Symposium: The Killing of Osama bin Laden
Symposium: The Killing of Osama bin Laden
The Killing of Osama bin Laden
We have asked Dissent writers to offer reflections on the killing of Osama bin Laden—on how it was carried out, its potential impact on government policies, and its meaning to and reception by the public. Their responses, beginning with Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer’s, are below.
Michael Walzer – “Killing Osama”
Lindsay Beyerstein – “The War Paradigm”
Feisal G. Mohamed – “The Theater of Counter-Terrorism”
Fred Smoler – “The Particular Case of Osama bin Laden”
Bhaskar Sunkara – “Pakistan at War with Itself”
It was, as everyone said, a famous (symbolic) victory. What was wrong, then, with the celebrations in front of the White House? There is an old Jewish commentary on the book of Exodus, which says that when Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea, the angels in heaven began to celebrate, and God rebuked them: how can you rejoice when my creatures are drowning? There must be a secular equivalent to that story. It would say that we should celebrate the ending of wars but not the killing of our enemies. And the war against Islamist terrorism isn’t over.
But are we actually at war? There are many people on the left who reject the very idea. Osama bin Laden was not an enemy to be killed, they argue, but a criminal to be brought to justice. From the beginning, that has been the critical debate: was the 9/11 attack an act of war or a crime? The two positions are generally held with great certainty; each one excludes the other. But the truth is that each one is right, some of the time, in some places.
The struggle with al Qaeda is police work wherever police work is possible—in West European countries, for example, which constitute a zone of peace, where Islamist terrorists are rightly regarded as criminals. They are pursued in accordance with the local rules of engagement for the police—and not in accordance with the rules of engagement for the army. Had Osama hidden in France, he would have been tracked down, arrested, and brought to trial.
In Afghanistan in 2001, however, the struggle with al Qaeda required a war—because the Taliban regime provided al Qaeda with all the benefits of sovereignty. That war is still going on. We haven’t fought it well; the Bush administration’s commitment to a war in Iraq meant that we never invested the necessary resources in the fighting or in political and economic reconstruction. Partly for that reason, the war spread to Pakistan, where another regime has given al Qaeda benefits similar to those it got from the Taliban—or refused to deny those benefits, or been unable to deny them. Pakistan’s sovereignty doesn’t protect militants whose hostile activities, directed at other countries, its government fails to prevent (whatever the reasons for the failure). For al Qaeda and for the United States, Pakistan is not a zone of peace.
So the killing of Osama bin Laden was an act of war. He was certainly a legitimate target, as the head of an organization that had declared itself to be at war with the United States—and delivered a devastating attack. How effective he still was in organizing future attacks from his Pakistani hideout, we don’t know. He clearly inspired ongoing efforts and may well have been engaged in those efforts himself.
Killing Osama did him no injustice. But was it a violation of our own values to have killed rather than arrested him? Should he have been treated as a criminal rather than an enemy—brought back to the United States and put on trial? He was indeed both a criminal and an enemy, but I don’t see the justice or the morality of asking U.S. commandos to act like policemen when they clearly were not operating in a zone of peace and when arresting Osama might have made their mission much more dangerous than it already was.
There are also prudential arguments against treating the struggle with al Qaeda solely as police work. Putting Osama on trial would have put every American abroad at risk—for there certainly would have been attempts to take hostages and demand his release. Even if we acted in accordance with the crime paradigm, we have enemies who are committed to the war paradigm. And that requires that we be committed to it, too, some of the time.
A decent sense of the struggles still to come, of the battles that may have to be fought and the police work that certainly needs to be done—and of the future victims of terrorism and war—should deter triumphalist celebration. Quiet relief seems okay to me—and gratitude that it was our Obama who did in Osama.
-Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent.
The conventional wisdom congealed quickly after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Before the first video game version of the mission was out, even liberals agreed that it was for the best that bin Laden met his end in his bedroom because capture would require trial and a trial would be a huge hassle for everyone. This sense of resignation struck me as deeply sad. As a nation, we’ve simply given up hope that our justice system can handle hard cases.
