It sure didn’t take long for the fretting over the circumstances of Osama bin Laden’s inglorious departure to move to center stage.
The official story has been in motion almost from the start, each succeeding version more sympathetic to bin Laden than what came before, with the usual suspects muttering in the background about “human-rights violations.”
First there was a firefight.
Then bin Laden was unarmed.
Yesterday, one report described him as “confused” and “fearful” in his final moments.
What’s next — he was reading to blind people and holding a litter of kittens as the SEALs burst through his door?
Fact is, the White House has done a shockingly poor job of establishing a credible line and sticking with it.
That line should have been aggressive and unyielding.
Bin Laden was unarmed?
So what? So were the victims of 9/11.
And would it have been better — a more fair fight — if a SEAL or two had been shot?
Days of angst over whether to release photographs?
A simple “No!” at the outset would have sufficed.
Clausewitz, of course, wrote of the fog of war — “the great uncertainty of all data in war,” which often “gives to things exaggerated dimensions.”
That should have been anticipated — and the White House most certainly shouldn’t have been dribbling out details even before the SEAL team had filed a detailed after-action report.
So bin Laden didn’t fire back? So a woman wasn’t used as a human shield? So there was no “firefight throughout the operation”?
So what? Doesn’t change a thing.
Bin Laden is dead — far too many years after he should have been killed. That’s all that matters.
Except in certain diplomatic quarters, it seems.
Navi Pillay, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, has demanded information from Washington proving that the mission complied with international law — as if there aren’t enough war criminals running around Libya and Syria to keep the UN occupied.
And former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt charges that killing bin Laden was “clearly a violation of international law” — as if any German has standing to lecture anybody about international morality before, say, May 8, 2045, the 100th anniversary of V-E Day.
Bin Laden engineered 9/11 to make a point; in that, he succeeded.
And now he is dead, under circumstances that suggest America intended to make a point of its own.
Also successfully.
Nothing else matters.