While I don’t think killing Osama bin Laden is actually going to change much at this point for fighting terror, he and what he represented clearly occupied a good chunk of American and my own attention, to varying degrees, over the last decade. So, rather than pondering it for too long, I’m just going to try and get my three big thoughts out of my system so I can move on to much more productive things…
The Video Games are Pretty Accurate
As more operational details emerge, it’s pretty clear that this was movie and video game stuff. A top secret mission, flown under radar, with Navy SEALS dropping on to a rooftop. That’s straight out of a Tom Clancy or Call of Duty game. Freakishly so.
Woe is Our News Industry
First of all, the American news media is showing its expected ignorance and autofellatic tendencies by immediately declaring this the “biggest story since 9/11″. You know what? It’s not, get over it. Five things, off the top of my head that were bigger stories, three of which are purely American:
- Arab Spring. The ongoing democratic movements in the Middle East and North Africa are the single most important long-term event for world security, stability and prosperity since the fall of Communism. Period. Nothing else even comes close.
- America elected a black president. I didn’t think that would happen in my lifetime. I didn’t even care if we caught Osama anymore, he had been relegated to the “nice to have” category.
- Hurricane Katrina.
- The Indonesia tsunami.
- The Japanese earthquake.
So please, American news media, just stop it. When you’re that stupid and you self-reflect, you’re practically wrong by definition. And it’s awkward to watch, like seeing Wolf Blitzer and Geraldo Rivera examine each other’s belly button lint.
Give the Partiers a Break
I have no real issue with the people who openly celebrated Sunday night. I didn’t feel any desire to join them and I think the partying was in poor taste, but I certainly am not going to claim that I’m not pleased that Osama is dead. Hell, it made me downright happy. I would have preferred that he be brought to trial, but that was always going to be unlikely. The world is a better place without him, it just is. This is a person who believed in a brutal medieval political system (with him and his – male – buddies in charge of things, of course) that justified treating women with less respect than animals and deliberately targeting civilians. In other words, he was a petulant, spoiled bully and religious zealot who who had the resources and lived with a lack of social controls to keep him from sponsoring and promoting mass murder.
Having said all of that, I think its spurious to think that people are “celebrating death.” For several reasons:
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We dehumanize our national enemies in order to enable ourselves to engage in conflict. This isn’t new. Just look at our portrayals of Germans or Japanese during World War II. Or of the “Russkis” during the cold war, or Communist posters about capitalist running dogs. Many Americans probably don’t see Osama as a person. He’s “the face” of the greatest single act of violence carried out against in Americans since Pearl Harbor.
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Whether you agree or not, many Americans view the War on Terror as a war, meaning with guns and death, not like the War on Obesity. Up until the War on Terror, Americans have only ever known wars with clear goals: “take Berlin”, get a surrender, or gain independence. The War on Terror doesn’t have anything like these goals because it’s not, and never has been, a “war” in that traditional definition. Law enforcement vs. organized crime is a much better structural analogy. As such, the “victory conditions” in this conflict are human. It’s more like Killing Pablo than the Guns of Navarone. People are celebrating a victory.
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Speaking of victories, for fuck’s sake, Americans needed a victory. If we look back at the last 10 years starting with 9/11, we’re already in a bad place. We were struck in a way we didn’t think possible and in a very visible manner. (I would still argue this had as much to do with our incompetence than with Mohammad Atta’s crack terrorism skills.) Then we got our first round of appalling corporate corruption and malfeasance with Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, etc. Then we invaded Afganistan and Iraq, both of which started out okay and quickly turned into nightmares. Next Katrina happened and it became horrifyingly clear just how bad America had gotten at taking care of its own or even operating government in a sane. Then we got another huge set of financial meltdowns and scandals that nearly sent the country and the world into a second Great Depression. Is it worth pointing out that there were space shuttle disasters, fatal infrastructure breakdowns, and a torture scandals too? So, successfully taking out Osama is the first really distinctly competent action that most Americans can wrap their head around in a long time. And let’s just point out, that not being able to find one fucking guy for 10 years, with all our national resources, really wasn’t the greatest thing ever for the national psyche, so there’s a significant relief factor going on.
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10 years. It feels fast if you’re over 30, maybe even 25. But for most of those young people celebrating at the White House or Ground Zero, that’s half their lives. They’ve grown up under the spectacle of 9/11 and Osama the way many of us grew up under spectacle of nuclear annihilation. In the long run I think they will look back and see that the Arab Spring had a much more positive effect on the world than the death of Osama bin Laden, but in terms of a singular event washing away years of tension, this is probably closer to that generation’s Berlin Wall.
All of which segues nicely to…
Can we please stop saying this isn’t political?
If Osama had been caught 6-18 months after 9/11, it wouldn’t have been political. But 10 years, 2 wars and over a trillion dollars of incompetence and lack of results and it’s completely, inextricably political. To be clear, I’m not calling our soldiers incompetent. Quite the opposite: if this weekend’s events have shown us anything, it’s that our soldiers and intelligence forces are exceedingly competent when provided with sensible priorities and mission parameters. Or put another way: when there aren’t a bunch of clowns running things, the American government can execute complicated, difficult tasks. I’m incredibly frustrated with Obama about many things, but at least he knows how to get something done. A lot of people noted that we got Osama on the “Mission Accomplished” anniversary, but that wasn’t the only Bush overstatement of a year. Remember “Heckuva a Job” Brownie?
The Bush Administration had eight years to find this guy. To find one criminal. Instead they used it as a big excuse to go play Risk all over the Middle East and Central Asia while underhandedly privatizing warfare and handing out no-bid contracts to their buddies for the spoils.
I can’t think of a single event that more starkly shows the difference in skill at governing than this has. It took Obama 2 years, 3 months and 11 days to right the ship and refocus America’s anti-terror priorities, all while scaling back our troop levels, and then accomplish the original goal – the original reason – that we invaded Afganistan in the first place. Remember that we gave the Taliban an ultimatum to turn over Osama bin Laden? A lot has happened between now and then.