Our sense of helplessness isn’t entirely misplaced. The incoherent idea of the “war on terror” has distorted our justice system to the point where we no longer know how to handle international terrorism.
The idea of a war on terror was sold as moral clarity, but it has resulted in judicial paralysis. Bin Laden’s killing was a missed opportunity to throw away the whole unwieldy legal apparatus and try bin Laden in a U.S. federal court. The last guy to conspire against the World Trade Center, the blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, is serving life in a U.S. federal prison.
One of President Obama’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order to close the detention facility for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay. However, the president was out-manoeuvred by congressional Republicans (and some Democrats), and the facility remains open to this day. In March, Obama conceded the point by setting up a legal framework for indefinite detention for some terror suspects. As Representative Pete King (R-NY) said in a statement at the time, “The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities.”
Under the war metaphor, the United States asserts the right to hold terror suspects as long as the “war” lasts, knowing full well that there is no clear endpoint in a conflict with a nebulous criminal organization that’s more of a brand than a fighting force.
It’s easy to let obscure prisoners languish at Guatánamo, out of sight and out of mind. But if bin Laden had been taken alive, there would have been immense public pressure to resolve his case. Our justice system has been so thoroughly corrupted by the “war on terror” metaphor that it might seem difficult to imagine what a trial such as bin Laden’s would have looked like. But we already have a successful model to fall back on: U.S. criminal courts have successfully tried terrorists, mobsters, drug cartel bosses, and countless dangerous individuals.
Many have argued that bin Laden’s killing should mark the end of the war on terror, but how far are they prepared to go? Ending the war would mean more than bringing troops back from Afghanistan or taking the body scanners out of the airports. In order to truly end the war on terror, Obama would have to reject the idea that it was a war at all. He would have to repudiate the Bush-era doctrine that the United States of America is literally at war with a decentralized network of semi-autonomous, stateless terrorist cells collectively known as al Qaeda.
The war on terror doesn’t end with the death of the titular head of al Qaeda. The war on terror ends when we decide that war was never the correct model for the fight against terrorism in the first place.
-Lindsay Beyerstein is a freelance journalist based in New York.
The Theater of Counter-Terrorism
Warfare often strives for symbolic killings as much as strategic ones. In Homer’s Iliad, the great storehouse of military mythography, Troy’s famous walls seemed considerably less a guarantee of safety after Achilles had chased Hector around them three times, killed him in single combat, invited his fellow Greeks to stab the corpse, and dragged Troy’s prince from his speeding chariot.
In Paradise Lost Milton points to that scene with a characteristically felicitous and economic phrase: Hector flees “thrice fugitive about Troy wall,” suggesting with the word “fugitive” that this attempted escape shows his vulnerability and the vulnerability of a Troy that could no longer protect him. As a poet-revolutionary, Milton spent much of his career fighting a war of symbols on behalf of the English republic that arose after the public beheading of Charles I. As recent fawning over Wills and Kate painfully reminded us, that republic was not destined to last. And when it fell in 1660, the restored monarchy made sure powerfully to symbolize its authority with some rather theatrical public killing of its own. The regicides were not just executed, but subjected to the traitor’s death, the procedures of which were described in the sentencing of General Thomas Harrison:
The Judgment of this Court is…that you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, and your privy members cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the king’s majesty, and the Lord have mercy upon your soul.
A traitor thumbs his nose at political authority. The traitor’s death makes quite clear the power that political authority wields.
Milton would have his symbolic revenge against the restored monarchy in his last long poem, a Samson tragedy in which the hero pulls down the pillars of the temple on the heads of the idolatrous Philistines, a proxy of English authorities in church and state. That final action delights Samson’s father, Manoa, who plans a monument that will inspire others to follow the strongman’s path:
Thither shall all the valiant youth resort,
And from his memory inflame their breasts
To matchless valor, and adventures high.
The Bible makes no mention of these valiant youth; Milton adds them to emphasize the importance in his own moment of emulating Samson’s godly resistance.
