Conclusion
The negative reactions to the ‘tragedy’ comment were quickly written off by Corbyn admirers as almost any criticism of him is. But I also found lots of fairly impartial people did the same. Even before Cameron mentioned it. People were instantly convinced he had been smeared and that closer examination would reveal nuance that exculpates him. I looked at the nuance and it doesn’t.
The comedic ramblings of the 62 year-old adolescent should have remained ignored in the depths of YouTube, but somehow 250,000+ people, apparently intent on us virtue signalling our way to impotence and defeat, elected him leader of a great political party. It become worthy of attention.
Corbyn has some detailed explaining to do. His appearance on such a show and on such a channel is a problem anyway but his specific comments were shameful. The childish moral wailing, or as Peter Htichens describes it, the “perfectly reasonable and civilised objections to the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden”, were sandwiched between low conspiracism and worthless conjecture.
To have a public attack of the vapours when a man who declares war on the United States, who murdered thousands of her citizens, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of others around the world, who still planned attacks, who claimed to love death, who begged to fight, lived to fight, and then eventually got a fight and lost… is perverse. It is pure masochism.
Shooting Bin Laden may not have been your perfect outcome and I won’t begrudge anybody for wishing he currently sat stateside in a supermax prison. But his killing wasn’t a descent into lawlessness or barbarism or anything close. The children in the compound lived and the minimum damage was done to complete the task. In hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden the United States demonstrated something laudable.
They showed that justice will catch up with you in one form or another. They showed that dilgent, thorough, hard working people were willing to dedicate a good portion of their careers, on civil service wages, to tracking down the culprit and the threat. Then they showed they were willing to take physical and political risks to move the task to completion.
take physical and political risks to move the task to completion.
Perhaps a trial would have shown something better on top, perhaps a different conclusion might have been preferable. But wildly so? At what risk is this advantage to be acheived. Should they retrain troops to the point that their lives are worth less than the public relations potential of putting a man, who didn’t want to come quietly, on trial? How many trained and willing soldiers should be risked? What punishment would we suggest after the first one or two are shot the third kills the target?
A man who worshiped death, killed countless and swore he would never surrender was dispatched. And if you think I am getting to close to sanitised euphemisms, he was dispatched by a bullet cracking open his skull and emptying the contents onto his bedroom floor. Force is ugly. But this was no tragedy and nor was it a further descent in cycles of violence. It was a disciplined, professional, controlled and considered act that was sensible, proportionate, necessary and had no credible alternatives to it suggested. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that those stating otherwise are one of the following: anti-American, masochistic, foolish, naive, working to an agenda, sympathetic to terrorists, or in the tragic case of Jeremy Corbyn, most of the above.