Evidently Noam Chomsky thinks Osama bin Laden was a democratically elected president of a sovereign country acting to defend that country. We can’t even call this “moral equivalence,” since Chomsky makes it clear he doesn’t even think Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush were equal criminals.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
No, we don’t have to ask ourselves how some would react to all that. Chomsky would celebrate it.
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