Terrorism is a mode of warfare that fully embraces the symbolic, often placing symbolic action above practical, strategic gains: toppling the World Trade Center will not bring world trade to an end, but it can make the global capital that is the engine of American empire seem fragile in a way that spells its demise in God’s time. In his essential book, Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer describes this tendency as the “theater of terror.”
What has been especially visible since May 1, 2011 is the attempt of counter-terrorism to stage its own theater. Though there has been no shortage of commentary official and unofficial on the death of Osama bin Laden, an afterthought just now emerging in these statements is his ability to fund and direct a terrorist network. He is consistently identified with past crimes rather than with future threats. His death provides “closure” to those families who lost loved ones on 9/11—or, more precisely, it gives that national drama the final act that we want it to have. In scripting his own part, Barack Obama has embraced the role of young Fortinbras more than elder Hamlet: a dutiful son setting right a national wrong, rather than an imperialist crowning himself with the laurel of conquest. In the words of his May 8 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft, no trophy photos or public spiking of the football, but, as Kroft put it, a “closing of the circle” with the laying of a red, white, and blue wreath at Ground Zero amid the din of camera clicks. This remains a national tragedy but, like Macbeth, 9/11 has become a tragedy promising that the nation’s history is fundamentally cosmic.
Unity of action demands that bin Laden be buried in oblivion. As usual, counter-terrorism explains that action with the excuse of “security.” The excuse does not hold: a travel warning was issued in the same breath as the announcement of bin Laden’s death. We are told that there can be no burial of bin Laden so that there can be no monument, like that of Milton’s Samson, to inspire those who would follow in his footsteps; but al Qaeda has already confirmed the death, proving, as the cult of suicide-bombing has long proven in the Middle East and in Sri Lanka, that martyr narratives do not need to furnish a corpse to rally the like-minded. Burial or no burial, the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad is already becoming something of a shrine. The absence of a monument strives for finality, though one’s enemies are not likely to accept that it is time for the curtain to drop.
Though press releases stated that Muslim rites were respected, burial at sea is fundamentally at odds with those rites: like Catholicism, Islam takes seriously the resurrection of the body and requires, if possible, burial in the ground on one’s right side, facing Mecca. The Grand Imam at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, Ahmed al-Tayeb, declared in a statement that dumping the body at sea violated not only Islamic principles, but also the code of human decency that would lead one to handle a corpse as respectfully as possible.
It is winning the war of symbols, much more than guaranteeing security or respecting religious traditions, that explains the burial at sea. That burial strongly eschews the grisly triumphalism of Achilles’ effacement of Hector or the traitor’s death. But it also speaks the same figural language as those displays of force. It is just an emphatic in declaring no place a refuge from vengeance—it serves notice to the world, to paraphrase the muscular line of Shakespeare’s Exeter, that if you hide a terrorist even in your hearts, there will we rake for him. And it is just as emphatic in seeking to rout out of existence those who defy power. Adding to the element of dramaturgy in this mission is the secret deal, just revealed, by which Pakistan agreed in 2001 to an operation against bin Laden on its soil on the condition that it be allowed some staged outrage afterward.
Also running in Manhattan last week, though hardly playing to packed houses, was counter-terrorist theater of a different kind: the May 4 presentation to the UN Security Council of Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, declaring that he will request three warrants for the arrest and trial of those most responsible for crimes against humanity in Libya since February 15, and that investigation potentially leading to further warrants is ongoing. Though the recipients of those impending warrants were not named, it seems certain that one of them will be Muammar Qaddafi, who has rivaled and outdone bin Laden in orchestrating terror attacks. (Qaddafi is certainly more like bin Laden than is Hitler or Stalin, the comparisons favored by individuals ignorant of history who are grasping for personifications of evil in their morality plays.) Moreno-Ocampo’s presentation may seem only a symbol in the pleasing and as yet purely fictive drama of the arrest and trial of Qaddafi, but that play is still in its early acts. Militarists keen on action will deride the leaden pace of such efforts even as they celebrate a blood revenge that took a decade to execute.
