because, you know, we never violate international law

So you see this rising tide of anxiety about the predominately glib reactions to putting a bullet in the head of a unarmed and disabled man, and like most anxiety in this culture it is expressed by a kind of full-throated insistence that there's nothing to feel anxious about. It seems that people, both right and left, are now finally turning to the question of whether this assassination was legal. There was an interesting Twitter debate about it between Adam Serwer and Will Wilkinson last night, although as is the way of Twitter, it's hard to weigh in on a conversation that happened in that forum.

Now, there's the fine print issues of whether the raid and killing (of five) was in fact legal according to international and US law, which I'm not qualified to weigh in on. (Here's an interesting article on the question from the foreign press.) But I'm perfectly qualified to point out that the whole debate is stunningly irrelevant to whether we would have proceeded or not. Is there anyone in the world who thinks that, had it been demonstrated conclusively to the administration that this action was illegal, they would not have gone ahead with it? Anyone at all? People who seek to justify the raid by pointing out its legality are engaging in sophistry, because they are well aware that the fact that we carried out the mission has everything to do with power and nothing to do with legality. Defending an action's legality when that legality was entirely uninteresting to the people who undertook it reeks of ex post facto justification, which is usually a sign of doubt.

The point of international law, after all, is that there be consistent standards of legal conduct for all countries. But international law exists in a context where everyone involved knows that no such consistency will ever exist, and that the relative military and economic powers of various actors determines everything. The United States can send a kill squad into a foreign country it has not declared war on because it is the United States and not for any other reason. And if we were particularly concerned about international law, we'd just flex our muscles and change it. That's life as the hegemon.

The idea that identical justifications could be used for similar actions by non-superpowers is of course a symbol of rank unseriousness. So we can think of the South American nations which have endured death squads and the killing of civilians by the military and intelligence services of the United States. They might decide that they have a responsibility to protect their citizens by, say, sending assassins to kill a CIA apparatchik, and they might use precisely the same reasoning used by bloggers and pundits all over the place now. (Here's a version from the New Republic-- you'll be shocked to learn that even the liberal TNR supports the legality of the killing-- but there are others bouncing around.) But to suggest that they might have a point is to excise yourself from the church of the savvy. Everybody knows it's different when we do it.

I'm glad the threat of Osama bin Laden is gone from the globe, although I wanted our 9/11 Nuremberg with him and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I like for criminals to be tried in fair courts; I'm old fashioned like that. And there are a lot of deeply complex moral and ethical questions that stem from opportunities to stop mass murderers. Yes, we should analyze whether the killing was legal; it's an essential question, after all. We don't get to pick and choose when legality matters. But please. Please. Don't pretend that the question of legality mattered to the people who undertook this assault, and drop the notion that there would ever be any consequences for us if it was proven that it was illegal. This had nothing to do with legality and everything to do with power. We are the United States, Pakistan is a dirt poor Muslim country, and those are the only facts that will have any meaningful relevance in this case.