A Hypothetical (7/20/08)

You are in charge.
In a meeting with Secretary of Defense Gates and the joint chiefs of staff, you learn that a top-ranking Al-Qa'ida operative has been secretly plotting attacks world-wide from right under our noses here in the United States.
He is currently hiding out and coordinating with other terrorists from the basement of a small apartment building in, say, Atlanta.
A folder is pushed across the table to you.
The folder contains a plan to take out the Al-Qa'ida leader using tactics that have proved successful in similar situations in the mid-east.
In summary, the plan calls for a B-2 bomber to drop a precision-guided payload onto the building containing the terrorist.
Simple.
Of course, there will more than likely be civilian casualties which would mostly be those who live in the building, but also anyone in the immediate area would obviously be at great risk.
You are understandably concerned, but are informed that action must be taken now or never, and there is simply no other way.
What do you do? What would any leader past or present do? Why or why not?

I believe that the majority of you would not allow the plan to be carried out. The result would simply be too catastrophic, and for a variety of reasons you cannot find a way to ethically or morally justify such an action. Perhaps dozens of American citizens losing their lives for the sake of killing one man does not seem worth it or right. Or perhaps after the massive loss of life on 9/11 due to a terrorist attack, the idea of the American government itself taking the lives of civilians seems too outrageous.

That being said, how can the American government, or any government, justify the actions that have been, are currently, and will continue to be carried out in the 'War on Terror' and various other military operations. Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives have been lost in situations not unlike the hypothetical I described. The only difference is the location.

I am baffled at how so many Americans can say that the massive loss of life we see taking place on a daily basis as a result of US military action is simply "part of war" or "necessary to keep us safe" or "going to be worth it in the end." Some even say "they deserve it" or “they are evil, we are good.”

There are simply too many problems with any such reasoning to count. In the first place, philosophically speaking, the line drawn between rogue 'terrorist' and government sanctioned 'soldier' at this point in the failed project of the modern nation-state is, in my opinion, a thin one. And going back to my original track, why are you so inclined to let something happen in another country that you would be shocked and appalled and terrified at if it happened in your own?

There are those of course who jump immediately to claims of racism. I would say that this is true only to an extent. While there are obviously those who hate Arabs, Africans, and/or Jews, I feel that there is still an underlying philosophical groundwork and line of thinking, whether conscious or unconscious, at work here.

We all remember what watching the news was like during the weeks, months, and year or more following 9/11 and can imagine the media frenzy and public outcry that would take place if we learned that our own government had killed its own under the above hypothetical circumstance. So why is it that we are so complacent about this current war, its architects, and its allies who, in order to remove terrorist threats and political rivals, have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Somalia, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait among other places?

The following are what I believe to be a few but not all of the basic key underlying philosophical issues that I'm interested in here more than whether or not war is right or wrong, and I invite any relevant thoughts and discussion as there is much more to these than the short fragments I list.

• Thinking along the lines of Zizek, the breakdown and/or inter-mingling of Virtual and Reality. Perhaps we do not really believe that the death we see on a television set, in the news paper, or in casualty reports is real or relevant.


• A la Benhabib, what grounds does the state have to do to outsiders what it would not think of doing to its own people?


• In considering Levinas, Derrida, et al., has the Other become so far removed from the Self, that we no longer see violent actions as such?


• Based on the teachings of Christ, should military action which knowingly, albeit not for its own end, takes the lives of civilians, be justified or condemned?