Lay down the mony upon the nail, and the business is done.
Oh, even-the-liberal-Kevin-Drum.
First, at the very least, trust but verify; it’s a long way from “ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe” to the blithe assertion that “we did get one of al Qæda’s big fish in the attack on Damadola last week.” Remember: never assume, for if you do, you make an ass out of you and me.
But.
Even if one were to grant the shockingly naïve assumptions available, each in their particulars, you’ve got the question wrong, all wrong: it is not up to us to tell you whether the death of a 52-year-old master bomb-maker and the disruption of an “apparent terror summit” are worth the deaths of 18 genuinely innocent bystanders. The question on the table is and always has been: how many genuinely innocent bystanders must die before you say enough? Would twenty make you uncomfortable? How about fifty? Maybe if they weren’t “genuinely” innocent? If ironclad proof of each of those assumptions were, somehow, available, would you go as high as a hundred bystanders, wedding guests, in-laws, kids? Were it possible to claim on the nightly news that Midhat Mursi and Khalid Habib and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi would convene no more terror summits, and Ayman al-Zawahiri now slept with “his eyes wide open,” “wondering who handed him up,” would it be worth your death?
War is wrong. It may sometimes be necessary, or at best unavoidable, but it is wrong. It makes monsters of us: soldiers, pundits, commenteers all.
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