Head-examining After the Osama bin Laden Killing

May 19, 9:45 AM —Publisher's Note

Head-examining After the Osama bin Laden Killing

By John R. MacArthur




John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the April 20, 2011 Providence Journal.

There’s much to criticize about the bloody pageant surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden: the assassination of an unarmed man apparently in front of one of his unarmed wives; the unseemly displays of patriotic fist-pumping by Americans who feel themselves superior to chanting Islamic radicals; the brazen exploitation of the killing by a president already campaigning for re-election, and America’s “alliance” against “terrorism” with Pakistan, a country led by corrupt, double-dealing oligarchs who sell themselves to the highest bidder. (Bin Laden’s “hideout” near the Kakul Military Academy sounds like off-campus housing for a visiting professor.)

But I’m even more disturbed by watching Obama, the supposed anti-Bush, becoming the ex-president — playing the “straight talker” and “decider” on “60 Minutes” better than Bush himself: “Justice was done, and I think anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”

That includes me, since I would have preferred to see bin Laden walked to his arraignment in handcuffs and then placed on trial in a pop-up courtroom in the desert, somewhere between Reno and Las Vegas. Most Americans, including the former constitutional-law professor Obama, believe that our system of justice is better and fairer than, say, Afghanistan’s. So why not demonstrate that equal justice under the law applies to mass murderers, including ones who brag about their crimes? Timothy McVeigh got his day in court, as he should have. Isn’t that what’s supposed to make us more civilized than al-Qaida?

Obama would have been wiser to follow the French government’s example in its treatment of Carlos the Jackal, a notorious terrorist and killer of French intelligence agents who is now mouldering in prison, a largely pathetic and ridiculous figure. Alive but incarcerated for life, Carlos will never be seen as a martyr like bin Laden. But since this is a French idea, it’s clearly crazy, like refusing to invade Iraq. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin certainly should have had their heads examined.

To be fair, there may also be people in President Obama’s Cabinet who need to have their heads examined. Hillary Clinton best expressed the administration’s increasingly delusional thinking when she suggested that bin Laden’s execution will help the war effort: “In Afghanistan, we will continue taking the fight to al-Qaida and their Taliban allies. . . . Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today it may have even greater resonance. You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. But you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaida and participate in a peaceful political process.” [MORE . . .]
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