At a time when the moral compass for international affairs seems to be having significant difficulties pointing steadily in any direction, let alone North, Sordel would like to take a moment (with all due deference to Buffy) to suggest a new doctrine:
"What would Michael Corleone do?"
Much as the Obama administration chooses to say that justice was served on Osama Bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces, our ideas of what is just, proper and "right" don't really embrace murder.
Sordel is not being squeamish or scrupulous though. We all love it when bad things happen to worse people, and this is what makes Corleone justice so compelling. Helicopters, assassins dropping through the darkness ... sure, it's a bit "Part Three", but Michael would assent, just as long as he could brood over a Catholic rite while it was taking place.
Pilotless drones firing rockets into a meeting of the Five Families? If the shadows are suggestive of chiaroscuro and a snatch of Italian opera is played, why not?
Risible Whack-a-Mole while trying to kill Qaddafi in the ruins of Tripoli? The Don demurs.
Michael Corleone's guiding principle was not morality, but effectiveness, and it wouldn't be hard to be on the side of democratic governments were they more effective. Protecting civilians, for example, is such a laudable aspiration, but there comes a point when an incompetently attempted good deed is even less welcome than a boldly effected crime.
Unfortunately, there is an admitted flaw with this new guiding light.
The event most typical of the Corleone approach is not the raid on Osama Bin Laden that took place in 2011, but the attack on the World Trade Center that took place in 2001. Ultimately, an ethical system that is enamoured of effectiveness to the exclusion of all other attributes owes its existence to the man who has now become its latest and most prominent victim.
Justice has been served all right, but only the poetic variety.
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