He writes with moral seriousness, he isn’t a knee-jerk anti-interventionist or a pacifist and he has a firm grasp of facts and ideas, and yet, I struggled to get answers from him regarding which or whose law had been abandoned or broken.
In the episode of BBC Question Time subsequent to the raid, Lord Ashdown and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown were in fine moralising form though at least Ashdown managed to be fairly reasonable. It took Alibhai-Brown to push this tale to the levels of farce. Regarding Bin Laden’s burial at sea she literally stated that it makes us no better than the terrorists and that it would ‘set off another generation’.
In brief then, the complaints from Corbyn and others following the killing of Osama Bin Laden are as follows:
1. There was no attempt to arrest Osama bin Laden. This was therefore an assassination.
2. The operation has made the world a more dangerous place.
3. The operation was a tragedy like 9-11 was and the invasion of Afghanistan was.
4. Cameron implied that Corbyn didn’t think the attacks of September 11th were a tragedy after he explicitly said they were.
5. Cameron lied, he quoted Corbyn out of context and in bad faith.
6. Osama bin Laden was ‘summarily executed’ via an ‘extra-judicial killing’.
7. The U.S. abandoned the ‘rule of law’.
8. The U.S. government, in doing this, and especially in disposing of the body, showed they are no better than the terrorists.
9. Boris Johnson said the same thing as Corbyn but received different treatment.
I believe all these to be fairly worthless complaints. Some are misjudged and some are utterly ludicrous.
I’ll go through them in a rough reverse-order and try to keep this on the brisk side of comprehensive.
Boris Johnson
In 2001 Johnson said:
Osama bin Laden… is both sinister and ludicrous at once, and a trial would expose that. If it is really true that a trial would provoke a revolt in the souks, then that is a small price for showing the souks how we in the West obey the rule of law
The piece apparently implies hypocrisy to the disadvantage of Corbyn. Johnson indeed suggests a trial is superior to abandoning the rule of law but what nobody else seems to be bothered to note is that the dichotomy he provides isn’t between a trial and an operation similar to the one which occurred and which I discussed in detail in Part 1, but between a trial and a ‘murder’.
He said:
It is Osama bin Laden, badly injured, and against all predictions, he is trying to surrender. The man who encouraged demented young men to take their own lives is making a pitiful attempt to save his own.
What do you do? Do you blow him away? You could sort of accidentally squeeze the trigger and pow, no more bin Laden; and if you did, there is hardly a person in the West who would condemn you.
To be sure, there would be long editorials in the Guardian, denouncing the shoot to kill policy of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, and John Pilger would accuse you of being a war criminal.
….
No matter how angry you might feel, and how vividly you recalled the events of September 11, you might think, as you raised your rifle to point at his chest, that British soldiers are not taught to murder unarmed people in the act of surrendering.