Matt Welch is a left-of-center fellow who writes well. I like him. He’s currently incensed over an award-nominated blog in Australia that’s making some … less-than-convincing commentary about the war.
And Tony O’Brien closes out the festival of reason with a triumphant use of scare-quotes and imaginative spelling:
But if we ‘civilised’ countries, full of ‘freedom-loving’ people wish to preserve our systems, particularly our time-honoured system of justice and of the principle of presumed innocence, isn’t the proper course of action to attempt to capture bin Laden et al, a la Milosevitch, and hand them over to an independent tribunal such as the European court of justice?
Milosevic slaughtered the peoples of Yugoslavia for a decade. For the first half of that decade, the world did just what the O’Briens of the world would have us do now – it sent in UN “peacekeepers” to deliver food, fretted a great deal, took pictures of the “tribal” carnage, and applied sanctions (oh wait, sanctions are bad, too). Anyway, Milosevic didn’t budge until he and his military were bombed, first in Bosnia, later in Kosovo and Belgrade. By then, the graves were full, the countries were ruined and the seeds for future war were planted. How many hundreds of thousands of American deaths is O’Brien willing to accept while we “attempt to capture bin Laden” without resorting to war?
Again, Matt is not some slavering conservative hawk. He’s a careful, well-spoken (ah, well-written) fellow who neither minces words nor suffers fools gladly. Consider what he has to say, carefully.
I’ll add another note. The blog in question goes on to ask:
And yet a couple of days ago didn’t I read that George – resorting to the b-grade cowboy movie dialogue that he loves so well – had given his special forces the nod to kill him if they find him? And why might that be? Might it be that they didn’t want him, at some date in the near future, blabbing off his mouth in front of a tribunal, and exposing the US role in all sorts of nasty business over the last couple of decades?
Might it be that bin Laden is a mad dog who needs to be put down as quickly as possible, lest (since “finding” is not “capturing”) he escape again? No, of course not. That would be too obvious. It must be a conspiracy by those damned Yankees.
Feh.