Western Moral Authority Died in Abbottabad

Western Moral Authority has been dead longer than that, but an OK article, nonetheless. USA! USA! USA!

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/08-4

Published on Sunday, May 8, 2011 by the Independent/UK Western Moral Authority Died in Abbottabad
by Joan Smith

It isn't Hollywood. It isn't an action movie with Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis crashing through an upstairs window, spraying bullets. On the contrary, it seems likely that Spielberg or Scorsese would make a more coherent version of last weekend's operation in Abbottabad, appreciating both its moral dimension and the need to get the story straight in advance.

For most of last week, the United States government seemed to be operating from a series of bellicose scripts. US special forces had met fierce resistance in Osama bin Laden's compound; they were involved in a fire-fight lasting up to 40 minutes; the al-Qa'ida leader (or someone) had used one of his wives as a human shield. In Washington, President Barack Obama and his top advisers had witnessed Bin Laden's death, relayed to them live from a camera on the helmet of one of the US Navy Seals. The tension was reflected in a photo taken in the White House situation room, Hillary Clinton nervously covering her mouth.

Now it appears that none of this is true. The US team met little resistance and surprised Bin Laden in a doorway. Yesterday's spin, that he turned to go back into the room, possibly to retrieve a weapon, raises even more questions about why he wasn't captured alive. Distastefully, he appears to have been shot in front of his 12-year-old daughter, while his wife was wounded in the leg trying to protect him. Obama and his aides didn't see the raid live. It isn't clear what they were watching – a DVD of Saving Private Ryan?

Even a halfway-competent script editor would return this dog's breakfast with acerbic comments. But the White House's lamentable handling of the raid has begun to tarnish the celebrations that erupted (tastelessly, in my view) on the streets of America after the killing was announced. Too many people have died to characterise this sombre event as some kind of edge-of-seat sports fixture.

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nothing further required.

:thumbsup:

Sid

Silly me. Where's that hairshirt and cat-'o-nine for E-Z self-flagellation?

Well said.

when we went in to get a mass murdering terrorist .

Childhood is a time of stark moral certainties -- we're good, they're bad. That's what Bush excelled at: being childish.

Grownups make morally complex decisions because they're aware we live in a complex world.

But this article's author would prefer for us to inhabit the same indulgent black-and-white fantasies of the Bush era. To the author: grow up.

N.B. When you tell someone to 'grow up,' that another way of showing that you're being patronizing and condescending. Whatever.

Condescension is a problem when it substitutes insult for argument. If you say, "the world is round," and someone responds with "is that what you learned today in kindergarten?" it's a problem.

My argument is that the author of the article would prefer to live in a world where one is never confronted with difficult choices. Do I think the author is immature? Hell yes. And that's not an ad hominem, it's a conclusion based upon an interpretation of the author's argument.

being patronizing and condescending? Likewise, referring to an adult's position as 'childish' is a bit on the patronizing and condescending side, I would say. But, as they say, to each his own.

of absolutist principles, like George W. Bush and the article's author.

you go again with the patronism and condescension ("crutch of absolutist principles").

Funny but your tone reminds me a bit of Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney.

Whats wrong with that?

Am I stooping to his level?

Go take your little shit stick and shake it in your own yard.

Poisoning the achievements of the POTUS and trying to re-write his past using media spreads his yukky cowardice like shakin' a shit stick.....I think.

Try as he will, history will remember him as a diabolical Darth Vader creature.

do you think a man who breaks the speed limit to get his pregnant wife to the hospital is doing a bad bad thing?

Do you think a woman who steals a loaf of bread to feed her starving child is doing a horrendous wrong?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you inhabit the mindset of this article's author.

I'm glad to see most of the DUers are unfooled.

If we are at war, then what in the hell were we doing launching a raid on the territory of our ally?

And being principled is not equivalent to living in a black and white fantasy.

Totalizing your opponent's position is also not an argument.

The author's argument was based in moralities. Moralities are an area different from factualities -- there's no refuting a moral principle by posting a contrary fact. "You think abortion is wrong, but do you know what happened in 1957?" doesn't work.

The morality espoused in the article is repellent because it prefers fantasy to reality, and allows for no difficult choices.

So, essentially, what you are forwarding is your fantasy of this article -- which does in itself consider difficult choices and offers alternate solutions.

