Fred Smoler: The Particular Case of Osama bin Laden

Fred Smoler teaches literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College.

Osama bin Laden was shot on May 2, and by May 5 both the New York Times and the Washington Post had run pieces recounting extensive criticism of the killing in the European press. Both focused on French and German elite opinion: a scholar at Sciences Po was quoted on renewed anti-Americanism, while a CDU politician criticized Merkel’s assertion that she was glad we had succeeded, and her foreign minister counseled against any wider German expression of such a sentiment. The editor of Libération regretted the “toxic rhetoric” of the campaign against terrorism, from which stems “this base, uncomfortable joy, unprecedented in a democracy, that blew yesterday over the streets of New York.” Helmut Schmidt pronounced Obama’s decision “clearly a violation of international law,” Handelsblatt called the raid “an act that violates both the international prohibition of force and humanitarian law,” and the ubiquitous Geoffrey Robertson, currently defending Julian Assange, denounced Obama: “This is the justice of the Red Queen: sentence first, trial later.” A prominent German TV commentator, Jörg Schoenenborn, was paraphrased claiming “that nothing good could come from Obama’s Bush-like breach of international law,” and quoted asserting the essential, primitive, and ugly nature of our national character. The editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, also uneasy about our lawlessness, was more or less echoed by the editor of L’Express—in no way a paper of the left—who additionally opined that “To desecrate the cadaver or the memory of Bin Laden is to revive him. To cry one’s joy in the streets of our cities is to ape the turbaned barbarians who danced the night of Sept. 11. It is to tell them the ghastly competition continues between them and us.” This interesting equation—bad to cheer the murder of thousands of civilians at the World Trade Center, perhaps equally bad to coarsely express one’s happiness that the chief of the murderers was dead—was most explicit in Der Spiegel, where a reporter called the New York celebrations of bin Laden’s death “reminiscent of Muslims celebrating in the Gaza Strip after the 9/11 attacks.”

As instructive and even diverting as it can be to receive German (and for that matter French) advice on the ethics of counterinsurgency and the aesthetics of chauvinism and Hurrahpatriotismus, the equation seems imperfectly persuasive. The adults who gave children in Gaza candy so that they would associate the thought of dead American civilians with sweetness were celebrating the mass murder of civilians, rather than the killing of a murderer of civilians. To the degree that bin Laden, too, was a civilian, that fact may be a spur to reflect on whether the antithesis of civilian/soldier (along with a couple of other antitheses) is entirely sufficient for assessing this particular case. The binaries suggest that bin Laden was either himself a civilian deserving a criminal trial or an enemy soldier, and if a soldier someone we had an inescapable obligation to take prisoner, or at least give the chance to surrender. Similarly, Pakistan is a sovereign state, we violated its territory, and thus breached international law. Do those categories, and that analysis, clearly describe and address the particular case of Osama bin Laden on May 2?

If the binaries are sufficient and bin Laden was not a soldier, merely a criminal resident on the soil of a sovereign state, we were obligated to attempt to extradite him. But Pakistan is not unreasonably suspected of being a state that shelters, arms, and sometimes directs jihadists to kill Americans in Afghanistan (along with Indians in India). It seems possible, perhaps likely, that portions of the Pakistani army sheltered bin Laden, and if so attempting to extradite him would have been at best quixotic. Ought we to have instead kidnapped him and tried him in the United States, on the model of the Israelis and Eichmann? Maybe, but anyone who insists on that thereby implies that we are not obligated to obey international law....