Sunday, May 01, 2011

Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead! The Wicked Witch!

Two things were new about the assault on the Abbottabad compound. One is that when the Al Qaeda people used Osama's youngest wife as a human shield, the Special Operations Forces and Navy Seals unhesitatingly shot her and the men using her as a shield. Openly doing that is novel.

The second thing is that is there is no pretense of being sorry "that any human being has been killed". No one in the government nor in the public is going through even the slightest shedding of crocodile tears over the violent death of Bin Laden.

Both of these changes represent the diminution of an always perfunctory pretense of the sacredness of human life. Given the brutality of the wars of the past centuries, it has never been more than a gesture, an insincere politeness.

Now even that has been discarded.

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