Innocence at war.
I’m finally sinking my teeth into Jane Mayer’s powerful tome “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.”
Mayer is an excellent journalist (who writes for the New Yorker) and the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. The paperback I’m reading was updated in 2009. The story of the Bush administration’s overreaction and violent response to the 9/11 attacks comes to life once again.
I found this passage on the Clinton’s administration’s hesitation to assassinate Osama bin Laden chilling:
“The United States had the military might to destroy Bin Laden and his followers literally at the flick of a switch. Steve Coll, in his brilliant history of the pre-September 11 U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Ghost Wars, describes how with the aid of the real-time video imagery transmitted by the Predator, the most powerful and technically advanced military force in the history of the world was able to stare from halfway around the globe at a tall, white-robed sheikh believed to be Bin Laden. The terrorist leader who had declared war against the United States could be watched as he walked through the primitive, undefended, mud-walled compound he and his terrorist associates and their families inhabited in the bleak, sage-brush-strewn plains outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The video imagery was so exquisitely detailed, U.S. officials viewing the videotapes at the CIA and White House could make out a lone child’s swing hanging in the compound, known as Tarnak Farms. The robed man seemed to present an irresistible target for missile attack. But the swing haunted Clinton. It was in a sense, the perfect symbol of the cultural, political, and strategic standoff described in Washington think tanks as “asymmetrical warfare.” The swing suggested innocent children lived there. The United States, for all of its military prowess, was a hamstrung Gulliver in the face of Lilliputian terrorists willing to sacrifice innocent lives in a way no civilized nation could.”
In hindsight, Clinton likely wishes he had pulled the trigger, but hindsight is always 20/20. That passage gave me renewed respect for Clinton, who weighed the consequences of war and murder carefully through a moral filter of right and wrong.
As Mayer outlines in her book, these filters were, unfortunately, not present in the Bush administration.
BUY “THE DARK SIDE” AT AMAZON.COM
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