Justice for Bin Laden?

Norman Geras asks a rare and unexpected Question to Which the Answer is Yes But Not in That Way.

The usual moonbats around the internet will conform to Sadie Smith’s Law, which is that [Osama bin Laden's Death][Big News Story] Will Prove Us All Right, by saying that what happened in Abbottabad (which sounds like an English village with a Pakistani name) was not justice.

I agree with Norman that it was, but not with this reasoning:

It seems equally obvious, however, that he was killed as an enemy in war – the war in question being the war on terror.

This seems to reverse back on Norman’s first argument, which that it “wasn’t an act of legal justice in which the world’s most famous terrorist received due process”, by trying to argue that it was covered by the law of war. I do not think that the War on Terror is a war, although that’s arguable, or, more importantly, that it ought to be called one.

I thought it a mistake for Barack Obama to say that America was “at war” in his inauguration address:

To use the term is to do the terrorists’ work for them … To say we are “at war” glorifies a bunch of sociopaths and misfits, giving them the status of soldiers that they crave.

America, or its allies, to not have to be at war for justice to have been done. What happened in Abbottabad was not legal justice. It was not really the “patient justice” that George W Bush promised in 2001. But there was never any doubt about bin Laden’s culpability. It was moral justice.

Photograph: BBC

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