Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, died suddenly Sunday of A.I.D.S. — Acute Idiopathic Disassembly Syndrome. But the remarkable aspect of the death of the man who planned the indiscriminate murder of thousands of noncombatant Americans was that no one else got killed, or even injured, in the drone strike. Our military and intelligence assets worked diligently over years to achieve that outcome. The men of Right Angle show why this makes the U.S.A. “the best damn country in the world,” as Steve Green says.
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15 replies on “The American Way: Zawahiri Drone Strike Shows Why the U.S.A. is ‘Best Country in the World’”
May God and the world hear Scott’s plaintive cry for peace. May we all one day meet in Baghdad..along the Tigris and Euphrates..
How many times are we going to kill this bad guy?
I prefer the “nuke the site from orbit” approach. “It’s the only way to be sure.” The entire region is corrupted by a religiously-charged political ideology that wants all free people to be destroyed. That ideology is anathema to peaceful human existence, and it needs to violently and quickly eradicated. Surgical strikes, no matter how frequent, will likely have the undesirable effect of creating future martyrs bent upon revenge. I sincerely believe that is why modern-day Japan is our ally — their past imperialistic culture was forcibly-changed via the threat of incalculable damage.
However, Middle Eastern oil is king. Long live the king.
I pretty much agree with your take on Islam in that it is a political system wrapped in a religious mantle. There’s an old saying that goes “Religion is only the beard on the face of Islam” that applies quite aptly.
That said, the situation we face with Islam is not like the one we dealt with in Japan at the close of WWII. Japan had a warrior class, Islam has no such class excepting that every male adherent of Mohammed is a potential warrior. Japan had a centralized nexus of power, Islam is spread all over the globe. The Japanese initiated a war against the West, Islam is at war constantly with everyone including other Muslims. Etc. There are a lot of critical dissimilarities.
If I could push a button or throw a switch that would eliminate Islam from planet Earth I would do so. There is no such button, there is no such order that could be given by our leadership that would accomplish that.
It’s true, anything we do creates martyrs and more fanatical Muslims bent on revenge. However, if we kill a single enemy like Ayman al-Zawahiri we create fewer of those than we would have generated if we destroyed the entire city he was occupying at the time of his death.
In killing Ayman al-Zawahiri alone we may have created dozens or even hundreds of rabid, wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics who would be committed to revenge against the U.S. Those people would be that way anyway and the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri is simply one more excuse among many. If we wiped out the whole block of the city he occupied we’d create thousands. If we nuked a Muslim city, or several, we would create millions of such people.
I understand your sentiment but it’s just wishful thinking with no practical way to achieve net positive results. Would that it were otherwise, I would support such a policy.
What is unsupportable is the idea of killing nearly two billion people for political reasons. If Islam is at its core politics then that makes eliminating every single person who practices it a political act. Killing billions for political reasons is such a drastic “solution” that there is no way it would not be compared to the Nazi Holocaust and rightly named far worse by an order or two of magnitude.
Such an act would easily surpass the horrors of all the regimes in history who have perpetrated such pogroms combined.
Islam, because it is political at heart, respects force. In fact, force is most often the only way to deal with Islamic excesses. It is the correct and judicious application of force that we must use to cow Islam into giving up its policy of terror as a tool of its politics. If Islamic people learn that the price of attacking the West will always be too high that will have that effect. We have to negate a cost/benefit net positive for Islamic terrorists in such a way that we teach those who would do us harm that it is going to be more expensive to attack us than its worth.
This is no doubt still going to generate a lot of fanatical Islamic revenge seeking vermin.
The way to stop that is to give those vermin no safe haven to organize and carry out their attacks. To make it clear that we will never, ever stop pursuing you if you carry out such an attack and to use the prudent application of force to dissuade anyone who might consider helping such vermin execute their bloody murders.
I think that killing Ayman al-Zawahiri alone and not killing anyone else sends the proper message. He was on his balcony enjoying the fresh air without a thought for his own security. Suddenly, twenty years after his most heinous act he gets sliced to a bloody pile of goo by what amounts to a bolt from the blue with no warning. He died instantly or very nearly so. The lesson that no matter what you do, where you go, or how long it takes we will get you is not lost on those who still remain.
That lesson is you can run but you can’t hide and you can fight but you can’t win. Things like this that make it clear attacking us is not only pointless but will cost you your life will make it increasingly unpopular and unlikely that enough people will conspire to do such things in the future. You can do these things but you are throwing your life away if you do AND that you will die in humiliation and failure eventually is a certainty.
In Islamic thinking everything that happens, good or bad, is the will of Allah. If you win the lottery, that’s Allah’s will. If your only goat drops dead and you starve, that’s Allah’s will too. Therefor the manner of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s death was “Inshallah” or as Allah willed it. The United States was only the agent Allah choose to apply his will. Because in Islamic thought it is not possible for anything of any sort to happen outside of the will of Allah.
To the Islamic mind if you do something and Allah exercises his will by punishing you for it, you opposed the will of Allah and should not have done that thing. This is de facto clearly something Allah did not want you to do else he would not have allowed you to be punished and humiliated by an unexpected sudden death at the hands of your enemies.
