Mark Steyn sums up perfectly the dichotomy of U.S. power and incompetence in the assassination of the Osama bin Laden, pointing to superbly trained elite warriors dispatched by a government that, up until recently, seems to have had no inkling of Pakistan’s subterfuge:

Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Pakistan’s complicity in terrorism is the worst-kept secret on the planet, cowed as they were into collaboration with the Americans after 9/11 finally got the attention of the west. In those immediate months and years after the terrorist attack, the Middle East and Central Asia were all too aware that they’d gotten more attention than they would have liked. But following a detour into Baghdad, the collapse of cooperation between Pakistan and the United States has been as self-evident as the war effort across the border.

The dumping of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean before using it as a propaganda weapon against America’s enemies was wasted. Steyn is mindful of history’s instructive examples. I mentioned MacBeth, but Britain’s revenge in Sudan in 1884 is also useful:

But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message.

Indeed, far from dragging bin Laden’s porous cranium onto a stage and driving in onto a pike, the U.S. reportedly gave bin Laden a respectful funeral observing Muslim customs and traditions before his body was converted to fish food. And did this shallow appeasement of the Muslim world do anything more than serve as another excuse to hate America? Nay. In fact, it gave the liberally enlightened academics another excuse to blame the country for its own predicaments:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them.

By the wording of Chomsky’s opening graph, you’d think bin Laden was busy drinking cups of Chai tea whilst planning the construction of girl’s schools in Waziristan. And rather than acknowledging the morally consistent use of a woman as a human shield by these fanatical Muslims, he chooses to focus on the fact she and her husband was shot, thereby denying the world the opportunity at giving the world’s most notorious bastard a fair trial under international law.

It is probably fitting bin Laden was killed in the heroic raid, for I have no doubt the Chomskys of the world would have given him full benefit of the doubt for his crimes, before leading the vociferous charge for a humanitarian stay of execution by intellectually massaging the moral conundrum of state-sanctioned murder. Thank God for Navy Seals.