Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 2:45:49 PM
As it happens, the US is not the only entity turning towards a
law-enforcement model in the war on terror. The UN has taken that
approach as well, perhaps to a reductio ad absurdum that
nonetheless will test Barack Obama’s decision on whether to pursue
counterinsurgency strategy and his commitment to multilateralism at
Turtle Bay. In a report to the General Assembly, the top UN
investigator accused the US of breaking international law by killing terrorists through missile strikes
Note too that while AFP mentions collateral civilian deaths, Alston
doesn’t make that distinction. The UN is concerned with whether the US
has justification for killing Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, not whether
we got the wrong targets. “Summary executions” mean that we have not
provided these poor dears with proper due process to determine whether
they should have been killed at all. It takes the law-enforcement
approach to its natural, absurd conclusion, which is that armies are
really nothing more than police officers with cooler weapons.
In a rational world, this would prove the utter uselessness of the
UN in dealing with terrorism and terrorist networks. In the Obama
administration, however, I suspect that they’re already attempting to
justify themselves to Alston, or worse, modifying an effective program
that kills terrorist leaders and disrupts their plans to satisfy
“international law” that forces us to act against our own interests in
war. The UN and a large number of Americans seem to forget that this
is a war, not a domestic organized-crime problem, and that war means killing your enemies on the battlefield before they do the same to you, not finding a way to get them into court.
If this farce helped convince the Obama administration of that, it
would be worth the laugh. Unfortunately, this is not an
administration capable of — or inclined towards — telling idiots from
multilateral organizations to pound sand.