Looking For Love in All The Wrong Places

14 years ago

The assassination of Osama bin Laden has prompted calls to leave Afghanistan now that the hunt is over. But he was never there in the first place. We knew that–right?

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."

3 Comments. Leave new

bucephalus
May 25, 2011 7:34 PM

In a non-alternative universe isn’t Obama already admitting the US might go into Pakistan (as if it wasn’t already there)?

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piranhaintheguppytank
May 25, 2011 10:04 PM

A few relevant quotes:

Line up Obama with his fellow assassins, from Eisenhower through Bush, and I believe he’s the most repellent of the bunch, down there with Woodrow Wilson. None of his rivals quite match the instinctive egotism that allows Obama effortlessly to affect the earnestness of a man taking the moral high road while executing a cynical program of electioneering-by-assassination.

–Alexander Cockburn, Hairy-Chested Liberals Exult: Big Question, Who Do We Kill Next? (CounterPunch – May 13 – 15, 2011)

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

–Noam Chomsky, My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death (Guernica – May 6, 2011)

[I]n war, the enemy, though combatants, are not criminals. Thus if captured they may not be tried unless they are suspected of violating the laws of war, and they have the right to be treated as POWs. But in the mongrel mix of the two legal systems under which the war on terror is carried out, people captured as terrorist suspects have neither the rights as POWs under military law, nor the rights of suspects under criminal law (I understand that this is being contested, but this was the original model). Moreover, though they are treated as criminals, this does not necessarily depend on anything they may have done; they are criminals by virtue of what they are: (suspected) terrorists: the rightless persons in the black holes of Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. The only other case I know of where people were punished under the law for what they were, is the late medieval and early modern witch hunts in Europe and America.

–Douglas Lummis, “Round Up the Usual Suspects … and Shoot Them” (CounterPunch – May 13 – 15, 2011 – Weekend Edition)

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someone
May 26, 2011 8:29 AM

Probably the only unrealistic thing about comic is that it depicts a still active American general suggesting we have fewer wars.

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