The Hand Wringing Over Osama’s Death from Fellow Progressives is Unwarranted

[stevenleser]

False moral equivalencies, cries of extra-judicial killing, all of this and more has been the reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden by a particular segment of the Progressive left.

To understand whether any of these accusations have merit, let’s completely outline the situation that existed and exists between the United States and bin Laden and his group, Al Qaeda.

In August of 1996, Osama bin Laden issued the first of two declarations of war against the United States. He issued a written religious edict, called a Fatwa that was unambiguously titled "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." In this Fatwa, he called on all Muslims to join him in this war against America and Israel.

In February 1998, bin Laden issued a second Fatwa declaring war against the United States, it’s allies, and Israel. In this second declaration of war, bin Laden among other things said “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it”

On August 7, 1998, i.e., a few months after the second declaration of war, the group led by bin Laden, Al Qaeda, bombed the US Embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania. Through those bombings, along with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and of course the September 11, 2001 attacks, bin Laden and Al Qaeda demonstrated the seriousness of the ideas and intentions expressed in those two declaration of war Fatwas.

Is it possible for an international law-recognized state of war to exist between a nation state and a non-nation state entity, or even two or more non-nation state entities? The answer is, “of course”, as an example, many civil wars fit this description.

My assertion is that according to applicable international law, a state of war existed and continues to exist between the United States and Al Qaeda and its affiliates. No cease fire or peace agreement has been signed between the US and Al Qaeda and acts of war continue between them.

International Law, as outlined in various United Nations documents and the Geneva Conventions has a number of things to say about terrorism, war and self defense.

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter says “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security….”

Al Qaeda is not a member of the United Nations and does not recognize the authority of the United Nations, its charter or its resolutions. Thus, the idea that the Security council can “take measures necessary to maintain international peace and security” in this situation via any kind of diplomatic actions or resolutions is moot, at least as things now stand.

On 12 September 2001, The UN Security Council adopted a resolution that condemned the September 11th terrorist attacks, expressed determination to combat terrorist acts by “all means”, re-affirmed the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, and expressed its readiness “to take all necessary steps” to respond to the terrorist attacks.

The September 11th attacks resulted in the US and UK as well as Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway joining together in Afghanistan to wage war against Al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters. Most of those countries are hardly the sort that would be involved in unnecessary wars or unprovoked wars of aggression. We can go beyond those countries who participated directly and say that virtually the entire international community supported the United States in their efforts to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.

Indeed, in response to the killing of bin Laden, Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations said “Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done to such a mastermind of international terrorism. I would like to commend the work and the determined and principled commitment of many people in the world who have been struggling to eradicate international terrorism.”

Linguistics Professor and political activist Noam Chomsky has compared and asked us to contrast the attack that killed bin Laden with a hypothetical attack by Iraqi commandos to kill George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Chomsky suggests there is a moral equivalence between the two. Anti war activist and author David Swanson wrote an article that suggests that bin Laden was lynched.

As an aside, most Democrats were against the Iraq war, identified it as unnecessary and unprovoked, and we were proven correct. I have written several articles critical of the war and proving that the Bush administration knew several weeks before the war that their primary justification regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not true. Here is one such article http://www.opednews.com/articles/Iraq-War--Six-Year-Annive-by-Steven-Leser-090304-145.html . Those facts make the Iraq war an unprovoked war of aggression and those who ordered it are guilty of that war crime.

The easiest response to Chomsky’s suggestion is that currently no state of war exists between Iraq and the United States. Not only that, the government of Iraq signed Status of Forces Agreements in 2008 and 2009 that governs how many US troops can be in Iraq and for how long. So Chomsky is comparing a killing that occurred between two entities that are at war and a hypothetical one between two entities that are not only no longer at war, they have good relations.

International law and most countries’ criminal law statutes take those kind of distinctions very seriously.

It would be quite an odd argument to claim that bin Laden should get the protection of a non-war status and those who killed him should be prosecuted for an extra-judicial killing after he himself declared war twice and since then has continuously waged war directly through the organization he led.

A helpful second example that illustrates the inaccuracy of the Chomsky and Swanson analogies is the April 18, 1943 killing of Japanese Commander in Chief Isoroku Yamamoto by the US Army Air Corps. Military intelligence learned that Yamamoto would be conducting an inspection of Japanese installations in the Solomon Islands and they learned the flight path his aircraft would be taking, and they had US Fighter aircraft ambush and shoot down the plane.

The ambushing of Yamamoto was not a crime and no one then or since has considered it so. In wartime, the commanders of combatants are legitimate and legal targets. It’s not considered an extra-judicial killing or lynching to attack combatants and their commanders in wartime.

A high percentage of those who self identify as Democrats and/or Progressives also self identify as anti-war, and I include myself in that. There is a difference, however, between protesting unjust wars and preferring non-violent solutions to conflicts whenever possible versus twisting facts and using false equivalencies to demonize actions because you want to try to assert that all acts of violence, particularly those by one country or entity (in this case the US), are evil.