> Look, Carrol. We have a very serious crime, mass murder, in fact. Doing
> nothing about is not an option. I do not support war, but there is a
> fairly well-established protolocal for a criminal investigation.
Why bother with a criminal investigation? Do you actually believe that doing so might deter or prevent future terrorism? Or are you of the mind that there exists some reducable material fact legitimating deserts as a coherent concept and thus making punishment obligatory?
> You gather evidence, identify suspects with probable cause, find 'em, and
> bust 'em. In this case there is the added problem that they are
> (apparently) under the protection of a hostile nation. By "apparently," I
> meand if it's OBL. The Guardian and Le Monde think there's pretty decent
> evidence;
Even if there was none in regards to 9/11, I've seen nothing to suggest that the other charges against him are fallacious.
> A lot of it had to do with chasing the money. Assume it's him and his
> lot. The Taliban was, at least before we started bombing, at least
> hypothetically open to listening to the evidence. If we had laid it out,
> and I can understand not laying all of it out in public, if it would
> endanger confidental informants, and they had still said Boo!, we'd be
> ina stronger position morally and legally. We should still insist on its
> being laid out, along with stopping the war. The war complicates things;
> we might have been able to buy cooperation, as indeed we probably could
> have paid Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait if we had wanted to. But we
> should demand extradition to the International Court of Justice, or even
> here--we sure as hell have jurisdiction. If the T won't cooperate, we can
> try to have them isolated, bring various pressure to bear, etc. We could
> see if some potentially legitimate Afghani alternative government would
> request a UN force of Rangers to find him. There's loads of stuff that
> could be done without killing anyone or disrupting too many lives. jks
This is what I don't understand. The reason I most viscerally reject the "blowback" analysis is because it has the unintended consequence of trivializing the prior crimes it depends on for whatever force it may be said to possess. Supporting Islamic radicals in an insurgency against relatively benign Soviet imperialism was wrong for reasons having nothing to do with the unforseeable consequences of 9/11. Preventing the Palestinians from obtaining a state was and is wrong for reasons having nothing to do with 9/11. Smashing the Taliban while taking care to cause as little suffering as possible and trying to ensure that a better regime takes its place was and is right for reasons having nothing to do with 9/11. Of course, I know most here disagree with that last statement. But I think the dissent stems entirely from a mostly well-founded mistrust of the US and not the worthiness of the goal.
-- Luke