war, no matter whose side you’re on, you’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and God loves you and He hates them to pieces like meeces. Adolph Hitler believed God was on his side, as did Benito Mussolini. The Japanese believed that God was on their side because, heck, they believed their emperor was God, so who else’s side would God be on? (Heh!)
We killed a lot of Japanese and German civilians from the air in World War II, most notably at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden. Many argue that the A-bomb attacks on Japan were necessary, but in truth they were only necessary to terminate the war with an unconditional surrender. If we had offered the Japanese surrender on the terms we would up giving them anyway, they likely would have cut the bushido and thrown their hands up. Apologists for the annihilation of Dresden note that the city was a vital German military and an economic target. So…what kinds of targets were the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers?
Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is, in my considered opinion, humanity’s all-time greatest military and political mastermind. With no navy or air force or army or even a defense budget he has managed to entangle the best-trained, best-equipped ever military of history’s mightiest nation in a self-defeating war that it can never win.
And it’s a war that we’ll never stop until we can somehow grow out of the asinine notion that name-calling makes for sound strategy.
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