The theater of counter-terrorism often speaks of justice, but not always in the same tones. Its cowboy justice is justice of a sort, but not justice of the best sort. There has been considerable revising and re-revising of the stage directions for bin Laden’s final scene—Enter bin Laden with wife as human shield, Enter bin Laden unarmed, Enter bin Laden firing AK-47 and pistol—so that we will never know with certainty if he could have been captured alive. Was this an extrajudicial killing, or did his captors act in self-defense? Obama certainly did not deny on 60 Minutes that the mission was to kill, saying that he did not “lose sleep” over bin Laden’s fate and that anyone who thinks that justice was not served “needs to have his head examined.”
Perhaps those who care about institutions of global justice need to have their heads examined. Because for such individuals it is crystal clear that if arrest was a possibility, then bin Laden should have been placed in the dock in a fair and open trial for his crimes. That final act would be counter-terrorist drama in its most dignified mode, one fully exposing the barbarity of an ethic of lawless slaughter.
-Feisal G. Mohamed is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
The Particular Case of Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden was shot on May 2, and by May 5 both the New York Times and the Washington Post had run pieces recounting extensive criticism of the killing in the European press. Both focused on French and German elite opinion: a scholar at Sciences Po was quoted on renewed anti-Americanism, while a CDU politician criticized Merkel’s assertion that she was glad we had succeeded, and her foreign minister counseled against any wider German expression of such a sentiment. The editor of Libération regretted the “toxic rhetoric” of the campaign against terrorism, from which stems “this base, uncomfortable joy, unprecedented in a democracy, that blew yesterday over the streets of New York.” Helmut Schmidt pronounced Obama’s decision “clearly a violation of international law,” Handelsblatt called the raid “an act that violates both the international prohibition of force and humanitarian law,” and the ubiquitous Geoffrey Robertson, currently defending Julian Assange, denounced Obama: “This is the justice of the Red Queen: sentence first, trial later.” A prominent German TV commentator, Jörg Schoenenborn, was paraphrased claiming “that nothing good could come from Obama’s Bush-like breach of international law,” and quoted asserting the essential, primitive, and ugly nature of our national character. The editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, also uneasy about our lawlessness, was more or less echoed by the editor of L’Express—in no way a paper of the left—who additionally opined that “To desecrate the cadaver or the memory of Bin Laden is to revive him. To cry one’s joy in the streets of our cities is to ape the turbaned barbarians who danced the night of Sept. 11. It is to tell them the ghastly competition continues between them and us.” This interesting equation—bad to cheer the murder of thousands of civilians at the World Trade Center, perhaps equally bad to coarsely express one’s happiness that the chief of the murderers was dead—was most explicit in Der Spiegel, where a reporter called the New York celebrations of bin Laden’s death “reminiscent of Muslims celebrating in the Gaza Strip after the 9/11 attacks.”
As instructive and even diverting as it can be to receive German (and for that matter French) advice on the ethics of counterinsurgency and the aesthetics of chauvinism and Hurrahpatriotismus, the equation seems imperfectly persuasive. The adults who gave children in Gaza candy so that they would associate the thought of dead American civilians with sweetness were celebrating the mass murder of civilians, rather than the killing of a murderer of civilians. To the degree that bin Laden, too, was a civilian, that fact may be a spur to reflect on whether the antithesis of civilian/soldier (along with a couple of other antitheses) is entirely sufficient for assessing this particular case. The binaries suggest that bin Laden was either himself a civilian deserving a criminal trial or an enemy soldier, and if a soldier someone we had an inescapable obligation to take prisoner, or at least give the chance to surrender. Similarly, Pakistan is a sovereign state, we violated its territory, and thus breached international law. Do those categories, and that analysis, clearly describe and address the particular case of Osama bin Laden on May 2?
