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“You don’t rejoice at the death of a man,” lectures Massimo D’Alema, a former prime minister of Italy. “Maybe if bin Laden had been captured and put on trial it would have been an even more significant victory.” “It was quite clearly a violation of international law,” former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt contends. “The operation could also have incalculable consequences in the Arab world.” Siegfried Kauder, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, dubs the killing of bin Laden “medieval.” “A random killing is not permitted according to international agreements,” he explains. “If one concludes that bin Laden was no longer active [running al-Qaeda operations around the world], the killing could be seen as random.”
But there is nothing random or arbitrary about killing a man who has waged war against the West for the better part of two decades. It’s called the “war on terror,” not the “police investigation on terror.” In wars, combatants don’t approach adversaries with warrants. They do so with weapons because their adversaries wield weapons. Though Americans may feel vengeance, the reason for killing bin Laden has less to do with payback than it does with administering justice and preventing future acts of terror.
When you don’t cheer for America, you don’t cheer America’s triumphs. But killing bin Laden wasn’t merely a triumph for America. It was a triumph for Spain, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, India, and every other place on the globe where innocent civilians have been deliberately targeted by al-Qaeda. One needn’t be for America, only for civilization, to recognize the victory of eliminating a serial mass-murderer. So blinding is the Left’s anti-Americanism that many of its adherents don’t see that a victory for the United States can also be a victory for humanity.
It might have been nice if the United States could have informed Pakistan of the raid without Pakistan tipping off the objects of the raid. It might have been nice to obtain a warrant, knock on the door of Mr. bin Laden’s compound, inform his confederates to peacefully turn over their boss, and take the accused to jail without incident. It might have been nice if a trial of bin Laden could have been held without the critics of his killing objecting to evidence collected by the CIA or his compatriots targeting jurors for death.
Since what might have been nice isn’t realistic, can’t we just agree that it’s nice that killing bin Laden has put an end to his killing?
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). He has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Sky News, PBS, CSPAN, and other networks. He writes a Monday column for Human Events and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
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To get the whole story on why leftists shed tears when Islamo-fascists die, read Jamie Glazov’s critically-acclaimed, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.
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