The meaning of American Justice

I was going to blog about how the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons didn't quite sit well with me, but then Lambert over at Eschaton went and hit it exactly on the head already.

Suppose we had captured Saddam's sons, and then turned them over to the Hague tribunal for trial. What happens? The national interest gets served in all kinds of ways. We get all the propaganda advantages that the Peruvians and Imperial Rome got (which is all the killing was about anyhow). We get the Europeans and the UN back on board, and maybe we get some help with reconstruction and even a graceful way out. Best of all, it's good for the Iraqi people. The Clinton administration followed just this policy in the Balkans when they got Milosevic tried at the Hague for war crimes, and the Balkans are doing reasonably well.

At best, killing Saddam's sons was a missed opportunity. At worst, it's the tip of the iceberg of a policy of targeted assassination that perverts the notion of American justice, and will lead to blowback just as certainly as funding Afghan jihaadists did.

And I agree wholeheartedly. This sounds like something Israel would have done. Instead of arresting these men, dragging them out in chains in front of the cameras, making them answer for their crimes in front of a court of the world, we just killed them.

We get no intelligence from them, and they get to die honorably in battle (I hope that doesn't sound too much like I'm a Klingon, but that's exactly what I mean) instead of rotting away in a jail cell.

This should not be the meaning of American justice. I don't think we should be the vigilates of the planet.