TheHammer wrote:
Ah yes the capture of Noreiga is your "example"? You do realize that during that invasion 24 soldiers and 3 civilians on the US side were killed. Another 200 or so dead on the Panamanian side. Another 20,000-30,000 rendered homeless. What a shining example of what we should have done! Nevermind the fact that comparing the Noreiega situation with Awlaki's is still quite a stretch.
Over a million and a half people have been killed in the course of this War on Terror, but you
still support it! You're willing to risk lives as long as it means killing other people, but when it comes to arresting people, oh no, that's way too big of a price to pay! You disgust me. If anybody has ever loved you, you sure as hell have done nothing to deserve it. Not a goddamned thing.
You're right, though- Noriega was better protected than Awlaki could ever hope to be.
Yep they could have just flown a helicopter over and arrested him. It was just that simple. I'm sure its unlikely anyone in the convoy would be armed with an RPG. And of course it comes as a given that they would have had time to get a commando force together and raid his convoy rather than a small window of opportunity to take him out.
See, what you could do is monitor him, over the year and a half you've got, and keep forces on a little thing called "standby", much like they kept drones on standby to be ready to blow him into shreds. Then they can be ready to go and intercept the convoy. Certainly it's not much riskier than sending a couple helicopters to raid Osama bin Laden's hideaway, but you'll claim that that was an entirely different situation where there was no chance of anybody in bin Laden's support staff having an RPG at hand, whereas just flying accidentally above al-Awlaki's convoy was certain death because God demanded that the USA kill him with a Predator drone.
What you could do, is take the year and a half it took and prepare for this. You're concocting a strawman, wherein the attempt to capture the man is done half-assed so that you fuckers can put on your smuggest faces and chortle about how those idealist pansies just don't have the masculinity necessary to defend this country. Why is it so important to you people that we blow people into bleeding viscera, spreading their intestines all over the countryside, such that you immediately distort any other option so that the people performing it are all incompetent? Are you snuff fetishists of some kind?
Weren't you just bitch about the US taking over the top reactions to men like Awlaki? His function was as a recruiter and planner. The longer he was alive, it stands to reason the more he would have recruited to his cause. And the more attacks he would have been involved in planning. That's not really a "ticking time bomb" as much as it is a wild fire that continues to burn as long as there is fuel... Unless someone steps in to put it out.
And again, this is want Awlaki wanted. This guy called for the deaths of Americans everywhere, and we got two of them in this incident.
I wasn't advocating that scenario. Did your mother try to suffocate you as a baby and give you brain damage? I was pointing out that your logic would seem to demand the maximum force possible to kill him as quickly as possible, but you don't get that. You probably think that waiting a year and a fucking half was the quickest and most effective way it could be done.
Invited by the new age, the elegant Sailor Neptune!
I mean, how often am I to enter a game of riddles with the author, where they challenge me with some strange and confusing and distracting device, and I'm supposed to unravel it and go "I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE" and take great personal satisfaction and pride in our mutual cleverness?
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