"Osama bin Laden will never walk on this earth again" is the rhetoric we want to represent us?

[RZM]

101. 'If they believed what they said' is a really big 'if'

I just don't know. But I can see the argument for killing him and announcing that publicly whether or not he was still active in planning attacks and managing al-Qaida.

First is the obvious political gain from it. He was a symbol and killing him was a clear triumph over that symbol. It's simpler and easier to understand and appreciate that he's dead. Plus there would be a lot of questions if he had been taken alive. There would be a lot of secrecy about where he was, what he knew, and how he was being treated. Given the bad press the US has gotten over torture etc., I can see why they wouldn't want to go down that road. Plus that would keep him in the game as a symbol until he was eventually executed, which is the same outcome in the end as killing him right off the bat.

Killing him was the quickest and easiest way to handle it. Plus it lessened the risks involved for US personnel. It's harder and more dangerous to take somebody alive and the more precautions you take involving how you handle your prey, the more risks you take yourself. Imagine if he had barricaded himself in a room and while the SEAL team was working on extracting him, one of his underlings had managed to detonate a device that killed everybody in the building. If that got out, Republicans would have had a field day with it. They would have said things like: 'Obama cares more about Bin Laden's life than the life of our brave SEALs!'

It was a tough call, but I support the president's decision. Given what I know (which is probably a small fraction of what the insiders know), I believe he went about it the right way.