‘The war on terror is over,’ says Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast. ‘Al Qaeda lost.’
Really?
Since 9/11, the US Congress has authorized a staggering $1.3 trillion on wars, extra security measures, and associated costs. These astronomical sums could have been spent fighting climate change, providing health care, curing cancer or in any number of other socially useful ways. To give some perspective, the UN says global hunger could be ended for $195 billion a year. In other words, the sums spent on the war on terror could have fed every single person on the planet for nearly seven years, saving millions upon millions of lives, and dramatically reducing social tensions across the planet.
Instead, the US successfully killed Osama bin Laden.
Well, if that’s a win, god knows what a defeat would look like."
So writes Jeff Sparrow on Australia's ABC's The Drum, here.
The Guardian addresses the question of whether the killing of bin Laden was an extra-judicial one.
"Earlier this week, the UN's independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, said there was "considerable dispute in legal circles as to whether we are dealing with an armed conflict in respect of al-Qaida in Pakistan". Prof Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, said that the attack had the appearance of an "extrajudicial killing without due process of the law". He added: "It may not have been possible to take him alive... but no one should be outside the protection of the law." Even after the end of the second world war, Nazi war criminals had been given a fair trial, Grief added.
Comparisons between Bin Laden and Nazi war criminals have set the context for debates over whether greater effort should have been made to capture the founder of al-Qaida alive and bring him to justice in an international court."
TomDispatch has this take on the matter:
"At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.
Now, he’s officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.
When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.
For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others."
Really?
Since 9/11, the US Congress has authorized a staggering $1.3 trillion on wars, extra security measures, and associated costs. These astronomical sums could have been spent fighting climate change, providing health care, curing cancer or in any number of other socially useful ways. To give some perspective, the UN says global hunger could be ended for $195 billion a year. In other words, the sums spent on the war on terror could have fed every single person on the planet for nearly seven years, saving millions upon millions of lives, and dramatically reducing social tensions across the planet.
Instead, the US successfully killed Osama bin Laden.
Well, if that’s a win, god knows what a defeat would look like."
So writes Jeff Sparrow on Australia's ABC's The Drum, here.
The Guardian addresses the question of whether the killing of bin Laden was an extra-judicial one.
"Earlier this week, the UN's independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, said there was "considerable dispute in legal circles as to whether we are dealing with an armed conflict in respect of al-Qaida in Pakistan". Prof Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, said that the attack had the appearance of an "extrajudicial killing without due process of the law". He added: "It may not have been possible to take him alive... but no one should be outside the protection of the law." Even after the end of the second world war, Nazi war criminals had been given a fair trial, Grief added.
Comparisons between Bin Laden and Nazi war criminals have set the context for debates over whether greater effort should have been made to capture the founder of al-Qaida alive and bring him to justice in an international court."
TomDispatch has this take on the matter:
"At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.
Now, he’s officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense, though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.
When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we’ll once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us, and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.
For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners, and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves, and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others."
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