Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Sunday, June 19, 2011 1:59:10 PM
Dad didn't mince words, so neither shall I:
There was nothing morally wrong in sending a highly-skilled team to kill Osama
bin Liner. We are at war with an enemy who makes no pretense of respecting the Geneva or Hague Conventions. Those conventions only regulate conduct between warring forces who have signed them. OBL could well have been wearing a suicide bomb-belt. Better to shoot down a hundred of his ilk than risk possible harm to even one of our wonderful SEAL team, or any one of our innocents, for OBL forfeited his right to life by his actions, while they have not.
During World War II, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor that forced America fully into the war in December of 1941, was taken out by an operation that some might call an assassination today, but which I see as having been both brilliant and morally quite acceptable. Dubbed
Operation Vengeance, the operation called for nothing less than the mid-air interception of the
Mitsubishi Betty bomber that the Admiral was traveling on during an inspection tour of Japanese forces by long-range
P-38 Lightning fighter planes. In an operation perhaps unique in military history, the intercepting fighters did find and shoot down the Betty, killing all aboard, including Yamamoto. Considered a military genius by many, the Japanese war efforts suffered a major blow when Yamamoto's plane crashed into the jungle. The admiral was a prize military target. The operation was a brilliant success -- free of any moral taint. He was a commander of forces hostile to and attacking the United States. So was OBL. This is life in wartime.
There is, let us never forget, as Richard Nixon reminded us in his brilliant book No More Vietnams, a great moral difference between firing first and firing back.
A relative once asked me how someone can be both pro death penalty and anti-abortion. I think he may have been a bit embarrassed when I pointed out that "that baby has never harmed anyone." Now my questioner is an intelligent man, but had missed this simple argument. We must always be not only glancing with our minds, we must be studying!
Many of us by now have heard about the NLRB's suit against Boeing for daring to try to open a new plant in Right-to-Work South Carolina, instead of in mandatory union membership state Washington. What is less commented on is that the NLRB didn't file its suit until Boeing had already finished building its new $750 million plant in SC.
Similarly, the nest-of-fanatics EPA didn't deny the Shell Oil Company the permit it needs to drill off-shore (well off shore) in Alaskan waters until the enviro-hated company had spent over $4 BILLION dollars on the project. Only then did they invent a
transparently spurious reason to deny the permit.
When you're looking for words to describe the BO administration, don't forget "malicious".