I'll let you take a pass on that. Maybe you read something in an ad on the side. Or maybe you have a rich and active imagination.

The author puts forward an entirely fabricated series of delusions, like, "The election of Barack Obama was supposed to mark a definitive break with the cowboy lawlessness of the Bush administration. It was supposed to be the moment when liberals could feel solidarity with the US again."

Candidate Barack Obama had said, repeatedly, from Aug. 1, 2007, and onward, that he was going to approve targeted military strikes within Pakistan to take out high-level terrorist targets. So in whose mind was his election "supposed to mark a definitive break" with a strategy he clearly, repeatedly, empahtically stated again and again?

In Joan Smith's fantasies, Obama "was supposed to" act differently than he'd always told us he was going to act.

She's a sick, sad individual, living in a fantasy world where Barack Obama was supposed to be Lawful Good, and condemning him for a decision that may have caused him huge moral agonizing for all we know.

but your fantasy of Obama's is somehow redemptive?

And are you saying that Obama announced he'd continue Bush's cowboy tactics? That doesn't really sound like a defense of Obama to me, ymmv.

Sorry, I'm not the fantasist.

August 1st, 2007, Obama said he would do exactly what he did. It's on youtube, and it was the center of political discussion for weeks -- Bush condemned him, McCain condemned him, Hillary condemned him, Karl Rove and Sean Hannity condemned him. He defended his statement over and over throughout the entire election season.

The author of this article has stated that Obama's election "was supposed to" mean the end of the exact policies that Obama ran on. So she either has created a complete fantasy about what he was and what his election "was supposed to" mean, or she's lying.

Basically what we have here is, Candidate A campaigned with the promise, "if elected, I'll follow a certain policy," this author was either not paying attention or engaged in deliberate self-deception and is claiming to feel betrayed when the elected official does PRECISELY what the candidate had claimed he would do.

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will," Obama said in August of 2007. He stood by his words consistently.

The article's author has created a fantasy where his election "was supposed to" mean something completely different from what he told us he would do, and now she's throwing a tantrum that he did what he promised rather than what she imagined.

"You said you'd bring me a puppy!" would be childish. But this article's author is complaining that he didn't bring her a puppy when he made it clear, over and over throughout his candidacy, that he wasn't ever going to bring her a puppy. So for her to say "you said you'd bring me a puppy!" as she's saying here, is not only childish, it's also either dishonest or delusional.

that we've had to go after terrorists. There was no collateral loss of innocent life.

This is a pretty silly issue, IMHO.

...of nation-states might as well worry about whether chocolate is an odd or even number.

It's a category error.

After all of the things this country has done over the years where we had no justification, this lady choses to pick a justifiable act as the death of our moral authority?

Beautiful....

Look, a simple point remains here that when you are ordering a raid against an enemy compound, you really aren't entirely sure of what's inside. Ordering the mission with a primary objective of capturing bin Laden would have increased the odds that our soldiers would have been at greater risk because, frankly, it is much easier to just go in there and shoot everything than it is to go in there and selectively target with the eye of keeping a particular target alive from start to finish. There are myriad things that can go wrong in a capture mission due to the extra caution you would have to take. A kill mission increased the chances that our soldiers would get out of there alive. As it turns out, they did get out of there alive. It's hard to say for sure what would have happened in the counter-factual, but I think that Obama made the right call going in.

If even one soldier had been killed due to the order being made to capture instead of kill, it would not have been worth it.

From the second I heard about the "celebrations" I was against them.

this in comparison to drone attacks and bombings that often kill innocents and, in any case, make no effort whatsoever to capture anyone. Was OBL's life worth more than those killed in drone attacks? Would it have been better if they had just hit the house with a missile?

when they get him close they always decide to capture him? That doesn't make any sense. Neither does this line of reasoning. If we had dropped a bomb on his head and killed him that way, fewer people would have objected. It's kind of an issue of semantics.

This probably sounds louder because the death of this man has been a bigger event in general.

So FOX News' Andrew Napolitano, the media figure who began this whining about Obama breaking the law, also objected to the drone strikes?

Keep on catapulting the propaganda.

like myself who have not remodeled our positions based on an election. Of course the right wing is full of shit. That is what they do.

you just ad-hominemed every liberal who disagrees with you by claiming -- without any factual basis -- that they "remodeled opinions based on an election."

Any facts to back up that smear?