If the binaries are sufficient and bin Laden was not a soldier, merely a criminal resident on the soil of a sovereign state, we were obligated to attempt to extradite him. But Pakistan is not unreasonably suspected of being a state that shelters, arms, and sometimes directs jihadists to kill Americans in Afghanistan (along with Indians in India). It seems possible, perhaps likely, that portions of the Pakistani army sheltered bin Laden, and if so attempting to extradite him would have been at best quixotic. Ought we to have instead kidnapped him and tried him in the United States, on the model of the Israelis and Eichmann? Maybe, but anyone who insists on that thereby implies that we are not obligated to obey international law.
Does American law, though, require that we do other than what we did? To this non-lawyer it is not clear that we are in breach of our own laws: an American law passed in the aftermath of 9/11 authorizes the president to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons. A trial, to be sure, safeguards against many dangers, in which case it is irrelevant that bin Laden had admitted the crime for which he was killed; for example, a man who has publicly boasted of a crime may nonetheless be in danger of being executed for a crime he did not commit, for people falsely confess. Yes, sometimes they do, but not, most people seem to think, in this particular case. Was something like a Nuremberg trial necessary to persuade the world that we have acted justly? Well, Nuremberg did not persuade the world—it was widely scorned as victors’ justice. Something like it is unlikely to persuade many Pakistanis, and perhaps not everyone in Europe, where some well-educated people who ought to know better have been amazingly quick to condemn us.
What about our own intuitions? If bin Laden was in effect a soldier, was it unjust or at least unlawful to kill him without giving him a chance to surrender? Some people think that bin Laden commanded soldiers, but if he was the equivalent of an enemy general there would be no prohibition on either an artilleryman or a pilot flying a military aircraft killing him while he was asleep in a barracks or a bivouac. But a commando is not a military pilot, and when a soldier offers to surrender—although there is no evidence that bin Laden did— troops are normally obligated to take him prisoner. On the other hand, soldiers of an army that commonly engages in perfidious surrender—for example, the Japanese during much of the Second World War—were often thought too dangerous to be taken prisoner, and instead killed on the spot. Al Qaeda is in this respect more like the Imperial Japanese than it was like the Wehrmacht in France, for it has no scruples about violating all the laws of war in every theater of its “war.” Under such conditions the laws of war have almost never proved, in practice, an enforceable one-sided suicide pact.
Speaking of suicide, bin Laden had vowed not to be taken alive and habitually ordered men to kill in the course of suicide. It probably does him too little credit to assume he would never have acted as he ordered others to act. Was bin Laden, however, very obviously no threat to anyone at the moment he was shot on May 2, thus in no way like a Japanese soldier in the Solomon Islands in 1942? Maybe, to some, in hindsight, but if a commando decided otherwise, shortly after hearing enemy fire and while in effect behind enemy lines, in a room containing enemy weapons, has an obvious and atrocious breach of the laws of war occurred? Asking around, many people who think we owed bin Laden some consideration—for example, people who would not countenance his torture—seem to think that no commando was obligated to assume too much risk on his behalf.
People who assume that Obama ordered that bin Laden could in no circumstances be taken prisoner—that he was to be assassinated—assume more than they can yet prove. If it is proved that Obama did give such an order, that will be the time to address with some care the prudence and moral status of such a decision. For now, two precedents come to mind: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in 1942, and the killing of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in the following year. Heydrich, a monster, was killed at the order of the Czech government in exile with extensive British assistance, which provoked the reprisal murder of what would in the end total around 340 Czech civilians from Lidice. Because of this toll, the assassination is often accounted a mistake—it did not temper German policy through fear of reprisal, possibly because the German gift for atrocity dwarfed the reprisals the Allies were willing and able to take, at least promptly and under that name. It is not obvious that al Qaeda needs the spur of assassination to engage in atrocity, so the cases may not be parallel. The targeted killing of Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, is generally thought to have demoralized the Japanese and did not provoke any particular Japanese reprisal, but like al Qaeda, the Japanese rarely required provocation in that sphere. It is almost always considered a success.
