Cowardly Dead Terrorist Opinion Share Lag

When I woke up hung over or still drunk on Monday morning and read the news, I immediately wrote something. I then decided not to post it, because I didn't expect many people to agree. Thankfully i've since seen every point made here backed by people I respect in all walks of life.

I'm not claiming this is especially insightful - just my thoughts. This isn't a conspiracy theory post either. There are undertones, but that's not the point. I'm happy being generally skeptical whilst it's still just about socially acceptable to do so and so I don't need to spend hours in an argument i'd feel comfortable on either side of.

What bothers me is that I didn't have the balls to post my thoughts straight away. That I need to fix. As for the posssible misuse of "irony", poor English and the general lack of coherence from point to point, just put that down to my being barely awake at the time of writing.

Here it was:---

I don't automatically believe what i'm told.

Many would say that's a good thing, but on a day like today, expressing my opinion becomes a bad idea. I have little to gain, and a fair amount to lose by saying to people I know that I find the timing and nature of today's news to be suspect. I would stake a huge sum on this having happened weeks ago, if not months ago rather than today. I would do this if I believed it happened at all, which I don't. We're in a "show me" world now. Whilst I draw no comparison between Saddam Hussain and Osama Bin Laden as millions of morons wrongly did at various times over the past ten years, we did at least clearly see what happened to the former. It was deeply uncomfortable, but we saw it. There's nothing unconfortable about hearing somebody who maybe did something that killed a relativly miniscule number of Americans ten years ago has been killed in secret and dumped in the ocean. It's beautifully simple. It's also celebrated as a great victory that a fire that was barely burning has been stoked back to life. The almost standard repsponse to this seems to be - good, but now what happens? Something probably will happen. It probably won't have much to do with Al Qaeda, but that's what the news will tell us either way. The real irony of course being that if this terror group did retaliate for the killing of a man that has probably already been dead for half a decade, nobody would be surprised, and would still think that everything happening is right in place where it's supposed to be. Meanwhile, coalition forces continue to die in Afganistan in the war that far fewer people seemed to oppose, because a better war to oppose came along.

I'm clearly way out on a limb here. More simply, before celebrating today and saying that this is a rare occasion that the killing of another human being indeed should be celebrated, consider the number of completely innocent Afghan casualties over ten years. I don't even need to find a number. You know it's nowhere near as low as 3000. Get a sense of proportion. Dead human's isn't only bad if it's YOUR dead humans.