This is why we must never, ever let these vermin go unpunished. No matter how long it takes. Killing Ayman al-Zawahiri alone made it clear that this was a very specific act of Allah to punish him and only him for his deeds.
In dealing with other cultures around the world there is always a cultural factor that can often be as important as bombs and bullets. That goes for Russia, China, Islam and every other sort. In this instance we are using the Islamic culture against Islamic terrorists. It’s a smart move.
There will always be Islamic fanatics willing to give up their lives for a shot at Paradise and eternity spent with 80 virgins. If they can be persuaded by witnessing something like the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri that they’re not going to get that, there will be fewer of them and those who do commit such acts will be far less effective.
The alternative is to slaughter 1.8 billion Muslims and that would make Hitler look like a rank amateur.
“Nuking them from orbit” so to speak, would do more harm to us inflicted on us by ourselves, than anything they could do to us.
Not politically correct, but some people NEED to die, and civilization NEEDS for them to die. Their quick death mitigates the temperature they experience when they burn in Hell.
While I agree with the context of what you are saying, I admit this left me confused. We have been told of this guy dying at least two times in the past. And similar to this time we have no pictures, eyewitnesses or DNA evidence. But at least we now have the Biden administration admitting that they have allowed Al Quaida back into Afghanistan.
When Bill said of drone pilots “They get to watch their targets walk around, they see the boom and they see what happens afterwards …” what he meant was they get to see the blood and gore and flying body parts. Those pictures are very high definition.
It doesn’t look like a special effect in a movie, the real thing never does though some of the more modern movies are significantly more accurate and graphic than the old westerns — Where if you saw a bullet wound it was a splotch of blood on the bad guy’s shirt and you never, ever saw a bullet strike.
It’s actually harder on a drone pilot than it is on a manned aircraft pilot who sees none of that.
A manned aircraft pilot after a bomb drop or missile strike, depending on the air-to-air (AA) threat will usually return and do a flyby over the impact area for purposes of bomb damage assessment. His wing cameras might capture some of the mess left behind by the catastrophic disassembly of a human being but even then it’s not real obvious as a rule. The pilot himself goes over so fast and the angle of view below him from the cockpit is so restricted that he doesn’t see much of what’s laying around on the ground.
I know I’m being graphic here and I mean to be. Bill can’t say all these things in a video to be posted on YouTube because they’ll take it down if he does. I want people to understand that this is not like a video game or a movie.
Have some compassion for the people who do this sort of work. We train them from childhood that good people don’t kill other people then they have to go out and do just that. That makes them feel like they are not good people anymore. It makes them feel that way because they are good people. I don’t know any other way to describe the situation.
It makes no difference at all if they do that work sitting in an airconditioned drone pod at a console in Florida or they do it with a rifle 10,000 miles away from home, the effect is the same. This is what happens to the people we send to do our killing for us. It might not be rational, it might not be reasonable, but it is certainly a factual description of the experience.
I’ve seen it written and heard it said that way in a number of other contexts (not always not fiction or in a military context). Also the “killing should not be easy. If it gets easy for you, be careful” or words to that effect.
Steve regarding the impact on Drone pilots – Ronette suggested that I might enjoy the Amazon Prime “Jack Ryan” series. I had my doubts but gave it a shot. They actually did a character arc of one of the drone pilots having difficulty coming to terms with his activities.
While I find the whole show uneven (and have trouble not seeing the main character as Jim from the office) this was a nice arc outside the main story line. While unintended by the writers (my guess) having the female drone pilot being tough as nails and the male drone pilot being the one with a crisis of conscience makes her a 2D character and him an interesting one.
Much like Scott – my perspective of good movie is one I can sit through with Mrs Ron, though we both generally have a cocktail.
This episode displays exactly why I enjoy RA (and Trifecta before that). One topic, 3 different perspectives, all grounded in Right thinking.
And between “Zawahiri Smoothie Machines” and “died suddenly Sunday of A.I.D.S. — Acute Idiopathic Disassembly Syndrome” – welcome back to a little taste of Scrappleface as well.
Yes, the United States absolutely deserves huge kudos for these operations. I do hope, howevver, that you’ve noticed how very careful another country, Israel, has historically been with regard to attacking their enemies. Additionally, Israel does this WHILE those enemies are actually firing missiles into Israel, at population centers and destroying crops and livestock. Thank G-d Israel isn’t waiting 20 years to get just exactly the right shot!
What a contrast to the way we treat our own citizens! Just thinking of Jan.6, for example, or maybe the thousands of small business owners who were driven out of business in the last few years. I’m glad we show our better side somewhere and maybe we can do it at home too.
Thank you and Amen! The America that Scott’s grandfather served in battle could not be further from the state of our beloved country today and I appreciate your hope. As far as the “President” agreeing to that decision: “No Comment” and another Amen!
Well spoken, Scott.
Scott wins the internet for today. “Zawahiri smoothie machines”.