In the West, targeted killings in war time have been pretty rare, possibly because of an ancient convention that values the lives of aristocratic officers far more than those of peasant infantry. This was not the most attractive possible motive for moderation and restraint, being most akin to the Royal Navy’s practice of exempting officers above the rank of midshipman from corporal punishment while occasionally flogging common seamen to death. Like the exemption from military violence of the most vile and vicious civilian while targeting any conscript infantryman, this may not be a custom and usage of war that exemplifies the most probing moral analysis.
-Fred Smoler teaches literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College.
I couldn’t join the “U-S-A” chants in front of White House on the night President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. The demise of a mass-murderer belonged to the world, not a country, and the rhythmic, parochial ring of that chant has always made me want to take a cold shower and sing the Internationale. I did go, without most of my friends, and was one of the first hundred or so there. The crowd was dominated by George Washington University students, but the showing was much smaller than the spontaneous outpouring that shook Pennsylvania Avenue after Obama clinched the 2008 election. On Sunday, the Christian ethos, that admirable belief in redemption, kept a few of us back. For others, it was the sheer morbidity of celebrating someone’s, anyone’s, death. But most, I would guess, just needed to cram a few more hours for a final exam or wake up early to make coffee and run Xerox machines on Capitol Hill.
I, on the other hand, am an atheist who rises at noon, grossly overestimates his academic ability, and observes “regicide day” every January 21. Plus, the noise from the White House, just a few blocks away, beckoned. I was applauding a military operation just hours after spouting vitriol about NATO’s incineration of a son and three grandchildren of Muammar Qaddafi. I was against the death penalty, but for a targeted assassination. The contradictions were irreconcilable.
Many of my Pakistani comrades were facing a similar dilemma. Their reactions were muted. They had no love for bin Laden or the reactionaries in their own country that rallied around him. They weren’t afraid either. Braving threats is an accepted part of being a left-wing activist there. But to Pakistani progressives, celebrating this American action smacks of an implicit endorsement of the drone attacks that slaughter civilians on the country’s western frontier. Their reflexive and, given the history of their nation, justified abhorrence of imperialism means that they join hands with segments of the Right in denouncing the frequent NATO incursions into Pakistan. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that American funds and weapons were flooded to Islamists forces and their bloody campaign in the region.
The response among the broader population has been mixed. There’s no massive grassroots support for either al Qaeda or the United States. Now that they’ve got their man, many hope that America will wind down its presence in the region. Still, there is disbelief in all quarters. Without pictures of his body or a public viewing, many are skeptical about the real fate of bin Laden. Others, like supporters of the Islamist party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, have rallied to condemn openly the killing and mourn the dead. Elements of the Pakistani Left, however, have taken the opportunity to point out that bin Laden was hiding out in a military cantonment. The fact that the ISI and other elements of the state have been incubating radical Islamists reflects a decades-long trend in that country. The Pakistani ruling class founded the country with the rhetoric of Islamism and has historically used it as a weapon against class and regional divisions. Bin Laden finding comfortable accommodation in Pakistan gives an opening for liberals to critique the ambiguity of their government’s commitment to the struggle against terrorism, but popular sentiment against American actions and the violation of Pakistani sovereignty makes such criticism politically risky.
Pakistan is a country at war with itself, and if the debate there continue to be polarized around American actions in the region, Islamist forces will continue to have the upper hand. In my Fall 2010 piece for Dissent, “Deadly Cultural Wars in Pakistan,” I harped on a few progressive victories, mostly at the level of student politics, not because I wanted to paint a misleading portrait of the balance of power in the country, but rather to remind people of Pakistan’s rich left-wing tradition. The Pakistani Left, however fragmented, exists, consists of thoughtful people who have a coherent critique of what ails their country, and simply needs to confidently assert its values: universal rights, economic justice, transparency, and secularism. This alone is no guarantee of renewed relevance, but it could yield an intellectual climate that is not purely reactive to Islamist political initiatives and U.S. action. The future depends on it.
-Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and an undergraduate at George Washington University.
