Bin Laden Raid Should Most Definitely be Politicized

Presidential campaigns are when we most discuss the most important issues; Romney shouldn’t have declared this particular one off limits. He could, instead, have responded in one of a hundred different ways—perhaps by concentrating on asking whether the war, in the past four years, has really gone the way anyone would have wanted. (Instead, as John Cassidy writes, Obama’s ad has proved to be something of a trap for Romney.)

Almost every decisive point in the ten-year story that followed the attack, after all, was highly political in character. These were precisely the issues that the founders regarded as proper subjects for argument. The list of questions that we have had to confront practically, not just abstractly, reads like a catechism of citizenship. When should we go to war? What are the limits of habeas corpus? What are our priorities—financial, moral, military—as a nation? What are the rights of citizens, and of strangers? What do Congress, the Court, and the President each get to decide? How much can we know about what they do? Is torture worth it? What are my rights? Should we sneak into South Asian countries and assassinate our enemies in the middle of the night? These are all matters for politics. And, again, in the past decade there haven’t been too many questions raised about them; there were, again, too few. And too often the critics were told to just be quiet and keep national security out of politics. Read it all at the New Yorker.