Although, the liberal support for the two quagmires, for drone attacks and now, of course, for assassination isn't something I remember from the Bush years.

People who said you were either with the president or with the terrorists were the objects of ridicule around here, as were drunks who chanted USA!, iirc.



Now, I don't have a statistical break down for you, that's just my memory of how things went.

And the death of surplus people is unremarkable and expected.

Who outside the West ever believed in Western Moral Authority?

:silly:

I dunno.

When I was a kid, "The West" was considered anything west of the Iron Curtain, north of the brown people in Africa, and north of the brown people who are south of the United States. Non-communist country white folks.

Some of those things have changed. Some haven't.

When I heard "Western Moral Authority", that's The West I was thinking of.

:)

Q: What were Custer's last words?
A: Where the fuck did all those Indians come from?

and, of course, Tonto's words to the Lone Ranger: "What do you mean 'we' white man?"

:)

Western Moral Authority is like the Coalition Provisional Authority - nice in principle but lacking somewhat in the execution :)

was responsible for the deaths of over 300 american civilians brah - a bullet in the head was an easy price to pay and leaves no where for the deranged religious zealots that follow him to go to rally around his martyrdom, and your bitching about how it was spun to the media?

It's been that way since the creation of authority itself.

It's a game that everyone plays and one that just about anyone can lose.

Debating now, after we've just killed one of sworn enemies, is just another brand of rhetorical masturbation.

The fucker's dead and I, for one, am glad that he's sleeping with the fishes.


Peace and love, everybody! :hippie:

since his body is most likely wedged between pieces of coral, eels would be closer to him ( and maybe even the occasional octopus ) Oh, and what are those nasty things that crawl along the bottom eating the crap from everything else? Those things are pretty close to him as well, eating the big piece of crap that was recently thrown to them

Try >Iraq.

lol

NO lol.

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Then we kill a million people in a country that had nothing to do with bin Laden, in bin Laden's name. Then we kill one more, bin Laden himself, and totally forget the dead million we killed in the country that had nothing to do with 2800 and some dead in the fist place.

USA! USA! USA! Yeah right. How are we any better than Osama bin Laden

terrorizing the world.

OBL didn't just disagree with our government thus getting himself killed. It took an extraordinary and continuous set of attacks on US citizens with the promise of more to come, before this administration decided to act.

It wasn't decided lightly as an immoral country would do.
It wasn't done for minor offenses as an immoral country would do.
It wasn't even done for political gain (once located Obama could have ordered this to happen in an election year).

It was done because it was the right thing to do.

I'm proud of this administration for doing it and not doing it would be more immoral than removing OBL from the world.

"Once you embrace the bin Laden Exception, how does it stay confined to him?"

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/06/bin_laden

Intelligence is required to know when to make exceptions. That's why there are so many zero tolerance drug stories like schools suspending someone for an aspirin.

We should never be blind adherents to anything.

I'm proud that it takes exceptional situations for us to look beyond rules and do what it right sometimes.

If there is another exceptional situation like OBL (hope not), then I hope that future administration is as intelligent as this one.

What a load of crap. I'll save my sympathy for the children who never saw their mother or father again after 9/11.

OBL didn't care that children would be killed in the WTC, yet our Navy SEALS didn't fire at the kids in the compound. *That* is our moral authority.

....reducing the building to rubble and every one of its occupants (12-year-old daughter included)to skid marks on the floor.....

that b/c it's better than dropping a bomb on the building and killing everyone indiscriminately? For the sake of your soul, I hope OBL's daughter is not telling the truth.

Greater love hath no man, AS IF! "You do it for me Kid!! I would but Ive got the damned dialysis machine."

the compound. Oh sure, they may have executed OBL if front of his 12-year-old daughter after they had him in custody and incapacitated, but at least they didn't fire at the kids in the compound.

Oy vey.

Stick with it ... maybe the 23rd time will be the charm!

nt

My guess is that you have a team, and that Obama is not on it.

nt

Our government shoots people all the time, most with far less justification. Argue that invading Iraq was the point where this happened and I am on your side.

If anyone has evidence of this I'd like to see it.

I got nothing better to sum it up.....

Ah, Bullshit.

How is this any different than killing an opposing military officer in a war? Military targets do not get trials.

Sid

OK....admit it....that was kinda funny.

LOL

stop with the bullshit.